Tag: media business

Radio’s challenge to print

You may have heard that two Boston Herald sportswriters, Rob Bradford and Michael Felger, are leaving the paper to join WEEI.com as full-time sports bloggers. The move hasn’t gotten much attention, but I think it may prove to be pretty significant in terms of how the media continue to change.

The buzzword for what this is about is “disaggregation.” What it means is that the one-stop package that is the daily newspaper — hard news and automobile ads, obituaries and sports, political analysis and comics — is coming apart, with niche media better able to give people what they’re looking for.

You can already see this with television sports journalism. The sports segments on TV newscasts have been shortened because the true fans are watching ESPN. Now it’s coming down to the local level, with WEEI (AM 850), a phenomenally successful all-sports radio station, taking the first step toward competing with the sports pages of the Herald and the Boston Globe.

This is going to be a challenge for Bradford and Felger in that there is virtually no adult supervision at WEEI. They’re going to have to provide their own journalistic standards, and no doubt there will be occasions when they’ll have to stand up to management and say “no.” In a larger sense, though, I’m fascinated at the notion that a radio station is going to try to fill at least part of the role traditionally held by newspapers.

In that respect, the WEEI move is more significant than Sacha Pfeiffer‘s decision to switch from the Globe to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) earlier this year. Pfeiffer’s new job, after all, is to be a radio reporter, not a print reporter who writes for the station’s Web site. It has more to do with a first-rate reporter moving to a medium whose non-profit business model, built on a foundation of listener contributions and corporate underwriting, is more solid than the newspaper industry’s.

Yet here, too, there are developments that bear watching. Every day I receive an e-mail from WBUR with the latest world, national and local news, complete with photos, AP wire copy and sound clips. It is a reasonably comprehensive wrap-up of the day’s news, even if it’s not quite as detailed as what I find in the Globe.

Currently the Globe offers a six- or seven-minute podcast that is little more than a teaser for what’s in the paper. But if WBUR is going to publish what is, in effect, an online newspaper, why shouldn’t the Globe compete with a half-hour podcast consisting of a reasonably complete news report, with paid advertising?

If digital convergence gives radio stations the power to become newspapers, then newspapers ought to consider what it would take to become radio stations. In the current environment, no one can afford not to experiment.

More: Dave Scott has some thoughts on what Felger’s move means for the local ESPN Radio outlet at AM 890, where Felger had hosted a show, as well as further background on the Bradford-Herald situation.

Another paper goes Web-mostly

It’s not yet a trend, but the managers of another daily newspaper have decided to go mostly online, and to scale back their print edition to just twice a week.

This time it’s the Daily Telegram of Superior, Wis., joining another Wisconsin paper, the Capital Times of Madison, which made the switch earlier this year.

Like the Capital Times, the Telegram is an afternoon paper owned by a chain co-owned with a larger, more successful morning paper in the same market. The real test will be when someone in a one-newspaper town tries this. Still, it definitely bears watching. (Via Romenesko.)

Paying for the news voluntarily

How much are you willing to pay for high-quality coverage of your community? Our local weekly costs $46 a year for a mail subscription. The local daily costs $4 a week, with tip. So we’re paying more than $250 a year.

But what if we were talking about a free community Web site? If the site had a chance to hire a journalist, would you be willing to contribute, say, $50 or $100 a year, even if you could still access it for free if you chose? It works for public radio. Why not for online local news?

That’s the idea behind Representative Journalism, a project started by Leonard Witt (above) of Kennesaw State University, in Georgia. Witt plans to give it a try at Locally Grown, an ambitious-looking site that serves the town of Northfield, Minn.

Witt described the project this past Saturday at a “Sharing the News” symposium at UMass Lowell, sponsored by the New England News Forum. You can watch a video of Witt’s presentation here.

Witt said he got his inspiration from a GPS his wife gave him for his car. He entered “barbecue,” and was presented with a list of options — and he realized he would never again consult the newspaper for restaurant listings. The Internet, he explained, has “decoupled” advertising and editorial content.

“The economic structure behind the old model of making the news is falling apart,” he said. “If we want high-quality news in the future, somebody’s got to pay for it.”

The discussion got bogged down when Witt offered two hypotheticals that he presented as being similar, but were actually very different. In one case, a community site might hire a journalist to cover important regional stories, as is the idea in Northfield. In another, a Web project of some kind might be looking for a reporter to cover, say, endangered species in Florida.

The first idea seemed to go down a lot better than the second, as it was pointed out that folks contributing money to the coverage of a particular issue, as opposed to a geographic region, would be tempted to demand that the issue be covered in a certain way. Witt responded that there would have to be some educational efforts undertaken ahead of time. And he admitted that he hasn’t worked out all the bugs, explaining that the Northfield experiment will be a chance to test out the idea.

“The whole reason I’m doing this is that I believe journalists should be paid a fair wage,” he said.

