It’s no longer news that newspapers are reporting disastrous drops in circulation: “Apart from those two national dailies, which eked out gains of under 1 percent each, every other newspaper in the top 20 posted declines, according to figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.” It would be news if they figured out what to do about it.
Change in newspapers — upgrading, updating, inventing, innovating — should be celebrated, no matter what causes it. See the story of the Madison Capital Times shifting — “reluctantly,” says the NY Times copy editor — from print, 90 years after it was first printed, to the web. Bravo, I say. This is the kind of bold move the American newspaper industry should have made five years ago, when they easily could have foreseen this future. The public is online, the new means of gathering and sharing news is online, the medium is more efficient and cheaper to run, the old business model is shot. Why wait? Yes, I sympathize with the staffers who lost their jobs, just as I sympathize with those on other papers who’ve lost theirs because their managements have not been strategic and brave and have not retrained them (or to put the responsibility where it better belongs, they they haven’t retrained themselves). But every newspaper in America should be delighted this is happening and should be watching it closely to see what works and what doesn’t. I think Jay Rosen shares this view as he reports on the shift and gives good advice to the former paper’s editors:
* I know this isn’t how they’re thinking about it in Madison, but from my perspective Saturday marked the debut of a local newsblog and opinion site in Madison with an editorial staff of 40, and a web-to-print engine that is ready to start clicking. Those are basically good facts for the Cap Times. It’s up to the staff to bring journalistic imagination equal to them. . . .
* If I were Paul Fanlund, the editor of the Cap Times, I would set a first year goal of developing 400 solid contributors of news, expertise and opinion able to work with my 40 pros at headquarters, and I would calculate that to get the 400 I would need a to register about 4000 participants in various networked journalism projects.
I think this is a big deal: LA Times editor Russ Stanton said the paper will “train all editorial employees in new skills in every medium in which we work (print/web/TV/mobile/radio).” I hope that also means training everyone in new opportunities: collaboration, networks, opening up the process… (By the way, I was honored to be included in Stanton’s reading list.)
I’m frustrated these last few days by the discussion online about newspapers and the future of journalism. It’s just such a retread.
Britannica’s blog — yes, even they have a blog — invited a handful of commentators to pontificate, doling it out as if it were a newspaper series (remember them? they were kinda like miniseries, only in black & white). What I want to hear is ideas for the future, not restating of the problem or the worries, but that’s mostly what we got. Nick Carr led it off with his predictable lamentation about change. Jon Talton — apparently a computerized algorithm with a name — recycled every blog complaint since 1999. Well, that’s helpful. Jay Rosen wondered about business models, which is on point (though the Britannica people, with their access to all the world’s wisdom, might have wanted to bring in some economists and business geniuses to try to answer his questions). At least Clay Shirky pushed for experimentation. And even former Tribune columnist Charles Madigan, after issuing what he seems to think is a required snark about the audacity of citizens daring to speak, has some ideas (he wants to make money for a free print paper by charging people to make wedding videos, arguing that it’s so hard to learn; I hereby invite Charlie to a CUNY class where we’ll teach him in no time). But it’s just so old, not moving the peanut down the street.
Meanwhile, friends Chris Anderson and Howard Weaver find kismet arguing that the state of the newspaper business isn’t as bad as some say. Well, a discussion of how bad bad is isn’t terribly helpful, either. What we need is discussion of ideas and action.
We must move past this pining for the past and shrugging about the future. We also have to stop seeing newspapers as the center of the news universe. More on this later.
One could make a blog with nothing but daily reports of bad news about newspapers.
One could make another blog with suggestions for drastic measures that should be taken — even if as experiments — at every newspaper company in the country.
The latest bad news is word that Journal Register, publisher of the New Haven Register and 21 other daily and 310 nondaily newspapers, could go bankrupt. The article argues that this is more a problem of debt service than operations — but then it goes on to say that “its operating performance has declined” with EBITDA expected to fall from $90 million to $70 million in a year.
