Tag: media business

What Craig hath wrought

I’ve been catching up on some new-media blogs this afternoon, and have run across a couple of favorable references to this post by Ryan Sholin, titled “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head.”

I agree with a lot of it, despite a tone that stands out for snottiness even in the generally snotty world of blogging. But I want to take serious issue with this:

It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.

Uh, actually, it is Craig’s fault. Not in the sense that Craig Newmark did anything anything wrong or evil when he created Craigslist. Rather, I’m talking about a simple reality — he and newspapers are in two different businesses, and his business has caused serious damage to the news business.

A large daily newspaper is an enormously expensive undertaking, and, traditionally, about a third of its revenues came from classified ads. Many newspapers actually made a pretty decent transition to the online world. As I recall, the Globe had a searchable help-wanted database on its Web site 10 or 12 years ago, and the Herald wasn’t that far behind.

But they still needed to charge money — lots of it — in order to pay for their journalism. When Monster.com and Craigslist came along, offering free and nearly free classifieds, there was no way that newspapers could compete. I recall reading a couple of years ago that help-wanted revenue at the San Jose Mercury News dropped from something like $115 million to $15 million in just a few years. (Note: Since I first posted this item, I found the article describing this.) Not surprisingly, the Mercury has been cut to the bone, with rumors of more cuts in the offing.

Could online newspaper classifieds be improved? Sure. But you have to wonder what the incentive is. The Globe is now partnering with Monster.com, which makes a lot of sense. No way, though, can this be as lucrative as the days when the Globe had a near-monopoly on the local classified market, and the Sunday paper was as popular for all those job listings as it was for the news it contained.

The serious and the frivolous

Should newspapers report what’s important or what interests people? Good ones do both, attempting to strike a balance between the serious and the frivolous.

Last night, at a panel discussion at the Boston Public Library sponsored by the fledgling New England News Forum, I caught an interesting exchange between John Wilpers, the editor of the free commuter tabloid BostonNOW, and Ellen Hume, director of the Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston.

Among BostonNOW’s innovations is a daily webcast of its editorial meeting, and the ability of viewers to send text messages about what they’re watching. On one occasion, Wilpers said, he and his staff were discussing a government story, and a viewer wrote in, “I’m bored already, and you haven’t even written the story.” Wilpers said he decided on the spot to kill the story, and then proceeded to offer a few disparaging words about the notion of government stories in general.

When Hume next got a chance to speak, she responded, “Part of what you said, John, gave me a little bit of a creepy feeling. You’ve got to cover government. I don’t want to kill the government stories.”

Wilpers responded, “I would never kill a story just because a blogger or a viewer of the webcast didn’t like it. I’m not going to turn my newsroom over to whoever happens to be
watching.”

Well, that’s a relief — even if Wilpers did seem to contradict what he’d said just a few moments earlier. Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to make government stories interesting. But the First Amendment wasn’t written into the Constitution to protect the right of newspaper publishers to cover Paris Hilton endlessly. That’s just a side effect.

Not-so-local news

Now this is a truly wretched idea.

The Associated Press reports that the Web site Pasadena Now has decided to outsource coverage of the local city council to reporters in India. In a follow-up, the Los Angeles Times says that one of these distant journalists, based in Mumbai, will make $12,000 a year, while the other, in Bangalore, will make $7,200. They’ll watch webcasts of the council meetings, consult relevant documents online and send their stories by e-mail. Who cares if they wouldn’t know Pasadena from Rawalpindi?

Pasadena Now editor and publisher James Macpherson tells the Times: “A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages.”

Reacting to Macpherson’s quote, Kevin Roderick of LA Observed digs up a terrific rejoinder from an anonymous Pasadena blogger:

That’s true, to a certain degree. The type of journalistic coverage McPherson [sic] is talking about really could be done by someone in another country, largely because their “coverage” often consists of little more than glorified press releases and parroting of the local media.

This is really quite a bit worse than the Boston Globe’s decision to outsource some circulation and advertising functions to India. Indeed, they’re even scratching their heads at the Hindustan Times, observing that “it remains to be seen how reporters would file their dispatches on local news — with all its flavour — from such a distant geographical location.”

No telltale byline, but here’s a possible example.

Dan Gillmor: “For the money he’s paying, he [Macpherson] could hire local bloggers. They’d do it better, with more perspectives — and have the advantage of, uh, being there.”

No right-wing rag

One of the great myths of journalism is that the Wall Street Journal is a conservative paper. To be sure, its editorial page is the most relentlessly right-wing and conspiracy-obsessed in the country. Its editors’ indifference to the truth was memorably cited in the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an associate of Hillary Clinton’s who’d become caught up in the non-existent “Clinton scandals.”

