The Publisher Audience

For years I've been meaning to write this post, but it seemed so obvious that I kept neglecting to write this thought down.

I am the publisher. You are the publisher. Anyone with a screen is the publisher.

That changes everything. It moves institutions that are publishers on paper or on the air one step further away from the audience. It means newspapers and broadcasters have to find ways to market their wares to the new publishers.

Reinventing Radio

Steve Outing says he's pessimistic about newspapers, and that their CEOs haven't demonstrated the ability to save them.

He then writes a list of things that newspapers could do to confront the issues they currently face. Of course many of these items are equally true for all media. Such as "transform the company to digital first," allowing readers to support newsgathering, or Jarvis' mantra (here, in this post from two years ago): do your best and link to the rest.

Outing also suggests that newspapers create a membership model and accept that the Web is about free.

These last two sound a little like Public Radio's business plan: create something good then ask supporters to pay for it. (Disclosure: I work in public radio at WBUR in Boston. So I know this unlikely but successful business model well.)

Radio is perhaps lucky that it is forced to recognize that radio and the Web are two separate and distinct marketplaces with different value propositions, an observation that may have been lost on newspapers.

In the first radio finds itself with a value proposition that still works. That is: I'm in my car, I need to be entertained by something that doesn't require my hands or eyes to make it work. Equally: I'm cleaning the house, a task that requires my hands and eyes but not my concentration; I need something to occupy my mind. Radio is the solution for the many situations like these you find yourself in each day.

Staying alive in this marketplace is all about adopting new technologies. That's because any tool you can use like a radio, can replace a radio. That could be a computer, a smart phone or a Web audio player. These are eroding traditional radio's marketplace and offer a better product, because they're attached to the Internet and so can play audio from anywhere.

In addition to that, listeners who want to spend a little time figuring out how to create playlists from different sources and play audio when they want it, are changing the radio marketplace, slowly but inexorably.

So the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition is still valid but the marketplace is changing. It's changing because the tools that put the audio into that space are changing. Public Radio has changed with them by producing some of the most popular news and information podcasts in iTunes. But listening to podcasts has a high threshold of entry for the listener. You've got to really want to do it, to do it. Something simpler, like Stitcher, will come along, and radio stations have to be there when it arrives.

The Web is a different marketplace, a fact that newspapers might have missed because their stories, already in text, move so easily onto the Web. But news and information radio stations aren't fooled by this, because news and information radio clearly doesn't lend itself to the Web. It doesn't work, because it breaks the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition. If you're surfing the Web your mind is occupied. You can't concentrate on a Web story and a radio story at the same time.

So if news and information radio stations are to succeed on the Web, reinventing themselves is not an option, it's a requirement for success.

Current reported recently on Public Radio's advances into Web content, looking at The Argo Project, a public radio project that aims to produce Web content in verticals, led by NPR's head of digital media Kinsey Wilson.

"We’re beginning to see the reinvention of newsgathering and delivery at the local level," acknowledges Wilson in the article. The Argo Project responds to that not by producing the broad coverage you hear of the radio, but by selecting narrow verticals and providing narrowly focus in-depth coverage of those issues, establishing Public Radio as something more than audio.

Over the years newspapers have failed in attempts to produce radio stations, and it's hard to imagine there haven't been radio stations that have failed in newspaper projects. Projects like these die because they are trying to move what they do in one medium directly into another. They are not reinventing themselves.

Public Radio seems to be showing that it has the will to reinvent itself. Let's hope the old unlikely business model will provide the money, as Outing suggests it might.

Two Months Notice for Globe

With the Boston Globe in negotiations to save the paper over the weekend, The Washington Post reports on Monday "the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown" of the Globe. The article notes that the move could be a negotiating ploy, but adds that the Times is also under pressure: "It recently mortgaged its new Manhattan headquarters, borrowed $250 million from a Mexican billionaire at 14 percent interest, laid off 100 newsroom staffers and cut salaries by 5 percent."

