BuzzMachine

Demonstrating that the very thing that made publishing privileged — presses — are now just a commodity and a cost center, the Telegraph is jobbing its printing out to competitor News Corp. in the UK, improving the quality of its output and reducing its investment. Smart move. Presses aren’t what make you special anymore.

Here is required reading for every news executive — editorial or business: Colin Crawford, svp of online at IDG, blogs that his company is now over the hump. It’s more an online company than a print company. Sure, I can hear you say, trade and niche are easier than mass. But only by degrees and timing. Says Crawford:

. . . Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues. This occurred in the US in 2006 and in Europe during the last quarter.

With this change in the revenue mix and the higher margins from our online businesses - the company is more profitabl[e] today than it has been previously. . . .

In the US, our online revenue now accounts for over 35% of our total US publishing revenues. Next year, for many brands online revenues will be greater than print revenues, if fact they already are at some of our key brands and by 2009 – approximately 50% of IDG’s US revenues will come from online.

Let’s write that on the whiteboard: Online will account for more than a third of revenue and for some businesses more than half. Online’s growth is more than making up for print’s decline. And the company is more profitable today.

See, it can be done. It is being done.

To drive this change and to focus on online revenue we’ve changed the business mission of our organization away from print. Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company complemented by expos, events and print publications.

I can hear some crying: That’s cheating. Expos. That’s not publishing. But publishing isn’t publishing anymore. It’s about information and connections, so you need to find many new ways to make them. And, no, it’s not easy. But it’s about reinvention:

The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t transform our organization and take some chances.

In the past media organizations controlled content and pushed it out to subscribers, today’s media has to deal with a world of social connections, networking and collective actions enabled by the Internet.

The more enlightened in our media world will figure how to allow their audiences freedom to create and share their knowledge and content and to mash it up in a way that engages users.

We have to become facilitators as much as content creators – our brands are trusted, they have quality content and loyal audiences – these are our competitive advantages but we’ll only hold onto those assets if we truly listen to our communities and provide appropriate environments for user initiated conversations and user created content

Figuring out the transformation from print to online is only the start. The information we produce, facilitate and aggregate increasingly will be viewed on a number of screens - the Computer, the TV, the smart mobile phone, the iPod and other portable entertainment devices. Many of these screens are more suited to video and audio than text. Even more new skills for our organization to master!

We’re in an exciting growth industry. Let’s shake off the image of being in a beleaguered print industry and seize the opportunities afforded to us by the digital revolution.

Standing O! Shout amen! This is your Moses and that’s the promised land. It is not a land of milking money. It is a kingdom of connections. (Sorry, I’ll stop now.)

This is a most impressive post not just because it encapsulates where (I think) media must go but because it proves that it can work. [via PaidContent]

Moments after posting the news about the the Daily Mail doing without a TV critic (below), I read Lucas Grindley on another paper getting rid of its movie critic and NFL writer, among others, . . . because they are not local and newspapers, at their essence, must be local. Amen to that.

The managing editor for the Winston-Salem Journal was faced with the need to cut his budget. And when looking around the newsroom, he saw the same thing all of us do. Duplication of efforts. So the Journal’s film critic and NFL writer were laid off.

Local film critics for national movies are a vestige of different times. For most markets, there’s no local angle to Mission Impossible 3.

Reassign your reporter now, before it’s too late, to something that might attract new readers. I wonder what the Journal’s managing editor would have covered if he had reassigned that film critic a year ago.

Maybe you’re the film critic. Don’t wait around for this same fate. Convince your editor to use wire copy so you can cover something else. Because when it comes time for the editor to look around the room for cost savings, your beat needs to be local and indispensable.

Sports writers, listen up. If you’re not writing something more than the game story, then you’re next. An editor can get that same gamer from the wire.

Features writers, if what you’re covering is on the wire regularly, then your beat isn’t local enough. Food is a national topic. Travel is a national topic.

Business writers, you’re not immune either. Prominent media types are already advising newspapers to “outsource” all types of coverage.

Death by a thousand cuts. A slow death is happening as newspapers lose writers. Don’t let positions get cut because you didn’t have enough foresight to realize they were being wasted. Maybe circulation declines wouldn’t be so steep today if we’d ensured every beat in the room was local, and couldn’t be replaced by wire copy.

Now read the managing editor of the paper, Ken Otterbourg, writing on his blog about the cutbacks:

We were one of the smallest newspapers to have a full-time film critic, and we enjoyed that distinction. But there’s plenty of excellent film criticism out there that we can use for nationally released movies. We’ll still occasionally review movies with a local tie-in. By contrast, nobody else is covering the local board of education or the city council. It’s unique content. So in making our decisions, we were guided by our belief that what we can do best is cover Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and Northwest North Carolina. That’s where we think our future lies, being a metro paper with a strong community focus.

