Tag: media business

Nostalgia won’t pay the bills

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute is creating a buzz by arguing that we all have a duty to buy the print editions of newspapers. He writes:

Until we create some new business models in support of the journalism profession, we’ve got to support what we have, even as we create and perfect online versions that may one day attract the advertising dollars and other revenues we need to do what we do well.

Needless to say, it’s not going to happen. Nor do I think it should. If newspaper executives have decided to give away their product online in the hopes that advertising will pay the bills, then we should take that at face value. By all means, get the print edition if you think it’s a better experience. But don’t be guilt-tripped into it.

I’m old-fashioned enough to want to read a good newspaper in a fairly comprehensive way and not get sucked into the search-engine approach to news. But when a newspaper Web site is well designed, I’m perfectly happy to read it on the Web rather than in print.

Besides, really good newspaper Web sites, such as the New York Times’, are better than print. Earlier this afternoon I watched Anthony Tommasini as he explained 12-tone music and played examples on his piano. It was pretty interesting stuff, but I still have no interest in reading the story.

Recently, as we all know, the Times dropped its paid online service, TimesSelect, on the theory that it can make more money through Web advertising.

I understand what Clark is saying. But no business ever succeeded by persuading people to pay for something they can get for free. We need to get to the point at which online newspapers are making enough money to support journalism. Embracing a dying model does nothing to move us closer to that day.

Paying for the news

“Recovering Journalist” Mark Potts has a great post on New York Times executives’ decision to get rid of their pay service, TimesSelect.

I’ll confess that my glee over the demise of TimesSelect earlier this week was a bit knee-jerk. For consumers, there’s nothing not to like about free. As a blogger, I like being able to link to all Times content. And since the Times Web site is by far the largest news newspaper site, it may be uniquely suited to the advertiser-only model.

But the Times’ move still doesn’t address the question of how to pay for journalism, especially at news organizations that lack the Times’ cachet. (That is, everybody else.) Even Times executives may not have thought this through completely. Potts writes:

[C]ommitting good journalism is expensive, and so far, there’s no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump — and attendant advertising — can make that up. A blanket statement that “content is now and forever free,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided — and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying a revenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.

Typical news junkies may regularly visit five, 10 or more sites. Given that, I think the subscription model remains impractical. (And thus I still don’t lament the passing of TimesSelect.) But microtransactions of some sort — that is, an account from which some small amount of money, perhaps on the order of less than a penny, would be deducted for every article you read — loom on the horizon as a possible solution of how to pay for the news.

Bill Densmore, the founder of one such system known as Clickshare, has further thoughts here.

Gannett’s same old tune

Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, is in the midst of an important experiment to re-invent daily newspapers around various forms of online citizen journalism. It also has a reputation for being among the most profit-obsessed media companies extant.

So when you read about downsizing and dumbing-down of the Burlington Free Press, you’ve got to wonder: Is Gannett serious about creating a 21st-century newspaper? Or is it just looking for a new ways to save money? (Via Romenesko.)

Teasing the Globe

Joe Keohane, Jeff Keating and Adam Reilly are all quite taken with the Boston Globe‘s new “In the news” front-page teasers, which run the length of the left-hand column. Joe even goes so far as to call the feature “a web-influenced sidebar.”

Well, pardon me, but there’s nothing even remotely new about what the Globe is doing. Certainly it’s no different from the “Newsline” column that appears on the front of USA Today (left). The Boston Herald ran similar teasers following its sparkling 1999 redesign, but gave them up after its New York Post-ification a few years later. (Unfortunately, Ron Reason, the consultant who oversaw the redesign, has removed the sample Herald fronts from his Web site.)

That’s not to say the Globe teasers aren’t a good idea. They are. They’re also intriguing from a strategic point of view. The vast majority of Globes are sold via home delivery, but there’s no need to flog the inside content for customers who are retrieving the paper from their front porches.

The teasers say that Globe executives have decided there’s circulation to be gained by persuading more people to buy a copy on their way to work. But aren’t these the same people who are reading the Globe online, for free, once they get to work?

That’s the 50-cents-per-copy question.

Analyzing the online news audience

The Shorenstein Center, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has issued an intriguing new study on user trends at news sites. You can read the whole thing (pdf) here, but let me offer a few observations and comments.

1. The study, titled “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” prepared by Shorenstein’s Tom Patterson, shows that a trend we’ve already seen with newspapers’ print editions is happening online as well: the national newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal) are doing much better than large and medium-size regional dailies, whose growth is stagnant. In fact, the study finds that the Times now accounts for “well over 10 percent of the online newspaper audience.”