(UPDATE: WBUR reports that later in the day the Globe released a statement saying that having "reached agreement with six of the seven unions" involved, the paper would not be "making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.")

Given that and the reported $85 million the Globe is expected to lose this year, it seems remarkable that the paper could survive even if it does extract $20 million in cuts from the staff.

The Globe reports more hopefully "Globe negotiations continue" and the Times sits on the fence with "At Deadline, No Deal Yet on Boston Globe’s Future".

Sree Sreenivasan tweets "AM STUNNED: Howard Kurtz reports NYT preparing to shut down Boston Globe. Was a possibility, of course, but still..." and links to the Post story, amid a flurry of Boston Globe activity on Twitter.

The Chicago Tribune (four paragraphs), the Los Angeles Times and the Philly.com (the story doesn't appear to have made it into the Inquirer) run stories from the Associated Press, which must make Bostonians wonder when this story will create the sort of national outcry that last year's collapse of the Tribune brought about.

Reinvention Means Real Change

Every manager in every news organization would do well to read Josh Benton's thoughts on what it means to reinvent yourself as an organization.

Everyone knows this has to be done, he says, but reinvention means a whole lot more than laying off staff and cutting your budget.

Then look at the Nieman's list of the top fifteen newspaper Web sites in 2008 and ask yourself: a) how many of these institutions have appeared in the news recently for being in financial trouble, and b) how many of these organizations are doing anything more than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

The answers are not encouraging.

Paper Cuts

Erica Smith, a "journalist, a designer, a novice programmer" at the St Louis Dispatch runs Paper Cuts, a site that lists the total number of newspaper jobs lost each year for the past three years, with a map showing where the jobs where lost.

Look above the map on the right and you'll see a drop down menu that allows you to go back through to 2007. You'll also find a map of newspapers that have closed. You can toggle the years on and off at the bottom left of the map.

Which raises the question constantly on the lips of news consumers these days: What happens in a town where the newspapers fold? A New York Times article, News Without Newspapers, asks that question, and looks at hyperlocal blogs' ability to replace traditional news institutions.

These blogs and database scouring sites face the same financial issues the old news organizations face: a lack of money. And being hyperlocal their intent, in a sense, is to reduce potential audience size. So you might say we're talking about scaling down revenue in a business that is already broke, which doesn't seem to promise a bright future.


Elsewhere in the paper the Times looks at its own paper the Boston Globe, which has thinned its staff several times but still faces the threat of closure.

The Future of Radio

NPR's David Folkenflik did a piece last week called "Newspapers Wade Into An Online-Only Future".

He tells the now familiar story of how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, its presses no longer rolling, hopes to find a future for a dramatically reduced staff in an online-only news production called Seattlepi.com.

Seattlepi faces the same problems that all old media organizations face. They are trying to understand where they fit in this world where readers seem less inclinded to read newspapers. Instead, it appears, they make daily news mashups in real time from whatever catches their eye in the stream of news that makes its way across their computer screens.

Suggesting that the question facing all but the largest news producers is not "what should I do with my Web site?" (they've put plenty of time into that already,) but "what makes me stand out in that stream?"

In Folkenflik's piece he quotes Hearst Newspapers President Steve Swartz saying "Very few people come to our Web site and try to re-create the experience of reading a newspaper." This may seem a little obvious, but it's worth repeating. You read a paper cover to cover because that's what you have in your hands. But when your read an article online, you have the whole world at your fingertips.

Broadcasting is different. Absorbing a story works very differently if you're listening. Radio is a linear presentation, you have to listen to the end if you want to hear the end of the story. You can't skip or skim as you do when you're reading.

Radio fills a genuine need because there are a lot of things people do in life that don't require a lot of brain power, but use a lot of time. Like driving, and cleaning the house. Painting, gardening, carpentry, construction, and so on. Almost anything, except those things that require a lot of brain power. Like reading and writing.