Will it work? I think it’s a promising model. One thing I wonder about, though, is that community sites are not necessarily driven by journalism. At a recent “Future of Journalism” conference at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Institute for Interactive Journalism, said the best community sites tend to be run by local activists who see their role as making connections and expanding the civic conversation.

Grafting a hungry young reporter onto that model could be a recipe for trouble. But it’s certainly worth trying.

More: Here’s a comprehensive rundown on the Lowell conference by Aldon Hynes.

Have you seen the Globe today?

To borrow from an old advertising campaign.

Our phenomenal delivery guy of some 20 years’ standing, Brent, is gone. The paper arrived late yesterday, and as of 9 a.m. today, it’s still not here. So, for the second morning in a row, I’ve read the paper strictly online, propping open my MacBook while eating breakfast.

Warning: I could get used to this.

Catching up on some recent posts

Following up a few recent Media Nation posts:

Hyperlocal is about conversation, not traditional news. Writing for the Online Journalism Review, Tom Grubisich takes a deeper look at the Washington Post’s LoudounExtra.com site, recently pronounced a failure by the Wall Street Journal. Grubisich’s verdict is that the site falls short in large measure because it doesn’t provide much in the way of interactivity and social networking.

Parsing the financials at GateHouse Media. The financial blog 247WallSt.com last week claimed that GateHouse Media — a national chain that owns some 100 community newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts — could go broke later this year because of its plummeting stock price and $1.2 billion debt. But, in fact, there is some positive news to report as well.

According to GateHouse, in the first quarter of 2008 revenues were $168.9 million, an increase of 78.4 percent over the previous year. And its EBIDTA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was $30.1 million, up 93.9 percent over the previous year.

A not-so-mysterious increase in listeners. The Boston Globe today profiles “TOUCH 106.1 FM,” a pirate radio station serving the black community that’s been threatened by the FCC. Globe reporter Brian Ballou does a thorough job, but I had to chuckle at his writing that the station’s Internet listenership has recently jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 without offering any possible explanation.

Here is the explanation.

Wolves at the GateHouse

I read a GateHouse paper. You probably do, too. Maybe even two: the chain owns good-size dailies such as The Patriot Ledger (Quincy), The Enterprise (Brockton), The Daily News Tribune (Waltham) and The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham), in addition to 100 or so weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts.

Anyway, sorry to bury the lede. GateHouse Media may be in deep trouble. According to the blog 247WallSt.com, the chain — based in suburban Rochester, N.Y. — is doing so badly that you might be able to get some furniture and computers cheap in a few months. After turning itself into a publicly traded company several years ago, the stock price has tanked, falling 80 percent over the past year.

247’s Douglas McIntyre writes: “Watch for GHS to be broken up before the end of the year or to enter Chapter 11.” (GHS is GateHouse’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.) Wow.

What’s more, the Motley Fool recently listed GateHouse as one of “5 Deathbed Stocks.”

GateHouse does some interesting things, but it has clearly been hampered by a lack of resources. Its Wicked Local sites were supposed to be a model of hyperlocal and citizen journalism, but they have yet to achieve critical mass. The company also pushes its reporters to shoot and edit low-end video, which is pretty smart. Earlier this year I wrote a post on Cathryn O’Hare, editor of the Danvers Herald, after I followed her through the process.

Mostly, though, the GateHouse papers in Massachusetts are good, solid community papers that have suffered under revolving-door ownership for many years.

During the 1980s, they were owned by a half-dozen or so regional groups, some based in Massachusetts, some out of state. Then, in the 1990s, most of them were combined by Fidelity into a chain that was dubbed Community Newspaper Co. Fidelity sold CNC to Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell for a reported $150 million in 2001.

Purcell did one thing wrong and one thing right. On the one hand, he took the Herald downscale, which made his purported flagship a weird fit with the affluent, well-educated readership he had just acquired.

On the other hand, Purcell unloaded CNC for $225 million just five years later, making him one of the few people to turn a profit on a newspaper deal in the 21st century. The money, many insiders believe, has allowed him to keep the Herald afloat. The CNC deal was part of a larger, $400 million purchase by Liberty Group Publishing, which renamed itself GateHouse, moved to New York State and went public.

GateHouse may or may not survive, but its papers should probably be all right in the long run. Community newspapers are in a better market position than major metros these days. Providers of quality local news don’t face a lot of competition either from other papers or, with a few exceptions, from the Internet.

The problem is that chains amass huge amounts of debt when they buy papers ($1.2 billion at GateHouse, according to McIntyre), and need to turn an unrealistically high profit in order to pay down that debt and satisfy their investors.

If the economy were rocking along, maybe GateHouse could pull out of this. But it’s not. Unfortunately, McIntyre’s post is an indication that things are going to get worse both for those of us who read GateHouse papers and the people who work for them.

Big media and hyperlocal journalism

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Washington Post’s big bet on hyperlocal, online journalism — LoudounExtra.com — has been a flop.