Here are a few posts where I’ve been pushing newspapers to boil themselves to their essence. But Lucas Grindley is right: This is about making shifts and investments now, before it’s too late.

The Daily Express decides to outsource its business section to the Press Association, the UK wire service (its Associated Press), cutting a tenth of the paper’s 350-strong staff.

It makes sense, as far as it goes. When I was Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, I worked to outsource our TV grids and book. Papers have long since done this with financial tables. Why not whole sections? If I ran a chain like Gannett or McClatchy (no thanks), I’d consolidate or outsource all kinds of editing. Yes, it makes sense on paper.

But what about off paper and online? There, if you don’t want to go to the expense of having a business section, if it’s not core to what you do, then you can link to one. And that forces you to decide what is core. What is it that just you can do and that can’t be outsourced?

When you’ve answered that question, then, finally, you’ve decided what your news organization is really all about.

The troubles hitting big media are hardly restricted to the U.S. In France, media mogul Arnaud Lagadère warns, “The press has ten years left. Production costs will become unsustainable.” Editors Weblog quotes him saying that the the press has “little future in its present state” and that “we’re moving towards the dismantling of its traditional support structure.” I’m hoping that this quote lost something in the translation, because I sure can’t figure out what he’s saying:

As for new media, Lagadère said that “Our adaptation will not consist of making a systematic and mechanic transfer of our press to the Internet. That would be a mistake. Our advantage will remain in the richness of our content. We will not submit to the mutation of modes of consumption; on the other hand we will play a part in their evolution.”

My Guardian column this week tells the success story of Netzeitung. Since I haven’t written about that here, I’m copying the full column below (it’s also here).

A grand experiment in the future of news is succeeding. Pity most of you can’t read it, since it’s in German. But thanks to an accident of school scheduling that plopped me into a German class, I’ve been able to follow Netzeitung.de since it was founded in Berlin in 2000 as a net-only newspaper. It’s not a blog, a search engine or an aggregator. It is a newspaper without the paper, but with 60 journalists reporting the news. Netzeitung has not only survived the internet bubble and a ping-pong game of corporate sales, it has acquired other media properties; it is starting an ambitious effort in networked journalism with citizen reporters; and it is set to be profitable this year. Ausgezeichnet!

Dr Michael Maier, Netzeitung’s editor-in-chief and business head, is an experienced and respected journalist: former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung, Stern and Vienna’s Presse. No blogger, he. When I met him after he and his partners brought the concept of a netpaper from Norway - where its big sister, Nettavisen.no, is still in business - Maier was adamant that he would have his own staff producing news. I tried to push my populist agenda of interactivity and citizens’ media, but he would have none of it. He was starting a newspaper, dammit, and newspapers have reporters.

In the years since, Netzeitung was bought by Lycos, then by Bertelsmann, then by Maier and a partner, who sold it to Scandinavia’s Orkla, which itself is being acquired by the press baron David Montgomery. Maier says he is glad none of his many masters was a traditional German newspaper, for he doubts he could have developed Netzeitung under its roof. I agree. I got nowhere trying to convince American publishers to try a paperless paper. They are addicted to ink.

Netzeitung remains impressive in the breadth, depth and the timeliness of its reporting. It is among the internet’s most cleanly designed news sites. Maier says the service now serves 1.2 million readers per month. It reportedly will earn €8m this year. It has acquired other large German sites for technology, health and cars. It recently took over a Berlin radio station, and so the online site produces both radio shows and podcasts (what’s the difference?). And it produces online and videotext news for German TV. This experiment in online news has become a budding media empire.

But what brought me back to revisit Netzeitung is its latest effort: Readers-Edition.de, an online paper by and for das volk. True to form, Maier insists that the people must report: “We don’t publish commentary.” So citizen reporters submit news and photos on politics, sports, technology and business. Netzeitung, the parent, puts the best on its home page and then pays the contributors.

Maier says his online journalists were at first afraid of these interlopers. But he also says his reader/writers are better at working with links than ordinary reporters, are fast (helping him scoop competitors), and are smart (they gave him an exclusive on a revival of the 60s radical group the SDS).

One reason we bloggers like blogging is that we have no editors. But the Readers-Edition contributors do: a team of fellow reader/writers act as volunteer moderators with the help of one Netzeitung journalist. They get together in meetings across Germany to share tricks of the trade. They even share rejected stories so contributors can learn what it takes to make the grade. Now that’s transparency.

I wonder whether this model could work elsewhere. The other citizen-written online newspaper of note, South Korea’s OhmyNews, has had difficulty replicating itself in other countries; its political and media landscape may be unique. And when I ran online sites in the early days, I tried to copy what I saw on German sites by having volunteer moderators keep peace in chatrooms. It worked in Germany, where users respected rank, but not in the US, where moderators got power-mad and users revolted.

I would love to see both Netzeitung and Readers-Edition spread, for we need more answers to questions asked at nearly every journalism conference I attend, namely how will we support journalism in the future? What are the business models for news? How does journalism survive post-press? I hope the answers lie in creating vibrant and successful newspapers that do not depend on paper. I hope the answers lie in creating networks that allow professional and amateur journalists to work together. And I hope the answers are also in English, since I didn’t pay much attention in that German class.

Scott Donaton writes an important column in AdAge — important especially because of his audience: the advertisers who, together with publishers, cling stubbornly to old media and thus hold back the transformation to the new. He takes off on the Wall Street Journal’s strategic planning and asks when — not whether — the print version should die:

But certain forms of media that are currently print-based, particularly daily newspapers, must explore the possibility that there are more reader-friendly and cost-efficient ways to produce and distribute their content.

It’s still surprisingly difficult to get traditional media executives to admit this. But their resistance seems based on an emotional attachment to ink on paper, a deeply held — if largely indefensible — sense that a newspaper’s soul is inextricably linked to its format.

Which is nonsense. Scary as they are, some things must be confronted, including our overly romanticized notions of what a newspaper is.

An update and correction to the post below: I just heard from Ed Roussel, editorial director of the Telegraph group, who says it’s not true that his paper will delay stories until after publication in print. In fact, he said, they have already shifted people to earlier schedules to get news out sooner. They are not trying to put every story online before print (which is where the Guardian is apparently headed) but they are free to put up anything short of a big scoop they want to save (which will be the same for everyone).

How did this meme start? He said at the World Association of Newspapers session in Moscow, there was discussion about content management systems and the ability to schedule publication to the web and it grew out of that. So they’re playing wack-a-mole on the tale now.

While I had him, I asked Ed whether the Telegraph has plans to invade America, like the Guardian and the Times of London. He said no. “The reality is that we want to do the best possible job of writing for our readers and the core of our readership is British people,” which includes expats. He said they already had a third of their online readership is in the U.S. And he said that the track record of British companies making a go of it in America is limited.

: LATER: More from Shane Richmond at the Telegraph about this.

Merrill Lynch predicts, via Ad Age, that this year, revenue for online will surpass that for both magazines and yellow pages.

When I said I wanted to see more transparency in newspapers, I didn’t mean that they should be sharing their family squabbles…. though I am glad they are, for it’s just so entertaining.

I’m already over the Froomkin kerfluffle but I’m amazed at the newsroom sniping that’s coming out in public. See Brad DeLong’s incredible phone interview with Washington Post political editor John Harris:

Q: So you knew [Ruffini] had been a Republican operative in 2004, and didn’t tell that to Jay Rosen?

A: [Ramble of which I caught only scattered phrases] But assuming you aren’t posting this at least immediately… A good relationship between the print Washington Post and WPNI… Happy to answer privately… Really don’t want to be quoted on the record… If you want to call me an idiot without my response, that’s fine…

A: No I want your response.

A; [stream continues] But I shouldn’t respond… I’ve promised people I won’t respond… We need to cool this down… It’s a really a very narrow issue: are there people confused about Froomkin’s role…

This is followed by the editor first going off the record and then refusing comment. Journalists should be the last people to do either.

: Now go to Ken Auletta’s New Yorker story about tsuris at the New York Times with some deft slipping of shivs between the shoulder blades of executive editors: Keller v. Raines v. Lelyveld. Most entertaining.

: Some are positioning l’affaire Froomkin as political: See Kos. Others are gamely trying to laugh it off as a turf war over a home page. See Aschenblog. Some see it as resistance to change: See Yelvington — “It’s time to change your people, or change your people.” I see it as that and as a war of journalistic worldviews about alleged objectivity vs. transparency.

But a wise editor I know said it better in an email: “The elbows are getting very very sharp right now.” And the reason is that the business is shrinking and the print guys and online guys — forced together in newsroom meetings and mergers — are like dogs growling and snapping over that last scrap of meat. When the going gets tough the tough get snarky.

Deborah Howell (with whom I used to work at Advance) writes an ombudsman column for the Washington Post that illustrates, in its quotes from editors at the paper, the kind of clueless, destructive, and snobbish territoriality between print and online that is killing newspapers.

Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing,” which is highly opinionated and liberal. They’re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, “The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters.

I have to stop there. What a terrible insult and slap at a colleague who writes a very good, respected, and journalistic column for online. What a slap from a newsroom snot. But that is what newsrooms are like.

Howell continues:

Froomkin writes the kind of column “that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display.”

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular — and [web site executive editor Jim] Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

So we acknowledge that Froomkin’s column is popular with readers… but not with print editors. What does that tell us?

And the solution this reputed problem is to play the dumb cable “balance” game, journalism as a Chinese menu? No, the solution is for Dan to be very transparent about his views and for readers to judge him and what he says in that context; clearly, that is working with readers. The public we serve is too smart to fall for this balance game. Crossfire’s dead, folks. Howell continues:

Froomkin said he is “happy to consider other ways to telegraph to people that I’m not a Post White House reporter. I do think that what I’m doing, namely scrutinizing the White House’s every move — with an attitude — is in the best traditions of American and Washington Post journalism.”

On the other hand, Chris Cillizza, a washingtonpost.com political reporter, appears in The Post frequently. When he writes for the paper, he works for Harris, who is happy to have him.

Which is to say: It’s petty and personal. Newsrooms are.

Some Post reporters don’t appreciate that links are put on the Web site to what bloggers are saying about this or that story — especially when the bloggers are highly negative.

And what does that say? Post print reporters don’t like anyone else having a say; they don’t like dialogue; they don’t like listening. And they wonder why readers don’t respect them? Because they don’t respect readers.

Metro reporters think the Web site ignores their good work and doesn’t display it well. “My concern is that we have this rich, deep, robust local coverage which is not fully displayed, but I know the site is working to fix that,” said Robert McCartney, assistant managing editor for metropolitan news. McCartney is a great ally of the Web site and was assistant managing editor of continuous news for two years before he became Metro’s top editor.

Oh, I heard that argument from every paper I worked with in my last job. It is code for: We want online to be just like the paper we produce and we want to be in charge of online. It’s about power and territory. Newsrooms are about power and territory.

Howell concludes that the web is good for what newspaper editors have wished it was good for: supplements to their print prose:

The Web is a wonderful place for The Post to put newsprint-eating texts and documents, such as presidential speeches, and other information, such as congressional votes, that readers want.

That is so 1995. No, friend, it’s just the opposite. The web is the rich medium; the paper is the thinner, less dynamic, staler, one-way, one-size-fits-all supplement.
Howell ends with one more slap at Froomkin:

But I agree with The Post’s political writers here; the Web site should remove the “White House Briefing” label from Froomkin’s column.

The Washington Post and its site are among the best in newspapering, yet we see this kind of trivial and destructive sniping between the two even there even as newspapering struggles to survive.

This is why I left that battleground.

: Froomkin rises above the playground rivalries in a most gracious post on the Post’s blog — and his readers come in to give him amazing support:

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics — or their criticisms — head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so — not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Amen, brother.

Some quotes of support for Froomkind, which should be printed on paper and handed out in the newsroom:

I am old enough to have read Woodstein word-for-word during Watergate. I recall the Post in that era with enduring respect and even fondness. Katherine Graham, Bill Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein - they made the Post the best newspaper this side of the moon; as integral to my day as that first cup of coffee.

I walked away in the early 80’s. It was a tip from a friend about Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” that brought me back to the Post over a year ago. Through him, I have come to admire Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and even the right-leaning Kurtz.

* * *

The only way to balance Dan Froomkin’s reporting would be to counter him with a complete liar.

* * *

view Dan Froomkin as a true reporter. He connects the dots in a very basic fashion. Rather than imposing a narrative on what is now called the “news”, the column juxtaposes raw source material with reporting, opinion and comment from elsewhere in a fashion that illuminates connections between events, and drives sensible debate. This makes the occasional irreverent observation all the more enjoyable.

I don’t think it makes any sense at all to say Froomkin is overly “liberal”. Modern America is psychotic with its need to divide the world into two groups, however, so whatever.

But even if he was — Why on earth would you lose a strong columnist because he has an ideology?

* * *

The WPs new Ombudsman would do well to use Dan Froomkin’s methods. Simply stating that WP reporters find his reporting highly opinionated and bias and calling him a liberal is not reporting. It is spin. Why not list and investigate specific claims instead of acting like the White House press secretary.

* * *

Froomkin turned me on to looking in all sorts of spots for my info. I’ve read and watched transcripts of press briefings, read articles by journalists with whom I was not familiar, found sources of info that were unknown to me because of links and things I’ve read in Froomkin’s column. Sending people to many different sources for their information and pointing out when the media is unable to get real answers to important questions is the opposite of bias.