If you want to listen to a story carefully, you have to stop reading or listening to anything else. Ironically, as I listened to Folkenflik's story on my computer I found my eyes wandering around the screen looking for something to do. It was an exercise of restraint to back away from my computer and focus on listening to the story.

But while focused listening may raise some issues, using your computer to generate background audio is in significant demand. Looking at some radio station Web statistics the other day it was clear that unlike Swartz's readers, a lot of people do want to use their computers to re-create a radio listening experience. They go to the "listen" page and switch on the stream. They are turning their computers into radios and then, I assume, getting on with their jobs as they listen.

So background listening maintains the advantage it has over print when you're on your computer just as it does when you're driving. It's hands free. Set it going and do something else online that isn't using your full attention.

Which seems to suggest that radio station should keep the live streams going and make appointment listening as portable as possible.

Related Stories
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Newspapers in Disturbia

A story in the New York Times today lists newspapers that have folded or are in bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Poynter reports that more than half of Americans polled wouldn't care if newspapers disappeared.

Show Me The Money

As the news industry keeps searching for the model that will pay reporters for hard work of reporting online, David Carr writes in the New York Times about Steve Jobs and how how iTunes changed the game for digitized music:

Mr. Jobs saw music ... as an ancillary software business to generate sales of the iPods and iPhones. That’s not a perspective that flattered people in the music business, but it did persuade listeners to pay for their wares

It seems obvious to me that newspaper will disappear the moment an affordable digital alternative that offers more or less the same functionality (and a whole lot more) comes along. The issue remains, if newspaper itself is no longer a vehicle for news, what replaces it? It could be a computer, a phone, digital paper, something like a large iPhone.

News organizations need to be concerned about how to get their news into those place as much as, or more than, they are concerned about how to maintain their old business infrastructures.

Tribune Debt Issues

The credit crisis in the U.S. economy comes at a bad time for Sam Zell and his turn around of the Tribune Company. The New York Times speculates that the Tribune Co. Could be Flirting With Bankruptcy.

The Times' DealBook blog also comments on the Tribune facing a potential bankruptcy filing this weekend.

Christensen on Christensen

Clay Christensen, a leading author on innovation, talks on the Harvard Business School Ideacast Episode 122: Reinventing Your Business Model. (It's not on the page yet, but you can subscribe to the feed, or the file is here.)

Christensen has an amazing ability to encapsulate his ideas in fairly short sentences, and the podcast is worth hearing just for that. He goes over the core ideas of his writing on innovation and draws examples from business today, including the plight of newspapers.

Decline and Fall

David Carr wrote an article in the New York Times today which read like a list of people lost at sea on a wrecked ship:

- The Christian Science Monitor abandons its daily paper.
- Time Inc. to lay off 600.
- Gannett to lay off up to 3,000.
- LA Times to reduce newsroom my 75.
- Newark Star Ledger to reduce staff by 40%.
- TV Guide (the institution) sold for $1.

Carr says the collapse is not from lack interest, but because "more than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product." He adds that advertising is in decline and he repeats the old observation that revenue online is pennies to dollars compared to old media products.

All of this is bad news. Carr ends the piece raising the issue that the blogosphere without newspaper reporters' stories to annotate will be a quiet place.

But the point about the blogosphere is that it is a place where new trusted brands can grow. Those brands are able to publish news at a fraction of the cost of newspapers or broadcasting systems. So the pennies that they earn don't need to be dissipated on costly legacy publishing systems. Those pennies can go into reporting.

The challenge is for online media organizations to show they can produce better reporting than we see today in our legacy newspapers, and to do it at a cost that online revenue can support. Is that such a tall order?

Geography and Revenue

One of the great aspects of communities on the Internet is that they are thought communities. They are not limited by the geographical restrictions of the real world. I can be an active part of a worldwide community as easily as I can contribute to my online neighborhood yard sale.

But geographical confinement is what has kept news organizations in business since ink first hit paper, and it is still how they define themselves today. From the names of the businesses down. The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald.

But the Web favors centralization. So to work on the Web you've either got to be very big, or have something so original that visitors can't find it anywhere else.