According to Journal reporter Russell Adams, there have been a number of problems, from a failure to commit sufficient resources to an odd strategic decision not to link to the site from WashingtonPost.com. But I wonder if there’s something larger going on.

To an extent, the Post’s woes strike me as similar to those of Microsoft. For years, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and company acted as though they knew someone was going to come along and steal their lunch money someday. And so they moved aggressively, most memorably destroying Netscape and earning themselves a massive antitrust suit in the process.

But, in the end, Microsoft couldn’t overcome the tendency of huge, established companies not to be able to anticipate what’s next. And so Google slipped onto the scene, making a ton of money with online advertising and slowly but surely developing free, Web-based applications that may someday make a program like Microsoft Office (or at least the idea of paying for it) obsolete.

Likewise, when it comes to hyperlocal online journalism, I think it’s more likely that community-based bloggers will start doing real journalism, and embrace professional standards, than it is that big papers like the Post will be able to dominate that turf.

At least the Post has a national and international audience. What about big regional metros such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Denver Post and the like? If there’s no longer a market for such papers doing international and national coverage, don’t they have to embrace the hyperlocal model?

Not necessarily. It could be that what they really need to do is find the sweet spot — completely dominate regional coverage of state and local politics, business, sports, health and the arts, while leaving the national and international coverage to the Post and the New York Times, and the Little League banquets to community papers and bloggers.

In Massachusetts, Web sites tied to local weeklies (such as GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local project) and dailies (such as the Cape Cod Times and the Eagle-Tribune papers) strike me as being more connected at the local level than the Globe’s site, Boston.com. Local blogs are proliferating; here are a few, covering Brighton, Arlington and Newton.

It will be a tough trick for big papers to pull off. The Post’s failures thus far in Loudoun County are specific enough that it’s hard to generalize from them. But I find it difficult to imagine that the Globe will ever be the first place you’ll want to go to find out what the lunch menu is in your child’s elementary school.

The Monitor’s hybrid strategy

Don Aucoin reports in today’s Boston Globe that the venerable Christian Science Monitor might be heading down the road blazed by the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. — a hybrid Web/print model, with the print newspaper coming out just once a week.

According to Aucoin, at the moment the Monitor is considering only a modest tweak — a weekly edition to supplement the daily. But, reportedly, there is a possibility that the weekly might eventually replace the daily. If that happens, the print edition could conceivably become an example of “reverse publishing,” a digest of the best content that’s already been published online.

Recently the Capital Times abandoned its paid daily edition in favor of two weekly free tabloids, a news-oriented product that comes out on Wednesdays and an arts-and-entertainment paper on Thursdays. At the same time, the online edition is being pumped up. This is a promising model likely to be emulated. A mostly online paper saves considerable printing and distribution costs without abandoning the print advertising market entirely.

I’ve tended to think of the Monitor as mainly a Web publication for some time now. I mean, where would you grab a print copy? At a Christian Science Reading Room? As long as the church remains committed to high-quality journalism, a shift to a mostly online paper might ensure the paper’s survival.

The Monitor also enjoys an ideal ownership model. These days, papers as diverse as the St. Petersburg Times, the New Hampshire Union Leader and the U.K.’s Guardian are often held up as examples of possible salvation for the news business, as they are all owned by non-profit organizations. (Disclosure: I write a weekly online column for the Guardian.)

So, too, with the Monitor. Unfortunately, as Aucoin notes, the church blew an inordinate amount of money on failed ventures in television and radio about 15 years ago, and has never really recovered. Church ownership may be benign, but in this case it doesn’t come with very deep pockets.

More than anything, the Monitor needs to carve out a new mission. In its heyday many decades ago, the Monitor thrived because it was the quality alternative — usually the only quality alternative — to the local rag. At a time when you can access any news source you want through the Internet, the Monitor must make a case for why you would want to read it instead of, or in addition to, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, et al.

In recent years, the folks running the Monitor have been pretty forward-looking in terms of moving past print. It’s encouraging that they’re still pushing in that direction.

Explaining the Journal Register’s fall

Media Nation reader MTS passes along this interesting Newsosaur analysis of what went wrong at the Journal Register Co., the bottom-feeding newspaper company now drowning in a sea of debt. (JRC’s best-known property at the moment is probably the New Haven Register.)

What’s fascinating about this is the gulf that separates Newsosaur’s Alan Mutter from his commenters. Mutter praises JRC’s 19.3 percent profit margin, and concludes that the company came to woe not because of the way it has run its newspapers but because of foolish investments.

Many of the commenters, though, say those profit margins were the result of such drastic cutbacks in newsroom budgets that the papers were decimated, leading to their “loosing circulation in heaps” (I hope that wasn’t written by a copy editor).

Of course, everyone is losing circulation in heaps these days. It would be telling to see how JRC’s numbers stack up with those of the industry as a whole.