If I can get some money into a program at CUNY — and as part of a conference on new business models for news I’m holding there, probably now in September — I’m thinking about hiring MBAs to create drastic models of new newspaper businesses, such as:
* The free newspaper — here’s an argument that the Guardian should go that way.
* The online-only newspaper — that has happened in Madison.
* Selling off printing, production, and distribution arms — as suggested by Dave Morgan.
* Break them up into a bunch of niche products — as suggested by NewMediaBytes. That could mean selling the sports section separately (or making it online-only); it could mean turning out a whole bunch of products from golf to parenting to food.
* Go hyperlocal.
* Turn all the reporters into independent agents — as I sort of suggested here — and the newsroom and news product into just a packager and ad network.
* Jettison everything but real reporting — which is a smaller proportion of an editorial budget than many would like to admit — and charge more for the product to a highly interested audience.
* Distribute a local supplement inside national papers: USA Today, The Times, or the Journal.
* Become a local magazine with an online component covering breaking news, local calendars, and such. (Except I think that local magazines are in as much trouble as local newspapers.)
* Become an ad network.
What else? Note that I did not suggest foundation or public support. I think that’s a pipedream. Journalism either is or isn’t a business. I think it is, but not like the one we have now. And we’d better get to reinventing it or it could well die. The Journal Register could just be the first.
Whoop. Whoop. Whoop. That’s the alarm going off, newspaperfolk.
: LATER: Note that the Britannica blog is holding a forum this week on the fate of newspapers. I’m looking forward to Clay Shirky’s call for experimentation.
The New York Times Monday media report completely buried the report of the worst newspaper ad revenue decline since 1950, when the NAA started measuring the number (which is to say, the worst decline ever). It’s on page C-7, given a mere four paragraphs. Granted, the news is a bit stale, having come out three days ago. Still, you’d think that the media section would have decided to give this more perspective.
I think the proper perspective is that we are at a full-blown, slippery-slope, accelerating-fall, watch-out-below crisis for the newspaper industry and professional journalism with it. It’s time for drastic thinking.
Newspaper ad revenues have taken their worst drop in almost 60 years - worse even than 2001. E&P reports:
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows.
The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.
“Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms,” John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.
Is that called whistling in the wind? Or pissing in it? Man, that’s denial.
Yes, some of this is as a result of the economic downturn, especially in real estate (and jobs will be next and cars after that and retail along for the ride down). But even when those segments rise again, newspapers will not — not — recover what they have lost. They lose doubly in a downturn: advertisers spend less because they have less and then they realize they can keep spending less. It’s a reverse plateau.
Here’s one more reason why I love the Guardian. I picked up the print faxed edition today and found this as the lead story, a reaction to the visit of Nicolas Sarkozy to the UK and his address to the houses of Parliament. You would never — never, never — see this leading The New York Times or any American news organization. But this is precisely what I want from a post-commodity news outlet: voice, viewpoint, artistry. Simon Hoggart writes (and I hope they won’t mind my quoting the whole damned thing):
He loves us. He adores us. He reveres us! Listening to Nicolas Sarkozy address Parliament yesterday was like being underneath a torrent of crème Chantilly sprayed from a high-pressure hose.
He actually said “thank you” for the liberation! Previous French presidents have implied that events in Normandy were mere skirmishes while the French got on with the job of throwing off the German yoke.
But Mr Sarkozy could not thank us enough. Grateful? It was surprising that he didn’t grab the Speaker round his legs to thank him personally for everything his forebears had done. France would never forget - never! She would never forget the English blood, Scottish blood, Welsh blood, not forgetting the Irish blood. They would never forget the welcome given in London to General de Gaulle (something which seemed to slip the General’s own mind quite quickly). “France will never forget because it has no right to forget!”
(Compare and contrast with the General, who ordered all US troops out of France. One diplomat asked: “does that include the ones under the ground?”)
The setting for this gush of gratitude was the Royal Gallery in the Lords. The president is partial to a spot of bling, and this is bling on a mega scale. The gold, scarlet leather, stained glass and gilt statuary - it is a mad Victorian’s idea of what a medieval castle looked like, and it makes parts of Versailles resemble something knocked up by Mies van der Rohe.
