Why Most Newspapers Will Fail: Deep Inertia

Newspapers as a a whole are not making a transition to the new media landscape:

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers - Brain Stelter via NY Times

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers. And the findings were grim.

On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. The papers seemed not to be diversifying their revenue streams or coming up with innovative products at a fast enough clip.

[…]

“Only 40 percent of papers say targeted advertising is a major part of their sales efforts,” the report states. “Most papers are not putting major effort into selling ‘smart’ or customized digital ads, the category expected to soon dominate local advertising.”

I don’t think that the NY Times — where I read this story — is pushing personalized ads to me. If they were, I wouldn’t be seeing Fashion Week all over the page.

Where’s The Bottom For Newspapers?

Here’s a big story, and the meta-story behind it:

The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph, Derek Thompson via The Atlantic

Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011.

[…]

Don’t just blame the bloggers. For decades, newspapers relied on a simple cross-subsidy to pay for their coverage. You can’t make much money advertising against A1 stories like bombings in Afghanistan and school shootings and deficit reduction. Those stories are the door through which readers walk to find stories that can take the ads: the car section, the style section, the travel section, and the classifieds. But ad dollars started flowing to websites that gave people their car, style, travel, or classifieds directly. So did the readers. And down went print.

The decline is stunning. “Last year’s ad revenues of about $21 billion were less than half of the $46 billion spent just four years ago in 2007, and less than one-third of the $64 billion spent in 2000,” Mark Perry writes. In the next few years — and hopefully, in the next few decades (I like print!) — we’ll see papers and magazines continue to invest in their websites and find advertising and pricing models that support journalism independently. Otherwise, one hopes that rich people continue to be fond of paying for the production of great writing on bundles of ink and paper.

I don’t think there is any business model that will prop up print newspapers as we know them. As media is being exploded into a thousand bits, the 20th century model of newspaper journalism is increasingly obsolete. Something else will come along, some sort of networked journalism.

Consider the way I read about this graphic: I saw a piece in my Tumblr stream by Futureamb, quoting a fragment of a Business Insider piece by Henry Blodget, where Futureamb actually didn’t add even a comment, but was curator zero for me. I then looked at the Blodget piece: he had a few things to add, but wasn’t the originator of the graph. The trail led to Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, who was citing Mark Perry’s graphing of data from the Newspaper Association of America. Derek added real value, and an extra graph:

Wow! The Wall Street Journal is a singular institution since the majority of its subscribers are businesses, not individuals. All the other major US papers are falling like stones.

And now, I am adding my 2¢, which is likely how you are seeing this.

My point is that this trail of interactions is how we are increasingly experiencing the ‘news’, and it jumps from place to place, outside the boundaries of the newspapers officially publishing this bits of the ‘story’. Newspapers are built top-down — that’s how most businesses are oriented — but that’s doesn’t match the way that information transfer works in a networked world.

The social object — the information embedded in these graphs — is handed around, from curator to curator, each adding something, taking away, looking at it from a different angle. It’s additive and subtractive, kind of like Wikipedia, but distributed across a bunch of independent, cooperative posts instead of embodied in a consolidated Wikipedia entry.

We need new social technologies — a step past today’s curation tools — to support this new sprawling, liquid media world. That’s what how we’ll experience news in the near future.

I am betting that newspapers will fail to make a painless transition to a new business structure before hitting the bottom, and fracturing into a millions pieces. After that crash, some of those pieces might begin to create a new networked, post-journalism model of news organization, one that doesn’t have papers in it.

5 Minutes on The Verge: Khoi Vinh via The Verge

Q: Who’s doing the most interesting desktop app design these days?

Vihn: I’m passionate about the Mac and what’s possible on the desktop, and I think independent Mac developers are some of the most creative minds in technology… but right now the most interesting thing happening on the desktop, by far, is Apple’s iOS-ification of OS X. They’re clearly in the process of upending a decades-old paradigm for thinking about desktop software, and whether it’s successful or not is going to be very interesting.

[…]

Q: How should media publishers deal with the fact that readers are increasingly getting news, links, and more from a range of sources filtered through social networks? Is anyone doing it particularly well?

Vinh: I think news organizations have to get really, really serious about creating a social software product that leverages their product in a value-add way. This is basically what a few dozen startups are doing, and somebody is going to figure this out; if I were the owner of a news organization, I would put $10 million towards funding a few of my own startups to get a better shot at owning the winning solution. Because none of the existing ‘old media’ news brands are going to do it. Anyway, within a decade, we’ll have a social news powerhouse brand that can sit comfortably next to the New York Times, Economist, CNN, etc. That seems inevitable to me.

I really think Vinh is one of the smartest people out there in new media.

News is a subset of the conversation « BuzzMachine

Sounds like Jarvis had an ulcer-inducing trip to London, where the BBC pissed him off, big time.

Jeff Jarvis via

I’m seeing that news organizations think it is their role to lead the conversation (they set the agenda), allow the conversation (you may now comment on our story, now that it’s done), and judge the conversation (see Bill Keller’s sniffing at vox polloi).

