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.

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
- Letter from Ann Arbor News Publisher Laurel Champion
- Will NPR Save the News?

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.

Radio in the Amphitheatre

Not long ago many public radio stations in the United States had what amounted to a monopoly in their markets. In many markets there was only one public radio station on the FM dial, and the audience had little or no choice if they wanted to hear Morning Edition.

Hybrid Digital radio has eroded that monopoly a little. But since very few of the audience have HD radios it's had very little impact.

But the Internet is a different story. On the Internet a public radio station in any market is just a tiny whisper in a huge cacophony of noise.

Searching for an analogy to describe this to a group of j-school students the other day, it struck me that the old days were like standing in an ancient amphitheatre. In the days of FM radio, it was as if the listener was standing on the stage and her public radio station was like a person standing half way up the auditorium, in very middle of row L, shouting down to the listener on the stage. Since the public radio station was the only person in the auditorium the listener, though a little way off, had no trouble locating the station, or listening to it.

But on the Web the public radio station is not alone. Every seat in the audiorium is filled with stations, newspapers and blogs trying to get the listener's attention. And in all that noise it's almost impossible for her to hear the public radio station.

In this situation, there's no point telling the same story as everyone else. Then it just becomes unidentifyable in the noise the listener, still standing on the stage, now hears.

The only way to stand out is to be different. To be distinct. To be original. The only way to be heard in all that noise is to tell a different story. To cover something that only public radio's special reporting skills and relationship with its audience allows it to cover.

It will still be hard to find, but the listener will at least have a reason to keep looking.

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)

I Million Friends

A line in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald caught my attention. In a harassment court case a Mr Hurst, accused of hounding a woman by sending her a friend invitation in Facebook, suggested Facebook friends are not that same as real world friends.

""[Popular British radio DJ Chris Moyles] has 1 million Facebook friends. Do you think he knows them all intimately?" Mr Hurst said.

Hurst was later cleared of any crime involving Facebook, but advised to leave the woman alone.

The case left a couple of questions unanswered. Does Moyles really have a million Facebook friends? If so, is his Facebook page more important than his Web site?

The first question is easy to answer. BBC 1's Chris Moyles Show page in Facebook currently has 334,860 fans. I imagine the number of unique visitors that cross Moyles' BBC pages each month is higher than that.

But looking at the pages both on Facebook and the BBC's site, it's interesting to note that there's something missing there that I'm sure is critical to the radio show: Chris Moyles.

Both the Facebook and BBC pages have discussion boards for users. But Moyle's personality doesn't shine through the pages. What's he thinking today? Where are his tweets? Where are his posts in the discussions? Did I miss something?

As a radio show I've no doubt that Moyles and the crew are focused on radio. But I can't help thinking 334,860 fans merit a little attention too. They're not just listening to the radio. They want to be seen to be associated with the Moyles show. And they are creating conversation around the show. In addition to the fans' posts on the Moyles Show page, Facebookies have created another 365 Chris Moyles groups.

Radio shows might do well to think about Facebook as a new antenna.

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."

Stern Action

The Washington Post writes: NPR Leader Out After Board Clash, Ken Stern's New Media Forays Rankled Public Radio Affiliates.

See comments from Jeff Jarvis on the resignation of Ken Stern.

Also Dennis Haarsager on the NewsGang podcast with Steve Gilmore.

And in his own blog.

Visual Radio

BBC reporter Spencer Kelly writes that radio stations are thinking about visual radio where glanceability enhances the radio listeners enjoyment. That is; key images appear on a digital radio screen that explain the story or tell the listener/reader/viewer more about what's on the radio.