Tag The News Business

Entries 35 Total

Everybody’s Talking Heads

Dec 13, ’07 2:33 PM

I’ve seen David Byrne’s blog post about a visit to the New York Times in too many places today to figure out where I saw it first.

Here’s my favorite graf:

“At present, it is mostly the ads in the Style section, and the glossy Sunday and T magazines that pay for a disproportionate amount of the newspaper’s running costs. Without the income from Gucci and Rolex, there probably wouldn’t be a Baghdad bureau. (That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the idea.)”

This would make great fodder for any number of grad classes I took at SJSU, especially Bill Briggs’ International Communications class.

Such a hard question. In theory, advertising for the luxury goods at the heart of the darkest corners of the American Dream is what’s paying for the continued survival of some of the most influential pieces of free press in the world.

Interesting little cycle.

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All I’m going to say about the Google/AP thing

Sep 4, ’07 9:52 AM

Google News now links to wire stories from the original source (AP, AFP, etc.), hosted by Google, in addition to the 5,137 versions of each wire story posted at individual news sites.

Three reasons why this is good for newspapers:

  1. Newspaper.coms no longer have to spend time, money, and resources on trying to build the best semantic, SEO-friendly code for their wire stories that are the least unique content on their sites.  They should work on doing that for local news and information anyway, but stop worrying about how you host AP stories and what that does to your placement on Google News.
  2. The rewards that newspapers with higher PageRank and more incoming links get on Google News might slowly diminish as the Google-hosted wire stories draw more attention.  Again, worry less about SEO and more about creating local content for local readers.
  3. The page view spikes from getting a wire story or an editorial on a national issue to show up on Google News are nearly worthless, anyway. A reader from Poughkeepsie who clicked on the AP story hosted by your newspaper.com in Jackson Hole isn’t coming back to find out how the rodeo turns out.

See Weaver and Hartnett for more rational thought.

The eleventh obvious thing: Your subscribers are dying

Jul 16, ’07 6:44 AM

Here’s a newsroom exercise sure to drive a stake of fear squarely into the heart of your circulation manager:

Count the number of obituaries printed in your paper in the last year for local residents over the age of 60.

Now compare that number to your paper’s drop in circulation over the same period.

If you see a correlation, you’re probably not alone.

At least once a week, it seems like another study or survey or poll or Pew report pops up explaining the obvious: The young’uns don’t care much for the newspaper these days.

Sure, you can go all Redeye and ASAP on their asses with a tab or a pretty site that shovels the same old news into a colorful, modernized wrapper, but *tricking* young people into reading the news isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

It’s the content, stupid.

(Yes, I realize I’m throwing around quite a few early-’90s references here. Forgive me – they were formative years.)

How many 18- to 30-year-olds in your town do you think give a shit about what the city council passed or didn’t pass at Tuesday night’s meeting? It’s not that they’re not politically active — don’t make that mistake — it’s that the issues are far more interesting than you make them out to be.

Let’s put it this way: I grew up on stories, not city council meetings, so why would you tell me a city council meeting when you could tell me a story?

Will a redesigned print edition or Web site bring in the flock to read about city council meetings and legislation that your local representative floated in a press release months before it will ever hit a committee, much less the House floor?

Again, if you’re serious about staying in business, you’re going to need content that the LIVING people in your circulation area are interested in. So let’s start brainstorming: What does the younger demographic in your town need to know, and how do you frame the story so it catches their eyes?

I’m exactly as pompous as I sound. No more, no less.

Jun 14, ’07 9:04 PM

If, for any reason, you can’t get enough of me prattling on and on about the future of newspapers in text, you can enjoy 33 minutes of me getting interviewed by Cameron Reilly, who apparently is the king of all podcasting in Australia.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard me say all this stuff before, but you can have the pleasure of hearing me nose-breath through the first three things on that list I made until Cameron cues me to pull the mic back. (Now I know what Hugh was doing wrong on all those Gillmor Gangs).

A few references I made in the podcast and one correction:

This was lots of fun – Cameron puts together a great podcast – check out G’day World and the rest of the shows at The Podcast Network.