And we had the vast battle pictures on either side of the room - Waterloo and Trafalgar. “We get them lit especially brightly,” said one attendant. Denis MacShane had come over from the Commons, bubbling with excitement. “Did you hear him on Today? He was completely over the top about Britain - he probably only talks to Carla like that!”
Ah, Carla. She entered, cool, calm and poised, as if nude pictures in the tabloids hadn’t greeted her arrival on our shores. (Why do I suspect Sarko doesn’t care?) She sat at the back of the stage and her audience seemed transfixed. Crusty old codgers who spend their lives steeped in policy documents smiled for the first time in years.
The audience were entranced. Even the translator could be seen to chop the air and wave in excitement as if she were delivering the speech itself.
“My dear British friends,” he continued. He needed us. The Franco-German axis was all very well, but it was now the Anglo-French axis that mattered.
“I was so often inspired in my youthful days by the greatness of Britain,” he mused. And now he would never forget the hospitality he had been shown. “Vive le Royaume-Uni! Vive la France!”
Somehow we slithered our way through all that cream and gave him the ovation he so obviously craved.
I won’t mince words: I hate the new and expanded news summary The New York Times introduced today on pages 2 and 3. It’s inefficient, wasteful, and ultimately insulting.
It’s not hard to see where this comes from. I’ve sat in no end of whither-newspaper meetings in companies and conferences in which the alleged shortened attention span of the American public is lamented. This is the most common cure. I’m sure the updated rationale includes blaming the internet: People read short things on the screen so they must want it in print.
But this is nothing new. In 1976, I was assigned — kicking and screaming — to be one of two editors to create the same news summary on the back page of the first section of the Chicago Tribune. Daily Briefing, it was called. Editors have tried putting them on the front page, on page 2, on the back page, everywhere. Never works. The Tribune’s feature died (after I quit in frustration and went to the San Francisco Examiner).
The problem with The Times’ latest effort is first that it’s inefficient and inappropriate to the form. They forget one of the still-great advantages of the interface of the paper: As I browse, I see every story and I get to decide then and there how deep to dive in: the headline or caption may tell me enough, the lede may, the first five grafs may. The beauty is that it’s all right there. If instead, I see a story of interest on The Times’ new page 2, I have to go shuffling through the paper to find it and keep reading.
The second problem, I think, is that it’s wasteful. As newspapers lose space and staff, I think they should be using both precious aassets to go deeper, not shallower.
Third, I do not think it’s true that our attention spans have shorted. Our choices have increased. And that means that our selectivity is greater. So we may give shorter attention to the stories newspapers fed us when they controlled our media choice. Now they don’t and we read what we want to. Indeed, we can dig deeper into a topic of interest and follow it longer. In that sense, our attention spans are longer when and where it matters to us.
While I don’t like The Times’ summary, I do like its new page 1 promos — reefers, we call them in the biz — because they use the unique value of a front page to give us more of a sense of what’s inside and what to look for; they are like links.
The other big change is a big promo box for NYTimes.com on page 4. I’ll also quibble with that, for it ghettoizes digital (as do most such boxes in newspapers and magazines everywhere). The Times has already been doing a better job of merging the two by printing meaty chunks of the Bits, Caucus, and other blogs, bringing a new journalistic voice into the paper. I say do more of that and less tchotchkefication of The Times.
While I was in London, the Daily Mail opened a campaign — and quickly declared victory — to ban ecologically dangerous plastic bags from stores. Even the Guardian praised it as Martin Kettle said the Mail set an example for government of finding a problem and just solving it (see also Google).
His point is about government and society but I also see a lesson here for American newspaeprs, which in my day, children, used to crusade. They picked a problem and found a solution and then stacked the deck to take credit for solving it. But at least it got solved. Where did that spirit go?
Here’s Kettle on the Mail and its lessons:
Once the Mail went into action the outcome was settled. Ten pages on Wednesday, seven more on Thursday, another four on Friday and the job was done. The Banish the Bags campaign was well planned, well focused, well judged, well timed and was executed on a scale and with a ruthlessness that would have impressed Bismarck. M&S was lined up in advance to create a second-day wave with its 5p-per-bag charge announcement. . . .
