BuzzMachine

The Star-Tribune disputes a New York Post story that it’s about to go bankrupt but I wouldn’t say this sounds positively optimistic (my emphasis):

“The Star Tribune currently has sufficient liquidity and is current on all its debt payment obligations,” Harte said in a statement issued Sunday afternoon. Pressed further, he said the newspaper would not miss a debt payment this year unless things worsened.

Bets, anyone? Add this to Tribune Company having to sell Newsday to raise cash to handle its debt and Journal Register facing a debt crunch. The slope is getting slipperier and steeper.

My Guardian column this week about wine wizard Gary Vaynerchuk:

Before you read this, do me a favour and go to WineLibraryTV.com Be prepared for a jet engine in your face. That blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk, a 32-year-old merchant who has made more than 450 daily wine-tasting shows online - just him, his glass and a spit bucket.

The show, with its audience of 80,000 a day, has transformed Vaynerchuk into a cultural phenomenon. He has appeared on two of the biggest TV talk shows in the US and in the Wall Street Journal and Time. His book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines, comes out next week and the day he announced this on his internet show, his fans immediately pushed it to No 36 on Amazon’s bestseller list. He has a Hollywood agent. He makes motivational speeches. And he has only just begun. Gary Vaynerchuk is on his way to becoming the online Oprah.

This isn’t as simple as using online video to sell wine, though the family store is now a $60m-a-year enterprise. Vaynerchuk is also transforming retail and making it social. He has realised that a store should be a community and so he uses every tool available online - a social wine rating site called Corkd.com, his videos, his appearances on other popular online shows such as Diggnation, his ubiquitous presence on Facebook, and answering countless emails every day - to make and connect with as many fans as possible.

One day, a few weeks ago, Vaynerchuk announced on his online show that he’d throw an event for his video friends at his store in New Jersey. More than 300 people showed up. He calls himself “the social media sommelier”. “Social business,” he says, “is the future of our society.”

Vaynerchuk is on a mission. “I want to change the way that people think about wine and change the way that people do business … This is how I will be remembered.” His secret is generosity and passion. Now that may sound like a line. But I’ve witnessed Vaynerchuk in action. I’ve bought my wine at his store for a few years and watched his sales people eager to help customers find a better, cheaper bottle. I watched him at the South by Southwest conference, where he gathered instant parties via Twitter, having strangers - now friends - sample from the seven cases of wine he had shipped down. I do think this guy’s for real. Authenticity, Vaynerchuk argues, is a necessity in the transparent, social, web 2.0 world. “You’re not going to be able to have multiple personalities,” he says. “Your personal brand is now completely exposed to the world, 24/7. Everyone is media now.” This leads him to a grand conclusion: “So now good is going to win.”

See, he does sound like Oprah. And he acts like her as he constructs his empire. He says he is building - as he calls it - “brand Gary Vaynerchuk”. Online, he issues opinions, not only about wine but about life, like this: “I’d rather have a million friends right now than a million dollars. Your social equity is far greater than your financial equity.”

He even has an inspiring personal story: he came to the US from Russia at age three, a young entrepreneur who made a $1,000 a week selling baseball cards at the mall. When he had to work in the family store as a kid, cleaning shelves, he hated it until he realised that wine was as collectable as baseball cards. And now he has used his expertise, passion and personality - and the power that online gives anyone to speak to the world and make friends anywhere - to turn himself into a star.

As I left the office where he tapes his show, he handed me a copy of his book. Then he went to a “meet and greet” with a fan who just wanted to be near force Vaynerchuk. All this is possible with just a dream and a webcam.

Reading Vin Crosbie’s piece about the resistance to change and general obstructionism he has found teaching at journalism school (he doesn’t say it, but he has spent the year at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University), it makes me triply glad I am teaching at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. This will come off as blatant self-promotion for the school but so be it.

Vin said: “What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors. . . I’ve also discovered that media academics follow, rather than lead, their industries.”

When I arrived at CUNY, I feared I would find what Vin did. But I haven’t, not at all. I thought I might be marginalized as the crazy guy. But that hasn’t happened.

Instead, in the last few months, I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.