That’s why I went theatrically batshit on Twitter against the BBC for holding the first day of a meeting this week about *social media* under Chatham House Rule, which decrees: “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

That’s a fancy, British way to say “not for attribution.” Or as I said in another tweet, “Chatham House Rule turns everyone into an anonymous source. Precisely the wrong thing for a journo org to do!” That is especially an issue for a public journalistic institution, which should be setting an example for other journalists and their sources.

But it’s most shocking that the BBC would impose this rule on a meeting that is not only about *social media* — I thought all Brits bragged about having a sense of irony Americans lack; apparently not — but worse, one that carried the haughty ambition to formulate “a universally accepted set of verification guidelines for social media material” and “an accepted ethical framework for using sensitive material from social networks.” Don’t they see that one can can longer set true standards for the rest of the world in closed rooms with invite-only guests who are gagged or anonymous and prevented from interacting with that world? Then the outcome becomes a standard only for that small subset of people, which negates its authority as a standard. At best, it’s another club rule.

He also is peeved at the way that newspaper view their interaction with the public — via comments — as a way to, at best, get some feedback, and at worst, a way to stifle real discussion.

The problem with comments, I’ve argued lately, is that the form and timing of them is essentially insulting to the public: It says we journalists don’t want to hear from you, the public, until after we are done with our work making content for you to consume. Then the public speaks and journalists don’t listen (because they think their stories are done) and the commenters are insulted and so they insult the journalists and the journalists say that’s the proof that the comments and the commenters aren’t worth the attention. A very vicious cycle. The conversation catches cooties.

The reason the BBC cut its comments down to 400 characters is cost. In a discussion on Twitter with the BBC’s Nick Reynolds, the social media executive who oversees moderation of all BBC social media, that became clear. Comments require moderation and that’s a cost. True enough. But I tried to argue with Reynolds in Twitter that the conversation writ large could also save costs. I couldn’t get it through to him. He kept defining the conversation as comments and “UGC.” I kept defining the conversation as collaboration.

Collaboration is not allowing people to comment. Collaboration is not giving them opinion polls. (Carey, by the way, argued that polling is “an attempt to stimulate public opinion in order to prevent an authentic public opinion from forming,” but that’s another topic.) Collaboration is not enabling them to send in the pictures of the snow on their back porches, something I hate when TV news does it as it condescends — it says the public can’t provide real news or quality images; we’re merely humoring them. “UGC” is bullshit.

No, collaboration is about sharing the work of journalism.

This is really about conversational control, though.It’s not about the comments on the newspapers or the distancing involved in terms like ‘user-generated content’. It’s about the demassification of The Public into a million publics, and therefore the decrease of influence of publications that think they shape the opinions of a Public.

The reality is that Jarvis obsesses more about old school media because they keep inviting him to their confabs to and speak on their TV shows. A lot of us are just looking ahead, and not worrying so much about what the BBC thinks about ‘the verification of social media material’.

Extinction Timeline For Newspapers, via
Zoom

Extinction Timeline For Newspapers, via

i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel

Interesting piece about a Lisbon-based online newspaper that is turning the design of papers upside down.

[via www.editorsweblog.org]

What i is doing differently

I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more. Traditionally, journalists have to fill a politics section even if there is nothing relevant going on in politics. We wanted to come up with something different.” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address, with five key words.

  1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion.
  2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page.
  3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. “We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams,” Figueiredo said.
  4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people’s private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited. More encompasses the fifth need that the paper wanted to address: sports, about 80% of which is focused on football - “this is very important in Portugal,” Figueiredo said.

I love it. The sections of the paper are Think, Know, Understand, and Feel.

Jack Shafer on The Future of Newspapers

Shafer argues that newspapers can’t survive by retreat: just cutting costs and trimming the stock quotes won’t win when bloggers are doing so much. Newspapers have to decide to excel in a way that bloggers can’t, or else:

[Not Just Another Column About Blogging - What newspaper history says about newspaper future By Jack Shafer]

[…]

The newspaper guild (again, reporters, editors, publishers) can’t compete by adding a few blogs here, blogging up coverage over there, and setting up “comment” sections. If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.

But instead of improving their product by deploying technology bloggers can’t afford (yet), newspapers are devolving. Many are cutting staff. Daily newspapers are growing smaller and uglier, with no paper looking anywhere near as lovely as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World from the late 1800s. Comic strips have gotten so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read them. I’m fine with newspapers cutting back on stock tables, but they aren’t adding something new to the package. Most newspapers claim they’ve shrunk their dimensions to combat steep increases in newsprint prices, but that’s a lie.

What else do I want? I want a daily newspaper that looks as good as Vogue but smells like a cinnamon bun instead of perfume. I want smarter newspaper headlines. I want a Mike Royko in every daily newspaper. I want editorials signed by people, so I know who to yell at. I want newspapers to restore editorial cartoonists to their place of honor instead of eliminating them. To broaden the answer, I want the newsmagazines to give me a better reason to read them than remixes of the last four days’ news cycle, and I want them to look like Harry N. Abrams’ coffee-table books.

In fact, while newspapers are failing, magazines are still doing well, so his general thrust — turning upmarket on production — might be smart. A weekly, regional news magazine? That might be the future for The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other smaller players.