What the old media organizations did, and do, is bring centralized information to a local audience. They did this because that was the only way that the audience could access that information. But now that the reader, or audience, can get its international news anywhere and everywhere, there is no value in a local news organization delivering it. So a local newspaper has to do something that only a local newspaper can do. Like; local news.

This may seem amazingly obvious, but it seems to have eluded many news organizations. International news may still be a useful impulse buy, to leave by the checkout (or off on the right rail), but front and center has to be the original information that a user can't get anywhere else. That's your raison d'etre. That's were your value is to users. That's the future of your revenue.

To Zell and Back

Sam Zell is back in the news about newspapers. Businessweek's article by Thornton, Arndt and Grover looks at Zell as a self styled "grave dancer" and says he should have seen the newspaper industry was in trouble when he bought the Tribune. It gives an interesting description of the anatomy of the deal Zell engineered to buy the company.

Like most articles about the Tribune's troubles, the focus is on Zell. Jeff Jarvis on the other hand takes a very different view of the situation blaming the staff at Zell's papers for getting them to where they are today.

It's hard to imagine any old media publication being broad enough to contain two such varied opinions. Which backs up Crosbie's idea that it's time of old media producers to realize that they are not an end product any more. They are just a part of a tapestry of news consumption that users stitch together every day, each in his own way.

Supply and Demand

Vin Crosbie writes that the decline of American newspapers is largely due to the basic economic principle of supply and demand. And if you only have time to read one article today, this is the one to read.

Crosbie makes a very compelling argument the the problem facing newspapers is that they are simply not supplying what people want. And when you look at many of the issues in this discussion through this lens, they all fall into place.

He says readers are moving online because they want the freedom of choice available there, in spite of the fact they say they would rather be reading newspapers. They don't want a product half filled with information that doesn't interest them. And they do want to ask a question and get the answer from the person best placed to give them a response, not the company which happens to be delivering their newspaper (in print, or online).

"The industry's problem isn't its ownership, the Internet, or lacks of multimedia or interactivity" says Crosbie. "The problem is its general-interest product has become obsolete."

Don't miss it.

What strikes me as odd about this article, one of three in a series on Transforming American Newspapers, is that it wasn't written years ago. The argument is grounded in the first and most basic law of economics. It's simple, logical, and I can't help thinking, irrefutable.

News: No Funding Model Yet

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about crowdfunding, written by Sarah Kershaw.

She reports that Spot Us in the San Francisco Bay Area is asking its users for story ideas and the funding to cover those stories. It's an interesting idea, which like all ideas, has its weaknesses. Such as, lobbyists could buy the news they want covered. And how could you fund investigative journalism?

I find it interesting that in 2008 there's still no definitive model for a new way to fund news emerging.

There's a new reality. A huge amount of very cheap publishing is going on. Funding is migrating away from expensive methods of publishing. Consumers are using their feed readers to create their own newspapers. They've become publishers creating self built "newspapers" each with a run of one copy. The feed reader melds the publisher and the consumer into the same person. Podcasting does the same for radio. YouTube, Netflix and all the other sources of online video eliminate the need for television.

That new reality has some funding components. Newspapers and smaller online publications sell online advertising. Sponsorship and grants offer another source of revenue. Membership is a third, crowdfunding, according to Kershaw's article, is a fourth and there are more. Kershaw's article mentions Pro Publica and Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero.

The article ends quoting Rosen saying "My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. ... we need to launch lots of boats."

This has to be true. To continue the analogy, it's as if the ocean got shallower. It's now covered in little boats crossing the water that once only the big liners could sail. And the liners are having their bottoms ripped open. They have to draw less water or run aground. They have to evolve into fleets of little boats. And little boats can be funded in many different ways.

Time to Act

Don't miss David Carr's article in the New York Times, All of Us, The Arbiters Of News. It's worth a read as a reminder that we've known that media organization in the U.S. and around the world need to change, and that we still face amazing resistance to that change.