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Labour politicians could learn more valuable practical lessons from what the Mail has done this week than from anything that Barack Obama is doing. This is not a fashionable view. Entranced by Obama’s success, every minister wants to know what he’s taking and how to get some of it for themselves. If only we too could somehow be like Obama, they say, trust and respect would flood back into the dried-up riverbed of British politics. But this is purest delusion. Most of Obama is not hard currency. It doesn’t transfer outside the American market. Forget it. . . .
On the other hand there are three lessons from the Mail campaign that really might be worth attention from our politicians. First, why does it take a newspaper to state the obvious and to get something done about it? . . .
Second, look what can be achieved by identifying a problem, deciding what should happen instead, and planning a strategy that can make it succeed. Modern politics has mislaid that hugely important skill. . . .
Third, isn’t it interesting that Britain is full of people who are keen and ready to respond to a call to do the right thing? . . .
Plastic bags are a problem. They can be reduced by leaders proposing clear solutions and promoting good norms. Don’t make people feel guilty. Don’t always reach for new laws. Help people also to feel they can make a difference and that things can be done differently and better. The Daily Mail understood that. The future may belong to the politicians who understand it too.
The other day, when I noted that the hedge fund breathing down the necks of the NY Times Company board and management had acquired as much stock as the Sulzberger family, I said that strategic change in the company is inevitable and I asked you what you’d do with the business. Here are some of my answers:
* I fear it’s too late to sell the Boston Globe (which just announced more buyouts). Bet they’re kicking themselves now. Jack Welch was interested in taking it off their hands in 2006, when it was valued at $500-600 million — down from the $1.1 billion the Times Company paid for it in 1993; the Times just wrote-down the value of the Globe and a sister company by more than $800 million. Whoopsie daisy. I doubt they can sell the thing today.
So I would make the most radical restructuring of a newspaper anywhere in the world and use that as a laboratory for the Times itself and for other newspapers (see how new Tribune Company boss Sam Zell is using his smaller papers as “petri dishes“). I’d follow Dave Morgan’s advice and cut the newspaper company into four: production, distribution, advertising, and content. I’d sell the first two (getting rid of huge amounts of staff and shutdown obligation) and free up the advertising company to sell any local media, starting with a collaborative, distributed hyperlocal network the Globe must start to complete with the local papers that ring the city and strangle the Globe (papers the previous owners should have bought but didn’t). This sales effort has to work in radically different ways, setting up high-volume automated systems that members of the network itself can sell into. The old structure of well-lunched sales people who didn’t really sell but just handled lists of inherited clients won’t work anymore; Google is about to eat their lunch locally.
The content arm, meanwhile, needs to get rid of anything that does not focus on local news. More radical, it needs to start to aggressively drive readers from print to online, leapfrogging to the future that publishers dread, past paper. The Globe should become a testbed for reverse syndication, handing readers over to the Times for national and international coverage and perhaps also for national business and sports and even entertainment (and getting a revenue share for the new traffic the Globe sends Times’ way). The paper should take a hard look at whether to make sports a separate product and whether that should be in print or digital (a decision driven in great measure by ad sales). The print product should be ruthlessly local and anything else in it should be well-supported by advertising. Such a denuded but focused product may need to be free.
The Globe should then define itself first and foremost as a digital company and, more important, as a community company, a relationship network. It should become a platform for local news, information, and action and for new local sites and companies. That’s what comes after being a content company. This means that the staff must change radically as roles evolve from producing content to organizing, enabling, and educating collaborative and distributed networks.
The Globe that emerges should be of a radically different size but I fully believe that if the Times Company showed the balls to be the first to completely and radically reinvent a newspaper, its value would increase.