I don’t mean to say that my colleagues immediately drink my Kool-Aid; there is disagreement and debate, as I’d hope there would be. At last week’s session, for example, I showed Twitter, predicting that a few of my fellow profs would shake their heads at the tchotchkefication of the world into 140 characters’ worth of words. Heads did shake. One of the professors said she gets the impact on journalism of other technologies we’ve discussed — indeed, she is using them, creating class blogs and more. But she challenged me to demonstrate the journalistic relevance of this one. Fair enough. I showed news organizations using Twitter to distribute headlines and bulletins. I talked about other news organizations, like Sky.com, using Twitter to report on breaking news live. I told them that I’d just seen the BBC and Reuters using Twitter to extract news (by, for example, searching for big-event tripwords like “explosion” and “earthquake”); the thought is that Twitter could be the canary in the news coal mine and that similar use of Flickr, YouTube, Technorati, and other services will surface witnesses’ pictures, video, and accounts. I passed that quiz.

Here’s the Keynote we’ve been using as notes for this discussion.

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At CUNY, we are teaching the tools of all media to all students and requiring them to make stories in various media throughout their time there. The faculty are learning the tools as well (I say “are learning” instead of “have learned” because it’s a neverending process). At the same time, we are trying to plan how to pull down the walls between old media tracks — print, broadcast, interactive — while still preparing students for specialized jobs. We believe we have to be careful not to be overeager with this because we risk getting ahead of the job market. But there is no resistance at all to the idea that all journalists must work in all media.

More important, we realize that we are teaching change. Rich Gordon at Northwestern has said this, too: We have to get our students ready to adapt as the tools inevitably evolve. But, of course, more than the tools change. The structure of the craft changes and with it the relationship of journaliasts with the public and with newsmakers. The structure of the industry changes and with it their jobs. And the structure of narrative changes as we have new ways to tell stories. So we are also teaching our students choice. They no longer pick a medium at the beginning of their careers and stick with it. Now, every time they tell a story, they have to make choices about the best ways to do that for their audience and for the story itself. Not all students like this much choice at first; some wish we’d just tell them how to do it. But we agree that choice is one of the key skills we have to teach. That was the discussion we had at our faculty tools session last week.

How am I so lucky? I think it helps that we are a new school without a legacy to protect; instead, we are building one. It also helps that the deans recruited a great faculty and that we both get along well and, as it has turned out, agree about the need to teach change while we also teach what we love to call the eternal verities of journalism: accuracy, fairness, reporting. . . . And it helps that we are drawing students who know they are part of a new school in an industry undergoing upheaval; they are daring and they demand that we are as well. They are the ones who are going to change journalism and that’s why I took this job.

We also see that helping and leading the industry in change is part of our mission. That’s why we got a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to hold meetings in networked journalism last fall and in new business models for news this fall. We got a grant from McCormick Tribune for my entrepreneurial journalism course. We got one from Knight to help bloggers learn what the needed about media law. We are about to announce something else along these lines.

We’re far, far from perfect. Every term, we learn — from listening to our students — how to better teach our courses, adjusting syllabi as well as the curriculum. In the videos here, I describe the interactive courses to new students just admitted and we are now trying to do a better job of telling them just what tools and skills they will learn at what level. That’s an improvement. I am also constantly struggling with finding ways to teach interactivity when student journalists don’t have a public with whom to interact (any ideas, please share them). So we must change, too.

Here are the relevant slides about the interactive program.

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I can’t speak for any other journalism school anywhere. And I think that Vin said what needs to be said to the academy and the industry. All I can say is that I shared Vin’s fears but I have seen that it is possible for journalism education to change and — only time will tell — lead.

In the meantime, Vin, come on by for coffee.

: ALSO: We’ve just announced our 100,000-mile warranty for students, enabling them to keep up on and brush up on new tools and skills after they graduate.

The best analysis of the Microhoo has been Kara Swisher’s, particularly her explanation of how Google ended up as the winner.

While Yahoo (YHOO) might not have wanted to be acquired by Microsoft (MSFT), its alternative to goose its revenues by relying on Google (GOOG) in an outsourced online search-ad deal is one it might regret even more if struck.