He also notes the opening day of the Olympic games as an example of how new media can help old media. Apparently, according to the article, NBC was doing its best to stop leaks of the opening ceremony. But those leaks served to increase interest in the ceremony which resulted in good numbers for NBC in the evening.

I remember reports in the early days of the Web that said initial fears from bookstores that the Web would eat their sales, were wrong. That the Web had increased interest in books in general and consequently increased bookstore sales. It would be interesting to know if this is still true. But this report about NBC's Olympic coverage reminded me of that story.

Less happy is Carr's mention of The Philadelphia Inquirer's plan to hold any significant content off the Web until it has appeared in the paper. Carr says "If the future of our business is online, then why set up a firewall, delaying the best content to protect a legacy product?"

It is sad that after ten years anyone thinks this is still an issue for discussion. And it's so much more depressing that a decade after this discussion began serious news organizations are still reaching the wrong conclusion.

Evolution Without Mercy

Jon Fine wrote in Business Week in June that "Newspapers still do some things that can't be replaced." He goes on to say "we're about to find out exactly what those things are."

Fine is talking more about the institutions than the medium.

I have every sympathy for those of us who are lamenting the death of newspapers, the institutions. But those institutions need to save themselves and stop equating their future with the existence of newspaper.

Regarding the medium, I find it surprising that this late in the game people still apparently don't know what those things are that can't be replaced.

If we don't know what they are, it's going to be hard to defend them. Hard to save them.

Which begs another question: why struggle to save outdated technology? Did anyone try to save the LP? I seem to remember pundits saying that digital audio lacked a warmth that only analog audio devices could achieve. But would you consider buying an LP today?

The challenge in the future of news is not to save newspaper, not to save the vehicle, but to save the stories, the reporting and the news. That's the real challenge. Next to that, the struggle to save newspapers looks like at distraction. A sideshow.

Anyone who reads newspapers will tell you that they won't go digital because they love the feel of the paper, the ability to carry it around and read it on the train.

But when a digital device does these things better than paper, newspapers will disappear. The institutions will evolve or die. Hopefully the best will evolve. Inevitably some will go under. But the paper itself will disappear.

Then the really useful qualities of newspapers will be challenged. We do know what some of those are. Serendipity. The ability to find stories that you weren't looking for. But news Web sites and Twitter provide that service too. And they will get better at it.

So what are the "things that can't be replaced"?

I suspect we'll wake up one morning and realize there aren't any.

January 14th 2009 update: TechCrunch: Large Form iPod Touch To Launch in Fall ‘09

Craigslist Revenue Grows

paidContent.org reports that Craigslist could bring in $81 million in revenue in 2008.

That's $81 million that isn't going to newspapers for classified ads. But given that the Web earns pennies where the old media earned dollars, it represents a serious blow to old media.

Discussion on the Future of Print

The New Yorker's article on the future of printed newspapers (Out of Print) by Eric Alterman has reignited the smoldering conversation about how the old media organizations will, or won't, survive.

TWiT 138 concludes that print will survive, but that enterprise journalism is under threat.

Articles...
- 2,400 Newsroom Jobs Lost: Biggest Dip in 30 Years (Poynter)

Exellence in Journalism 2008

The Project for Excellence in Journalism yesterday released its 2008 report on the State of the News Media. This always creates some fanfare and it's not hard to find articles on the report today. (e.g. SF Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Poynter.)

Ironically, or perhaps offering a statement about the state of journalism today, of the two hundred articles thrown up by Google news few are anything more than a republishing of the AP or Reuters story. (And the AP story, at the time that I read it, had a number of typos in it.)

The full PEJ report is available at journalism.org.

Reuters reports "In a study of more than 70,000 stories appearing in newspapers, cable and network television and radio news shows, pieces on the war in Iraq and the U.S. presidential campaign occupied nearly one-third of the coverage.

""The whole rest of the world filled less than 6 percent of all the space," Rosenstiel said. Domestic issues such as education, welfare, religion or labor each accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage."