Tag: media business

The demise of BostonNOW

I’ll be on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) later today talking about the demise of BostonNOW, the free commuter rag that’s been competing with Metro Boston for the past year.

To be the second paper in the rather narrow market for people who want something free to look at during a 15-minute T ride was always going to be tough. Publisher Russel Pergament is blaming his Icelandic financiers, but if BostonNOW were making money, then no one would be pulling the plug.

When BostonNOW started out, it was supposed to be a state-of-the-art meld of print and Web, with readers setting up blogs that would be excerpted in the paper. That did happen, but it never really garnered much attention after the initial flurry of interest. Webcast news meetings stopped months ago, according to this.

Whoops — looks like the BostonNOW Web site just went down. Even before I could post.

Update: Whoops again. It’s back up. No telling for how long, though.

Going deep and narrow online

The Outraged Liberal, a former journalist and a good one, offers some useful observations on how newspapers can best employ their Web sites. He specifically singles out the Globe, which yesterday published a medium-length, interpretation-heavy story on Gov. Deval Patrick’s speech about his $3.8 billion bridge-repair plan and the cool reception it received from state Treasurer Tim Cahill.

You can like the Globe’s story or not. Mr. O.L.’s point is that the Globe missed an opportunity by not using its Web site, Boston.com, to run the full details of Patrick’s plan (Blue Mass Group did that), or a video of Patrick’s speech (ditto), or the spin from the governor’s office (taxpayer-supported and thus free for the taking).

We’ve entered into what will probably be a lengthy period in which a typical newspaper’s print product will continue to produce most of the profits, even as it shrinks, while the Web site grows and becomes increasingly important to the bottom line. Most newspaper Web viewers read the print product, too. So it’s crucial that the two sides work together.

Among the larger challenges facing news Web sites is that people spend far less time with them than with the print edition. A recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the average visitor to a newspaper Web site spends less than 50 minutes per month, a number that I think is based on flawed assumptions. (I might spend a minute or two per month at the San Francisco Chronicle’s site, for instance, thus pulling its numbers down.)

But there’s no question that news-site editors need to find ways to bring people back over and over, and to spend some time once they’re there. Now, I like Red Sox pet photos as much as the next person (actually, that’s not true), but that’s not going to induce me to keep coming back. I think there are various ways to do it.

You do it through multimedia presentations of some of your best journalism, stuff that holds up well beyond the week it was published, as the Globe does with its special reports. You do it through databases that invite repeat visits, such as the Globe’s gubernatorial political-contributions map from 2006 or, as Mr. O.L. notes, the Herald’s database of state-employee salaries. You do it by inviting a conversation built around your journalism. Boston.com has discussion boards and the Herald lets readers post comments to stories, but the more interesting news conservations are taking place elsewhere, at sites such as Universal Hub and Blue Mass Group.

And you do it be offering deep information on narrow subjects. The idea behind Mr. O.L.’s post is that Boston.com should have been the first place people thought to go to find out more about the governor’s bridge proposal. In this case, if they thought of it, they wouldn’t have found much.

Repairing the Web’s broken meter

There is no bigger issue facing the news business today than how to make the Web pay. And there is no bigger obstacle to solving that problem than figuring out how many people are visiting, how long they’re sticking around and the like.

As I found out last year when I was reporting a story on young news consumers for CommonWealth Magazine, the internal numbers compiled by Web sites like Boston.com and BostonHerald.com can be as much as three times higher than the numbers reported by Nielsen/NetRatings, the source of the leading apples-to-apples statistics used by advertisers.

The dilemma: Nielsen says it’s more accurate to ask people which sites they’ve visited than to look at a given site’s statistics, because an enormous percentage of those statistics are based on automated hits from search engines. News-business folks respond that Nielsen greatly undercounts the number of people who log on from work and from overseas.

Now, according to this article by David Cohn in the Columbia Journalism Review, help may be on the way. The Media Rating Council, a nonprofit group that helped standardize television and radio ratings nearly 50 years ago, has turned its attention to the Internet in an attempt to figure out all the metrics that should be of value to advertisers: how many people, how many different people, how many pages they’re calling up and how much time they’re spending with a given site.

These problems are far more difficult to solve than you might imagine. As Cohn points out, increasing numbers of privacy-minded people are setting their browsers to eliminate cookies every time they quit. The result: they’ll be counted as “unique users,” rather than return users, whenever they visit a particular Web site.

And if someone leaves a Web page on her screen while she goes on a 10-mile bike ride, how is that supposed to be measured?

The news business thrived on the lack of knowledge over whether any given subscriber would pore through the paper that day or toss it in the recycling bin unopened. Online, advertisers demand to know a lot more than that. So far, it’s proved impossible to answer their questions. Maybe that will change soon.

More on WBZ

How big a story is the downsizing at WBZ-TV (Channels 4 and 38)? Bigger than the Globe plays it — a small story inside City & Region. [Correction: I’ve been told that it made the front of City & Region in some editions.] But not as big as the Herald seems to think, with a huge front-page package.

With three well-known names — sports anchor Bob Lobel, entertainment reporter Joyce Kulhawik and on-air news guy Scott Wahle — departing the station, the local-newscast glory days of the 1970s and ’80s are starting to look more and more like the distant past.

Oddly, though, it may be the most retro of the three, Lobel, who still has a future in local television. As Herald columnist Steve Buckley points out, the newscasts have shrunk their sports segments in recent years because the obsessives have left for NESN, ESPN and the like.

If Lobel wants to keep working and doesn’t mind taking a substantial pay cut, he could presumably slide into a prime slot on cable tomorrow. Except when the Red Sox are playing, NESN still resembles a local-access outfit more than it does a professional operation. I like Bob Ryan’s show, but Lobel would really help.

By the way — think Dan Rea has had any second thoughts about moving from television to radio? No, I don’t think so, either.

Finally, the Outraged Liberal has some worthwhile observations on the WBZ cuts and related media matters.

The bell tolls for WBZ

If any broadcast news operation could avoid cuts, you’d like to think it would be WBZ. With two television stations (Channels 4 and 38), a powerhouse news-and-talk (AM 1030) radio station and an unusually good, video-laden Web site, the CBS-owned operation should have been in a strong position.

Unfortunately, 30 people are being let go, according to this Jessica Heslam piece in the Boston Herald. According to a story by Bill Carter in the New York Times, CBS is cutting back nationally, and Boston is being hit harder than just about anywhere.

More troubles for newspapers

The ongoing good news/bad news paradigm in which the newspaper business finds itself continues. According to the trade publication Editor & Publisher, advertising revenue dropped by the largest proportion in 50 years from 2006 to 2007 — and online revenue gains, though still impressive, are beginning to slow.

So where’s the good news? Readership isn’t really declining when you add print and online together. I must admit, though, that the utter lack of ideas on how to pay for the journalism that the public continues to seek is starting to put me in a pessimistic frame of mind.

And it’s not that newspapers as we know them — either in print or online — have to thrive in order for journalism to survive. But though I see plenty of projects that do some of the things that newspapers do, none comes close to being a replacement.

I know that better days are ahead, but right now it’s discouraging. I just hope the latest news is more recession-driven than it is a sign that we’re heading over the cliff.