Why? Aside from the potential antitrust issues, which are distracting at the very least, it fundamentally puts one of Yahoo’s main businesses–search advertising–directly into the hands of the very company that killed off Yahoo’s chances of ever succeeding in the arena in the first place.

Yahoo has no visible strategy. Microsoft isn’t in much better shape. AOL remains a drag on TWX. Google wins again.

The Wall Street Journal reports on Facebook being used as a tool of dissent in Egypt.

The activism on Facebook is part of larger efforts by youths across the Arab world to use technology — from blogs to cellphone text messages to YouTube — to challenge their governments and push the envelope on dissent in ways older generations didn’t know. In parts of the Middle East such as Beirut and Tehran, local governments immediately jam cellphones if there is civil unrest, to prevent it from spreading.

In a sign the government is taking the challenge seriously, Egyptian security forces last month arrested a young woman, Esraa Abdel Fattah, after she had formed a Facebook group to promote a strike on April 6 over inflation.

Monday’s Times has a feature on IDG, the trade publisher, making the successful transition from print to digital. (Actually, the company talked about crossing that bridge a year ago.) Says the Times:

The journey beyond print is uncertain and perilous, but the experience of I.D.G., the world’s largest publisher of technology newspapers and magazines, suggests that it can be done. A privately held company, whose magazines include Computerworld, InfoWorld, PC World, Macworld and CIO, it appears to have made a profitable migration to the Internet, with revenue from online ads now surpassing print revenue. . . .

“The excellent thing, and good news, for publishers is that there is life after print — in fact, a better life after print,” said Patrick J. McGovern, the founder and chairman of I.D.G. . . .

Stewart Alsop, a journalist turned venture capitalist, was the editor in chief of InfoWorld in the 1990s, when it was thick with ads and its editorial staff was at its peak. “Technology publishing just happens to be at the point of this whole transformation of media,” Mr. Alsop said. “What’s happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

Henry Blodget analyzed the future of newspaper advertising this week, concluding that “the $42 billion that was spent on print newspapers in 2007 isn’t going to vaporize–it’s just going to go somewhere else.” By 2017, $10 billion of it will go to surviving newspapers, $2 billion to outdoor, and $30 billion to digital — of which, he predicts, $5 billion will go to newspaper web sites and $25 billion will go to “Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, job sites, blogs, mobile ads, video ads, etc.”

But I disagree. Much of the advertising that is still in newspapers will vaporize. Much of it already has vaporized. Papers in top markets are down tens upon tens of millions of dollars each in classified revenue that has disappeared. Those former advertisers are using free or near-free substitudes to bring in and serve customers: craigslist, real estate agents’ own sites, car dealers’ own sites, and other new competitors. That’s not even to mention the cheaper sites — Monster, et al — that took real marketshare but at lower revenue. That newspaper revenue is gone forever. I’m not whining about that. It’s the new reality of the post-scarcity economy. This will only continue.

Now add Google and its power to get more and more targeted in a more efficient and transparent (well, translucent) marketplace. That is to say, the same marketing power will be bought for less.

Now add more changes in the marketplace itself. There has been a tremendous consolidation in retail with all department stores becoming one — Macy’s — and big-box and mall retailers that spend more on national than local budgets and Wal-Mart killing stores but not advertising locally itself. Yellow Pages will also migrate to mobile Google maps, I predict.

And there is the overall trend of advertisers replacing ad dollars when they create instead direct relationships with their consumers. Bob Garfield identified that in his Chaos Scenaro 2.0. And I wrote about that here.

So you see plenty of revenue vaporizing. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s a minus-sum game.

Now at the same time, if papers are smart, they can use online and its laser targeting to serve a new population of hyperlocal advertisers that never could afford high-priced papers before. But as I can tell you from first-hand experience, papers are not built for high-volume, low-cost advertising like this. So those advertisers will go to Google and local blogs.

: Gallows humor: Friend Steve Gorelick sends me the Onion’s analysis:

A recent glut of feature stories on the death of the American newspaper has temporarily made the outmoded form of media appealing enough to stave off its inevitable demise for an additional 21 days, sources reported Monday. “People really seem to identify with these moving, ‘end-of-an-era’-type pieces,” Washington Post editor-in-chief Leonard Downie, Jr. said. “It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.” Downie added that the poignant farewell Op-Ed he recently penned was so well received that he will be able to hold onto his job for up to six more days.