But the Journal’s news pages are run completely independently from the opinion operation, and are widely regarded as the pinnacle of careful reporting and graceful writing. Barney Kilgore, who virtually created the modern Journal, is even credited with inventing the “news feature,” a form that we take for granted today.

As for politics, a 2005 UCLA study found the Journal’s news operation to be more liberal than that of any major U.S. media outlet, including the New York Times. Now, I don’t know about that. But, clearly, when you hear someone say that it doesn’t matter if Rupert Murdoch wins control of the Journal because it’s already a right-wing rag, you can be sure that person doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

But why would Murdoch interfere with the Journal if he’s successful in his bid to purchase the paper and its parent company, Dow Jones, for $5 billion? Doesn’t he know that the Journal represents the gold standard in American journalism, and that he’d be crazy to mess with it?

Uh, get real. No, he might not be drag its news coverage to the right, or turn it into a screaming tabloid like his New York Post. But the reason he’s willing to pay so much for it is that he thinks he’s smarter than its current owners, the Bancroft family. And, in fact, he probably is smarter than the Bancrofts, if by “smarter” you mean better at maximizing its economic potential. Why should he spend $5 billion just to leave it alone, especially if he is firmly convinced that he can make it better?

In an interview with the Times today, Murdoch makes it clear that he can’t wait to start interfering with the Journal. He thinks the stories are too long. He thinks the news section should feature more political coverage. He would consider starting a Journal-branded weekend glossy magazine. He insists that he’s not planning deep cuts, but adds, “I’m not saying it’s going to be a holiday camp for everybody.” Oh, no. You can be sure of that.

If Murdoch is successful, it would be a disaster. And, at this point, it looks like he stands a good chance of pulling this off.

The Fox Street Journal

So Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the Wall Street Journal. This might prove to be as futile as Jack Welch’s bid to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co.: the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, is reportedly opposed. But this certainly raises some questions, doesn’t it? Here are a few:

  • If Murdoch succeeds, he’s really not stupid enough to wreck one of the great brands in journalism, is he?
  • But can he help himself?
  • Is the Journal’s nutty editorial page too right-wing even for Murdoch? By contrast, the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard is a model of moderate sobriety.
  • Could Neil Cavuto have tugged his forelock any more obsequiously in his Fox News interview with Murdoch?
  • Does Murdoch know he could also wind up owning the Cape Cod Times, the New Bedford Standard-Times and other community papers? Will he drop by for a visit? Will he stop the bleeding?

And here’s some completely unfounded speculation. Dow Jones stock has underperformed for years, and at least some factions of the Bancroft family have reportedly pushed for a sale from time to time.

It’s possible that the moment for that sale has arrived, and that previous talks involving the Times Co. and the Washington Post Co. will be revived. Murdoch may have offered such a huge premium in order to get something done quickly and pre-empt other buyers. But given the Bancrofts’ initial reaction, he may already have failed.

Update: From the New York Observer: “‘It’s out of the frying pan and into a thermonuclear blast,’ said one Journal staffer. ‘This was the worst-case scenario — other than being sold to Vladimir Putin.'”

Counting readers

I’ve been seriously under the weather the past couple of days, and I’m wary about trying to post when I’m feeling as woolly-headed as I am right now. But I do want to call your attention to Robert Gavin’s story in today’s Globe about efforts by people in the newspaper business to convince advertisers that print and online readers need to be considered together.

Yes, print readership is dropping like a rock, but Web readership continues to rise. A reader’s a reader, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the way the advertising business has looked at it. Even aside from the fact that there still aren’t nearly as many online readers as print readers, ad executives have continued to insist that a Web reader isn’t as valuable as a print reader. That’s got to change.

My Northeastern colleague Steve Burgard, director our School of Journalism, tells Gavin:

The challenge is to get advertisers to buy into this new model of counting readers. This is a transition period. The question is, “Will revenues recover?”

Meanwhile, Sean McCarthy, late of the Herald, presents some figures from Scarborough Research showing, again, that you just can’t measure circulation without considering the online component.

As you’ll see, what’s especially valuable about the Scarborough numbers is that they purport to take into account people who use both the print and the Web editions, thus eliminating some overlap. On a weekly basis, Scarborough found that the Globe’s print edition reaches 42 percent of the local market, and 47 percent when the Web is factored in. Comparable numbers for the Herald are 25 percent and 26 percent.

One big problem, as I’ve noted before, is that Web readership is infinitely measurable — too measurable for the good of the news business, perhaps. If you have a busy week at work and pitch your stack of unopened Globes at the end of the week, no advertiser will be the wiser. By contrast, an online advertiser will know exactly how many readers saw her ad, how many clicked on it and how many used it to buy something.

There’s no going back, but right now the formula completely favors the advertiser. There’s got to be some way of restoring the balance.

One way to get free content

BostonNOW, the new freebie commuter tab, has attracted a lot of attention for its goal of loading up on local blog content. Participating bloggers wouldn’t be paid right away, but might share in BostonNOW’s revenues somewhere down the line.

Well, guess what? Boing Boing caught BostonNOW running an item from the Bostonist without permission. BostonNOW provided credit and a link, but obviously that’s not good enough. It was especially stupid given that the Bostonist, unlike most Boston-area blogs, is a commercial, profit-seeking enterprise. BostonNOW editor John Wilpers has apologized and said it won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we await BostonNOW’s first authorized blog item.

You can read Wilpers’ apology here. (Via Universal Hub.)

More: We talked about BostonNOW’s prospects Friday on “Greater Boston.” The video should pop up here at some point. I also shared my thoughts on BostonNOW recently with Paul McMorrow of the Weekly Dig.

Paying for the news

San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media, have been going back and forth over a column Lazarus recently wrote on whether newspapers should start charging for their online editions. In brief, Lazarus: yes; Gillmor: no.

I’m not going to take on every argument each is making. Rather, I want to address the notion that newspapers are hurting because they’re giving their product away on the Web. Certainly Lazarus believes that, and he goes so far as to suggest that newspapers be given an antitrust exemption so they can get together and demand payment, both from readers and from aggregators such as Yahoo News and Google News.

Lazarus isn’t entirely wrong, but the real problem is that Web advertising simply isn’t as valuable as print advertising. Much of this is because lucrative classified ads have migrated to the likes of Craigslist and Monster. The Wall Street Journal has succeeded in charging for its Web edition, and the New York Times has been relatively successful with its much-maligned TimesSelect service.

But I don’t think most newspapers are ever going to be able to charge for their online editions — and I don’t believe it’s fair that they try, either. Here’s why:

  • Readers have purchased their own personal printing presses — their computers — at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000.
  • They’ve also bought their own distribution systems — Internet access — and are paying $30 to $50 a month.
  • The interconnectedness of the Web has greatly changed reading habits. People who regularly whip around 10 or 15 newspaper sites are not going to pay full-blown subscription fees to all of those papers.

So is there a way to get some money out of readers? I think so, and it goes back to the earliest days of the Web. About a dozen years ago, people were talking about digital cash — electronic money that you could spend online without your credit-card company being able to trace it back to you, just like the cash in your pocket. (It’s all in the math.) Here is a 1994 story from Wired that I remember reading when it first came out.

That type of digital cash never caught on. But the idea is that you might read 20 articles at a variety of Web sites during a given morning and pay a tenth of a cent apiece — or a penny apiece, or a nickel, or a dime. These microtransactions would be handled anonymously and automatically. Your privacy would not be compromised, and you wouldn’t have to slow down to enter usernames and passwords.

As newspaper executives try to figure out how to move into an all- or mostly online future, it may be time to take another look at microtransactions and digital cash.

The Boston Daily Blogger

Media Nation trivia: In the early 1980s John Wilpers and I were competitors. Back then he edited three weekly newspapers, including the Winchester Star, now part of the giant Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media chain. I edited the Winchester edition of Woburn’s Daily Times Chronicle, still owned by the Haggerty family, among the nicest people in the news business. So there you go.

Anyway, these days the much-traveled Wilpers is the editor of a nascent free daily to be called BostonNOW, which will compete directly with Metro Boston and indirectly with the Globe and the Herald. (The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, also owns 49 percent of Metro.) Wilpers is working for Russel Pergament, a hyperactive visionary who founded the suburban Tab weeklies (long since subsumed into the chain that became GateHouse), was the first publisher of Metro Boston — owned by a European media conglomerate — and then started amNewYork, a freebie that (yes) competes with Metro New York.

It looks as though Wilpers and Pergament are looking to fill BostonNOW with gobs of blogger-provided free or nearly free content. Here’s what Wilpers says on the BostonNOW blog:

This is your opportunity, as a local blogger, photographer, artist, or pundit, to get in on the ground floor and contribute. You will get to share your perspective on living, surviving, and thriving in this amazing city. Participation in the BostonNOW experience will give you massive exposure to a huge reading audience — your words in a daily newspaper going to tens of thousands of commuters and residents; your words on a website generating thousands of page views; your words syndicated worldwide with a share of any profits going to you.

The best part? You’re already doing it on your blogs and websites. We want to give you the opportunity to share your insight with the entire city.

It’s an interesting idea, and a way to distinguish BostonNOW from the generic, wire-heavy Metro. I’m skeptical of corporate-driven citizen journalism, of course, as schemes like this strike me as little more than an opportunity to exploit volunteer labor for profit. Handled right, though, BostonNOW could wind up being a better read than Metro. Then, too, I’ve seen cereal boxes that are a better read than Metro.

Pergament and Wilpers have invited bloggers to meet them on March 10. The details are in Wilpers’ post. Wish I could be there. (Via Universal Hub.)