* * *

Why would the credibility of the Post be endangered by a column that is largely populated by links to and discussion of stories filed in the print edition of the Post?

* * *

I applaud his approach and wish more reporters, print and media, would follow it. Keep it up Mr. Froomkin.

* * *

Where do I go to file a complaint about the ombudsman herself?

Froomkin is a must-read for me. I can’t imagine there are people who think it’s factual reporting — anyone savvy enough to read his fascinating column is surely savvy enough to differentiate between opinion and fact.

* * *

Too many other reporters–including those at the Post–seem just to repeat what they are told. Froomkin does that openly, with links to his original materials, but in addition he has the guts, and integrity, to check the statements of his sources. If that is liberal bias I’m all for it.

* * *

How can anyone who reads the column equate accountability with liberalism? The quintessential Froomkin column ran a few days ago; it was called “Fact Checking the President”. It was composed almost exclusively of links to news stories in which the reporter noted discrepancies between Bush’s picture of Iraq and more disturbing pictures of Iraq provided by people who are actually there.

* * *

The rest of the Post’s White House team should read the last year of Froomkin’s column to see what real reporting and analysis are. Froomkin has usually been way ahead of the curve of the “establishment” media, pointing out Bush’s increasing unpopularity, for instance, long before it became acceptable in conventional media to talk about Bush’s high rate of disapproval.

* * *

I often rely on Froomkin and Kurtz combined to get a grasp on many of the stories of the day, and the integrity of the reporting involved.

* * *

Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand 1. what is going on behind the headlines and 2. the greater context in which ongoing news stories play out.

The media guru Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, bemoaned the degradation of American discourse into a world of decontextualized information — thanks largely to the rise of television as our predominant medium for communication.

What the Internet does best is to subvert the packaging of news that television has led to — and Froomkin, by compiling the day’s news — from all sources online — with links to the stories themselves, subverts that decontextualization.

And on and on. To paraphrase my friend Jay Rosen, here’s the message in that to Post print people: The readers are writing. Are you reading?

: The real lesson for Posties should be this: As Howell herself points out, the Post’s site is a helluva lot bigger than the Post’s paper:

Its circulation, as reported in September, is 671,322 daily and 965,920 Sunday. The Web site’s reach is huge — 8 million unique visitors a month, about 1.3 million of them local.

Perhaps that should tell the paper’s editors that they should be learning from online, rather than trying to lecture to it with haughty bravura. That, too, is what newsrooms are about. But the audience has clearly shown its support for the online Post over the printed one; the only reason online is not as successful is because advertisers are even more behind than newspaper editors. And the audience has clearly shown Froomkin their support. Perhaps the paper should be doing more of what he does. Did you ever think of that, o, vaunted newspaper editors?

: And perhaps the Post print people should read what their boss and owner had to say about the future of print. The day of the last presses is approaching. Are you ready, print people?

: LATER: Jay DeFoore at E&P covers the kerfluffle.

: LATER STILL: Jay Rosen interviews the Post’s political editor, online editor, and columnist in a fascinating exchange.

What interests me first are the atmospherics. The online folks are bending over backwards to be deferential to the print people. The print person is spitting lines like “pompous” and “total bullshit.” Not a happy camp, there. Once more: Newsrooms are like that.

Second, what interests me is that I think we are seeing the Japanese monster movie of journalism … or perhaps a more timely allusion would be King Kong: Dinosaurs v. the overgrown ape. The print people (you can guess at my casting; either that or Godzilla would be loaded) are holding onto their beliefs in objectivity for dear life. The online people have moved onto a new world. And Dan holds firm saying that he’s not a liberal columnist or even an opinion columnist, though he has taken on the latter label; he says — and I agree — that these days, tracking media and those who would spin it is reporting. In my book, that is sometimes more like reporting than what some reporters do when they dutifully report what the powerful spin. But it all fits in the big tent of journalism, if those who think they own that tent will allow it. Jay quotes an internal memo from the print editor to the online editor:

It’s not an overstatement to say that our generation of reporters and editors is trying vindicate the entire tradition of ideologically neutral news in a web-driven age in which most information is presented through argument. Certainly the Bush White House would be happy to have this tradition die—it makes it easier for them to dismiss all reporting they don’t like as the work of liberal critics.

A tall order. But the contrary arguments that are made are first that no one is ideologically neutral and that transparency is needed and second that not all information online is presented through argument but argument does not invalidate information.

One thing I forgot to say in all the posts about newspapers and business below:

Newspapers have neither a constitutional nor a God-given right to exist. They exist if they serve their communities well and are supported by those communities in one way or another.