Hope for mobile news

Jun 7, ’07 8:05 AM

I’ve gotta admit, when it comes to the question of newspapers adopting new delivery systems, I’m usually the one wagging my finger and saying “You better…”

But John Duncan over at The Inksniffer has a far more hopeful approach when it comes to the prospects for cutting deals with cell phone carriers and getting headlines from newspapers to mobile phones:

“There will, I’m sure, be Powerpoints. I think big cellphone operators, who like to do business with big brands and who can tailor their products by geography, will seek out local newspapers as partners very quickly. Readers may tell researchers about how little they trust newspapers but big telecoms trust us a lot. They advertise with us already. Newspapers know them. Newspapers play golf with them. Newspapers used to carry their books to school for them when they were young.”

He’s probably thinking of larger papers and larger newspaper companies, but the message is clear — this is one area where newspapers can play a few pieces of capital they’ve built up over the years.

As an added bonus, it’s not rocket science. Get your text headlines out on a mobile screen. It’s not difficult. After that, move on to pushing your video content out to iPods. Plenty of instruction booklets sitting around about how to do that. (Note to self: Do that.)

Will the real online news business model please stand up?

Apr 21, ’07 9:03 PM

Terry Heaton’s take on the Yahoo/Amigos deal and other attempts to make up for lost print revenue with online advertising dollars turns on this point:

“…the essential problem for all local media companies is their insistence in the belief that a model of scarcity online will generate the kinds of revenue needed to offset losses to legacy platforms.”

For as long as I’ve been interested in this business, I’ve thought local advertising is the way to go at local online news organizations, but Terry’s counting out even that seemingly-obvious model, taking fragmentation and the unbundling of news as a given. Which I do. But I still think branding is a big part of unbundled content, feeds, and widgets.

We give away information so that we can increase the presence and prominence of our brand, get the newspaper’s name out in front of more eyeballs, and draw attention to any and all baby-step innovations we have to offer.

Making money off that is, of course, a long-term proposition.

Some more from Terry: “The longer we wait to aggregate the local web, the more we accelerate our own demise.”

“…aggregate the local web…” Now we’re on to something here.

Imagination is everywhere

Mar 26, ’07 7:12 AM

Scott Karp says part of the problem with the newspaper business has been its lack of imagination:

“Nobody imagined that somebody would be so recklessly uncapitalistic as to create a website where people could post classified ads for free. Nobody imagined that an online software company specializing in information retrieval, but which produced no information of its own, could create the largest market for small business advertising that the world has ever seen.”

If your newspaper heart needs a little warming after a weekend of gloom and doom, here are a few places to look for an incredible amount of imagination — on the editorial side of the newspaper, if not always the business side:

What are the news sites that inspire you? And where are the papers pushing the envelope when it comes to verticals and local search? Is hyperlocal the way to compete with Craig/eBay/Google?

The obvious end of journalism schools?

Mar 24, ’07 1:21 PM

Dave Winer:

“First, reform journalism school. It’s too late to be training new journalists in the classic mode. Instead, journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why? Because journalism like everything else that used to be centralized is in the process of being distributed. In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers.”

How far off is that future? For some papers, it could be sooner than you think.

Your readers don’t know everything, but don’t you go telling them that

Mar 10, ’07 2:36 PM

When your newspaper is the news, suddenly you’re thrust into the role of the person, the business, or the organization that gets a story published about them in the paper.

Continue Reading…

“The whole industry is in play”

Nov 29, ’06 9:04 PM

Mark Potts has this observation on the troubles Knight Ridder faced, the Tribune Company is facing, and the New York Times has on the horizon:

“Ultimately, this is about much more than The New York Times Co., or Tribune, or Knight Ridder. The whole industry is in play. Where does it end? Gannett doesn’t have the kind of stock protections that the Times has; some investor might eventually jump that company. McClatchy could be a target, if it can’t adequately digest Knight Ridder.”

There is a cataclysmic change underway. It has to do with finance and profits, but it also has to do with a slow but steady slide into irrelevance. Newspaper circulation was on the decline before Jayson Blair, Glenn Reynolds, and Dean Singleton made their moves.

Decades of agenda-setting and cherry-picking have come home to roost. There are ways around it for the metros if they play their cards right: The analytic use of databases, in-depth investigations, and narrative journalism are just a few ways to stay relevant.

Video done right and multimedia and interactivity might make better use of the online medium than text, but they don’t solve problems of relevance or news judgment.

Frankly, I don’t know if newspapers can innovate online fast enough to get ahead of the Web. At best, the newspaper business is constantly playing catch-up with start-ups and the giants that absorb them. And every new generation of readers grows up with less trust of monolithic media, and more trust in their own social network. I’m not sure a newspaper brand can beat that.

But I got into this business to improve it from the inside, so I’m sticking around.

Wish me luck.