3. The culture of newsroom leadership contains a fatal 20th century flaw: A fundamental belief that equates all new trends with dangerous “fads.” Newsrooms don’t trail the leading edge simply because they’re too dumb to keep up: They’re behind because their editorial leadership believes that keeping pace with rapid change is a fool’s errand. Many senior editors don’t simply fear change — they resent change that succeedswithout their endorsement.
This is spot-on in a weird way. I am afraid maybe the executive class can’t separate keeping up with the latest versions of various productivity applications from real technical change. On top of that, some pretty substantial changes, such as adding comments to news stories, did nothing to change the economics of online publishing: Pluck is just another bill to pay at the end of the month. It’s no wonder managers are skeptical!
Rapid technical change is difficult to achieve on a major news site. It might have dozens of blogs, all individually skinned, and as many as a hundred page types. Usually the vested interests around the paper require that their section doesn’t fit the cookie cutter and it has to be custom built.
However, none of the managers I interact with thinks online publishing is a trend. All are convinced it is “the future”. Were they late to the game? Yes. But that isn’t even the problem, which is that they don’t see that the future is now.
I’ve been trying to put together some thoughts on a new model for news businesses. I’ve run in to a couple problems:
lack of data
jargon
The publication I work for is privately owned, so financial information is hard to come by. I’ve looked around for what other “knowledgeable” people might think, and it turns out all they can do is spew meaningless jargon. Phooey!
I found a bit of info in the form of estimates of newspaper publisher revenue by the US Census Bureau, but the links have gone, at least momentarily, dead. In any case, it wasn’t broken down well enough for my purposes.
One pertinent detail is that online advertising revenues are on the order of five percent of print advertising revenues. In an industry facing twenty percent year-over-year revenue declines, five percent does not look like salvation.
The first thought that occurred to me is that online advertising revenues are irrelevant. This conclusion was supported by a manager at work, who saw things even more starkly: the amount of revenue per reader of the print product has historically been about $1,000. The available revenue from online readers is – wait for it – about $1. Very few businesses can absorb a drop in revenue of three orders of magnitude and survive. What to do?
The only other source of revenue at hand is readers (unless you are the Christian Science Monitor, but that particular solution does not scale). I can see no escape from the necessity of charging readers to get news online. However I can see the outcome that keeps news organizations from doing this: the fear that readers are o allergic to paying for online content that the revenue generated could turn out to be less than the advertising revenue foregone due to the drop in page views.
If that is what news executives are afraid of (and they certainly aren’t sharing this with me), then it is high time we had a frank conversation with our readers about what they want and expect from the news sources of the future. Here are some conversation starters:
How much are you willing to pay for news online, whatever form that might take?
Is it important to you to have access to numerous news sources, or are you OK with just local or just national news from one or two organizations?
Who do you want to pay for the news, readers or advertisers? Is an advertising-free news source worth a premium to you?
The crew that is in charge now simply cannot fathom how to break us out of the current downward spiral. Radical action and experimentation are needed. What we are getting is incremental changes to a doomed business model.
2. The culture of newspaper management is a dysfunctional relic of a low-bandwidth, monopoly era. It still hasn’t adapted to the lessons of Web 2.0, it’s generally beholden to a short-term stock price instead of a long-term re-investment strategy and it simply refuses to accept that you can’t expect 20 profit margins in a competitive market. Instead of leading, it is a legacy anchor.
This is actually three things rolled in to one:
short-term decision-making based on quarterly results
newspaper management misunderstanding the impact the availability of bandwidth and the competition that implies
failure to “get” web 2.0 and collaboratively created content
First off, I work for a newspaper that is privately owned and as far as I know has made losses every year since 2000. I don’t think that is short-term decision-making! Clearly at the start there was hope or commitment that things might turn around, though the moves required to execute that turn-around are another story. In short, the time frame you consider tends too be a result of your financial structure (public vs. private), and is endemic in many non-news industries. So I’ll say no on that.
There are still vestiges of acting as a monopoly, however. The bandwidth bottleneck has moved from the ability to deliver information to people to the ability (or willingness) of people to receive information. That means, among readers (ie actual consumers news content), you are now competing with the major papers in addition to the local television and radio news, blogs with your own opinion pages, and most famously, craigslist with the classifieds.
Although we are “rethinking” the classified sections, no-one is seriously considering just turning them off on some particular date. They used to be 40 to 50 percent of a typical newspaper’s revenue. These days that figure is probably more like 10% and the only reason it isn’t 3% is that display ads have fallen by a huge percentage as well. Newspapers need to either offer a product with a better value proposition than eBay and craigslist, or get out of the classifieds business.
With regard to Web 2.0, newspapers have actually been engaging in this in a small way since early in their history, by printing letters to the editor and op-ed pieces. Some have expanded on this in recent times, seeking comments on issues of the day an publishing them as, for example, “Two Cents“, an experiment that ended about a year ago. Of course this was all in the limited-bandwidth printed paper, so any space devoted to reader opinion meant that much less for staff (or wire) original reporting.
On that count, newspapers have engaged the public pretty much all along — but in a way that fit the constraints of the time. These days, the constraints have changed and newpapers have done things like add comments to stories but they have not embraced “collaboratively created content.” There is a good reason for that: newspapers — in fact a lot of journalists — are leery of having to vet content created by people with an agenda. It’s not that they don’t get it, it’s that they get it and don’t like it and I don’t think it is about feeling threatened, it’s about accountability. How can you fire a weekend warrior who messed up a story by failing to follow up on a contradictory source?
That leaves us looking for a model for the journalism of the future. That’ll require another post …
It being the holiday season, and being at Target, we decided to drop $30 on a Lego set, for no reason other than the laser beams attached to their heads. I had no idea Lego had such sense of irony, never mind the inclination to avoid a possible movie tie-in.
I built out the kit as designed and took some pics of the resulting diorama:
Imagine the carpet is the ocean (and insert the drilling platform), and it looks almost like the original:
Note the sharks, complete with laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads! W00t!
A while ago Julian sent me this list of reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news. I’ve elected to give it a little more analysis than I did initially, given a few months recent tenure at a daily newspaper.
1. Newspapers’ core audience still doesn’t want change, but they’re aging and they like a product that nobody else wants. The newspaper dilemma: Change the product in hopes of attracting new readers and you piss off your loyal core. Do nothing and you’ll watch your circulation drop every day on the obituary page. All too often, newspaper management responds by promoting bizarre changes that don’t attract new customers and alienate existing ones.
This one is absolutely true.
I happen to be the victim of a bug in the voice mail system: I regularly get calls from people who are looking for some particular part of the newspaper. Last Thursday it was someone looking to place an ad who got cut off from “Katherine” in sales and apparently neither had each other’s phone number. Friday, a, uh, senior gentleman was calling to lament a recent change (read: reduction) in the size of the TV grid.
Those calls leave me with the impression that the segment of the population that can’t navigate IVR is still reading — and caring about — the paper. They do not want anything to change, not the typeface, the columnists, the editorials, even the ads should remain as they are now (were in 1977?), forever.
My fair employer is, needless to say, embroiled in a redesign of epic proportions. Alternately called “Blue Sky” and “<publication> 2.0″, it has been going on for a year or more (I’ve only been back since June). An enormous number of prototypes, endless focus groups, at least two rounds of consultants, and we have not yet chosen a typeface, not for body type, . The first new sections are supposed to be launched January 11 — the one in 4 weeks.
If you have ever had involvement in newspaper production, you know that all ability to react quickly is dedicated to breaking news, with only passing consideration given to ongoing projects. As a result, any project that doesn’t explicitly carve employees away from day-to-day tasks is almost certain to be delayed.
You also know that deciding on a typeface is a rate-determining step: no real redesign work can begin until this central decision is made. Once that is in place, one can decide on standards for type size, leading, tracking, and build those into defautls for articles, columns, editorials, letters to the editor to name a few. The list is long and the differences are somethimes subtle but there is an extremely non-trivial amount of highly technical labour involved in just designing all of these elements, never mind implementing and automating them and training the small army of editors that lay out pages.
So in conclusion, yes, newspapers are prone to perfecting the buggy whip.
When you are dining in the company of a gentleman and it seems to you that perhaps he is a bit rushed in the process of ingesting his meal, may I recommend that you take a moment to recall the following:
Elizabeth “Biddy” Russell was the mother of a trio of childhood friends. They lived down the street in idyllic suburban Westmount.
I haven’t seen or spoken to her in at least twenty years. Interpolating from my own memories and the news stories, the eldest two children have faced no small amount of challenge in their lives. The youngest, however, I believe is now a doctor.
Biddy was one of two Canadians murdered in Mumbai last week. She was traveling with the other, a man that due to ill health expected to die there, Michael Moss. He had a British passport though he had lived in Canada, as I understand, for several decades. Apparently the relationship was a bit hard to classify, though I do know they shared a duplex and traveled extensively together.
Being two degrees — albeit a long-broken two degrees — of separation from an attack such as this does a lot to open your eyes, maybe just a bit, to the awful amount of suffering that emanates from such a crazed attack. Multiplying what I expect the people around Biddy and Michael must feel by a hundred or a thousand — never mind a million — is simply beyond the capacity of my mind. Just trying to think and write about it invokes an avoidance response (clean your desk! make breakfast!).
While trying to process this I found three news stories about her.
I finally got all the parts I needed, and have re-assembled Jacquie’s old L6 as a working phone. I even have Sir Robin’s Song as the ring tone! I’m not sure what could be better, with the possible exception of the Fish License Sketch. But that doesn’t really get going for a little longer than is required of a ring tone.
Re-assembled L6
I get a particular thrill out of keeping an old cell phone going, because of carriers’ awful habit of forcing you to upgrade at the slightest provocation.
I was sure I had already posted this, but a search reveals I have not. Here is another commandment:
Thou shalt not use mail to send data.
In my work for a Major Media Organization (Major Metro Media Organization?) we support the publication of horse racing results and betting lines. As a non-betting person I have little direct interst, but as it turns out, we receive all these via mail. Said mail gets piped through a processing engine, formatted in to tables, and then published.
The problems with this seem too obvious to even mention, but here they are anyway:
no security: anyone can send mail to the processor address, and manually set the correct “from”
line breaks wandering everywhere as people name horses whatever they woke up from dreaming about
transmission reliability: it might get eaten by your spam filter
One wonders how long it will be before a viagra spam just happens to be formatted enough like horse racing results to get past an over-worked clerk. It’s a real-world test of the infinite monkey theorem.
Fortunately is the title of a book by Remy Charlip. Basically, it follows a day of the ups, down, narrow escapes and unlikely triumphs of the protagonist. Perhaps you remember it? If so, you have probably noticed the same sine wave making itself known in all parts of your life. It’s supposed to start with “fortunately,” but for example:
Unfortunately, Jacquie cracked the screen on her cell phone.
Fortunately, replacement screens are readily available.
Unfortunately, I only ordered the LCD, when I needed the glass as well.