This is serious — but not, I would argue, quite as serious as it might appear at first glance. Nor do I think it represents any major diminution in people’s interest in local news. Consider:

  • In most parts of the country, the national papers (especially the Post) are not as easy to get in hard copy as they are online. The Web sites of the national papers represent huge growth potential that simply isn’t available to regional papers, since getting the Baltimore Sun or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (to name two of the papers included in the study) in print is easier and more convenient than reading it on the Web.
  • Readers outside a regional paper’s coverage area aren’t all that interested in what that paper has to offer. Nearly all of a regional paper’s target audience already has the option of easy home delivery. An exception that proves the rule: the Globe’s Boston.com might be the most popular regional news site in the country (depending on whether you consider the Los Angeles Times to be a regional or a national newspaper). And a lot of that, Globe insiders will tell you, is because of the “Red Sox diaspora.”
  • Most regional papers’ Web sites fall far short of the Times’ and the Post’s, which are models of how to do online journalism. Thus readers have an additional incentive to stick to print.

2. Shorenstein reports that the Web sites of PBS and local public television stations are losing audience. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I will point out that news is not the dominant programming paradigm on public television. Perhaps what this really means is that “Arthur” and “Sesame Street” aren’t as popular as they used to be. Certainly “The NewsHour” site is looking pretty good these days.

3. But we also learn that NPR and local public radio stations, which are far more news-oriented than public television, are losing online audience as well. And though I don’t pretend to know why, I do wonder whether podcasting has something to do with it. If you go to the podcast directory at the iTunes Store, you’ll see that NPR programs do very well. (Actually, so does the aforementioned “NewsHour.”) It could well be that the most Net-savvy of public radio’s listeners are going straight for the podcasts and not bothering to visit the Web sites. Podcasts are powerful; streaming audio (and video) is a loser.

Besides: I’m willing to bet that more than 90 percent of public radio is consumed in people’s cars. Even though public stations like Boston’s WBUR (90.9 FM) are trying to beef up their Web presence, the Web-print synergy that exists in the newspaper world has no analogue when it comes to radio.

4. The Shorenstein study finds that the growth of Digg.com is off the charts. The report describes Digg as an aggregator not much different from Google News or Yahoo! News, but that’s not quite right. Digg is a social-networking site that allows users to submit news stories that the community then votes on. Those that get the most votes rise to the top.

The readers’ choices tend to be tech-oriented, and those that aren’t can often be pretty juvenile. But the Internet, especially in its Web 2.0 incarnation, is all about community, conversation and participation, and Digg.com has found a way to apply that to news. There are lessons to be learned from that.

Update: GateHouse Media’s Howard Owens calls the Shorenstein report “seriously flawed,” and points to this for another perspective.

The Bancrofts and the Benjamins

Barring a miracle, Rupert Murdoch will take over the Wall Street Journal later this week, when his latest offer is presented to the Bancroft family. (Journal coverage here; New York Times coverage here.)

For all the disingenuous talk about the Bancrofts’ holding out because of their deep, deep concern for journalistic integrity, it all comes down, as usual, to the Benjamins. The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens reports:

Dow Jones had pushed for Murdoch to raise his $60-per-share bid by $2 to $3 per share, an amount that had come to be known as a “tip” to help placate the Bancrofts, the family that controls Dow Jones. The majority of them instantly rejected Murdoch’s bid when it became public.

A tip. Well, here’s another tip — the editorial independence agreement that has been worked out over the past few weeks will prove not to be worth the paper it’s written on.

The Journal will probably continue to be an excellent newspaper, although it may cease to be great. This isn’t about ideology — its nutty editorial page may actually move slightly to the left, as Murdoch is far more interested in power than in politics. Rather, this is about a profit-crazed, meddling shark smelling blood in the water and moving in for the kill.

Here’s a roundup of commentaries by Jack Shafer of Slate, who’s been particularly good on this subject. I especially like “Murdoch: The Filth and the Fury,” an overview of how he destroyed the New York Post despite making explicit promises not to.

Murdoch is a good steward only in the sense that he’s not overly concerned with cost-cutting — he’s far more likely to subsidize the Journal so that it will remain a suitable adjunct to his Fox Business Channel, set to debut on Oct. 15.

I don’t mean to be too nostalgic. Obviously the news business is falling apart, and we’re going to witness all kinds of unimaginable events before someone figures out how to put together a new, very different model.

But this is a sad day for journalism. At the very least, if managing editor Marcus Brauchli has any tough stories on China in the can, he’d better run them in the next day or two.

Photo (cc) by Paolo! Some rights reserved.