I just saw this stat as I was searching for something for the book.

Pew said that in 2004, 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

If I were Rupert Murdoch, I think I might just let the Dolans of Cablevision have Newsday. For they’ll likely run it into the ground. Like Brian Tierney, who had the misfortune of winning the Philadelphia Inquirer, they’re ill-prepared to manage the rapidly declining fortunes of a newspaper (see the post about accelerating circulation declines and the post about local advertising I’ll soon write above). Unlike Murdoch and the Daily News, they have no real opportunities for synergy and savings. Oh, yes, they have cable channels News12 LI, NJ, and NY but they are bargain-basement operations that could have reinvented local TV but instead come off like parodies. (I worked with them on the New Jersey launch when I worked at the Star-Ledger’s parent company.) The opportunities for cross-media ad sales are slight. They have a terrible reputation in the market for their customer service. They haven’t been able to agree with their board on more than one offer to take their company private; it’s almost as if they hope that a newspaper would be dead weight sufficient to lower the price of the empire so they could finally buy it.

Here’s the irony: As with the Wall Street Journal, which was better off with Murdoch’s willingness to invest than the Bancroft family’s unwillingness, so would Newsday appear to be better off in his hands than in those of the alternatives. On On the Media this morning, Brooke Gladstone asked Jack Shaffer whether Murdoch is the last salvation of the American newspaper industry. Jack pshawed the thought. I’m not so sure.

: Lauren Rich Fine, former analyst, says she’d buy a newspaper if the price were low enough. I think all you may be buying are shutdown costs. Remember when Tribune unloaded its strikebound Daily News on Robert Maxwell (I was Sunday editor at the time), they paid him $60 million to take it off their hands. And newspapers have only continued to slide since then.

Die Zeit came to interview me at CUNY and here’s the video — subtitled. In it, I mention discovering the early German blog Der Schockwellenreiter and he noticed that in turn with a classic of Denglisch: “Jeff »BuzzMachine« Jarvis hat den Schockwellenreiter genamedropped.” The past perfect of verb namedroppen. Ich namedroppe. Du namedropst. Wir namedroppen.

Alan Mutter, chronicler of the decline of newspapers, has a good bit of context on the accelerating decline of newspaper circulation.

Based on the record 3.5% drop in daily circulation reported today for the nation’s largest newspapers, it appears that average daily circ this year will be no better than 50 million. If so, that would be the lowest level since 1946, when daily sales averaged 50.9 million, according to statistics provided by the Newspaper Association of America.

Though circulation has fallen back to pre-Baby Boom levels, the population has more than doubled since 1946. If you divide circulation by population, you will find that fewer than 18 out of 100 Americans today buy a daily or Sunday newspaper. Back in 1946, 36% of the population bought a daily paper and 31% took a Sunday edition.

While newspaper circulation has weakened since the 1980s, the decay has accelerated sharply since 2003, as illustrated in the chart below. Sunday circulation, which had been relatively more resilient than daily sales, now is falling more precipitously than daily sales. In the six-month reporting period ended on March 31, 2008, Sunday circ fell 4.2%, nearly a full point higher than daily circ.

For contrast, 121 million Americans voted in the 2004 Presidential election, 97.5 million Americans watched the SuperBowl, there are 40 million black Americans, 37 million Americans watched American Idol last year.

iTunes is 5 years old this week. The seb internet turned 15 yesterday. The decade delta between those dates is the generous amount of time the music industry had to save itself from the fate that overcame it … and didn’t. In these five years, iTunes has sold more than 4 billion songs. Think of how many songs the music industry could have sold us if only they’d gone with the flow of new opportunities and given us the chance instead of persecuting us and resisting reality while trying to preserve outdated business models based on outmoded technology. Every industry knows how the music guys blew it; it is now an article of faith in any conversation about the internet and innovation. The presumption is that they didn’t act fast enough, that the internet came barreling down on them. No, in retrospect, they had plenty of time to learn and experiment and find new opportunities to get music to us in new ways. A decade. They’re worse idiots than I thought.