* As for the New York Times itself, I’d cut bait and turn it into a national newspaper — international in their dreams. The Times is not now and has not been for sometime a New York paper. So I’d either spin off or kill metro coverage. It could become a new local online collaborative journalistic network in the mold of the new Globe. Or it could die and I firmly believe a new and more nimble local network can emerge and take up the slack left. With that spinoff goes the Times production and distribution arms, in the Morgan model.
The New York Times itself should focus on what it does best and wants most to do: national and international coverage for a national audience. Either the Times will succeed at being the premiere American national news brand or . . . well, there is no “or.” That is the Times’ only choice; it is the box into which it has boxed itself.
What form does that take? It clearly should be more online than print — soon or immediatley exclusively online. It must focus on great reporting. It should be open to all media. It should become the host of opinion and discussion about all issues — which will be tough for them. The Times will have hearty competition from both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal but it should bravely leap ahead and recognize that Dow Jones management is scared of change (thus their mewling and successful efforts to convince Rupert Murdoch not to take down the pay wall . . . for now). It will also have competition from international news brands coming to America: the Guardian, the BBC, and possibly others.
I think the Times should explore the reverse syndication model I propose above and have the ambition to be the source of national and international reporting for every metro and local news site in America. If those sites send them enough traffic that generates enough revenue, the Times could expand its news coverage. By sharing revenue with those sites, it would beat the other competition in the old syndication business: wire services. But they’d better watch out: Reuters could be right behind them.
The Times should create and sell quality collaborative networks and expand the brand around its value: reporting. It should invest heavily in digital innovation and learn well from work that is going on elsewhere, especially London. And it has to become the product of collaboration with networks and independent professionals and its audience. I agree with Fred Wilson here: “I’d make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline. The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.”
* Some — including the hedge fund pressuring the company — would sell About.com but I’d hold onto it. (Disclosure: I consulted there for about a year and a half.) About is the one bright-spot in the Times P&L. It has brought understanding of online, SEO, and new means of content creation into the company and had an influence on the paper. It is, for now, the company’s only real digital asset. The reason to sell it, I think, would be to recognize profits and to set up the company’s balance sheet to go private if it chooses. But I think that’d be a strategic cop-out.
* I agree with Fred Wilson that I’d sell other assets. They are a distraction and management has enough on its hands. This includes the Herald-Tribune, which I’d probably fold into the Times operation and brand.
* Yes, and I’d sell the building.
At the end, the company can concentrate on rebuilding and extending its core asset, the Times’ reputation, and build a new relationship with its public.
Michael Fioritto was nice enough — and skilled at Excel enough — to compile results from my little survey that asked you what you’d kill from a newspaper’s budget. Keep in mind that it’s unscientific as hell and that respondents could pick as many suggestions as they liked. I need to do a proper survey and probably will at my New Business Models for News conference (this one was just a demo of Google Forms). In any case, when Michael did the tabulation, 425 people had responded and here’s what they wanted to ax:
Financial tables 43.06%
Sports section 21.65%
Sports columnists 8.00%
Entertainment section 3.76%
Movie critic 3.76%
Business section 2.59%
Syndicated features 2.59%
TV critic 2.59%
Music critic 1.88%
Book critic 1.65%
Comics 1.65%
Foreign bureaus 1.65%
Lilfestyle section 1.41%
Washington bureau 1.18%
Editorial columnists 0.71%
Copy editors 0.47%
Online site 0.47%
Top editors 0.47%
Editorial page 0.24%
Photographers 0.24%
Financial tables are obvious (which is why it’s all the more appalling that all papers haven’t killed them).
What fascinates me most is the large number who want to kill sports. I’m one of those who doesn’t read the sports section (you always knew I was neither a real man nor a real American). So I just throw it in the back seat. But sports sections are also expensive to produce — lots of staff — and bring in few endemic advertisers. Granted, some people buy the paper to get the sports section alone. But this makes me wonder whether sports should be a separate product. If it’s a great one, perhaps you could charge even more for it than you charge for the paper. Could it work as a free paper? Well, the lack of related advertising could be a problem there. Should sports live only online with the opportunity to have more media and interactivity? Should newspapers go out of the sports business? Those seem to be the questions to ask.
