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Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology

May 21, 2009 • 1:46 pm 3

Google won’t invest in the bundling of news in print

Eric Schmidt! WOW! Welcome Google to Argentina! =)
Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt encapsulated the challenge facing newspapers in an interview with the FT (only available to subscribers).

He highlighted that there was always an uncomfortable relationship between news gathering and the profitability model.  News, itself, did not produce revenue.  Profits came from the bundling of news with advertising and other services:

So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of the revenue came from classifieds and these big, untargeted print ads, the content was fascinating but they were not connected to… it was ultimately destined to be challenged by technology and that’s indeed what happened.

This great unbundling is the problem for the newspaper industry, as Nicholas Carr wrote last year:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product … The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

And this changes once the newspaper is on the internet:

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story. They may not even be aware of which newspaper’s site they’ve arrived at. For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the maketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits.

Google has worked out how to make money from the atomisation of content and the fragmentation of the audience.  And while it considered investing the beleaguered newspaper industry, it concluded that ploughing money into the physical bundle of content called a newspaper was not the way forward.

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Filed under: journalism, newspapers, online

April 18, 2009 • 7:39 am 0

Looking back at 10 years of online journalism

Journalists don’t tend to look back every often, which is why a session on 10 years of online journalism at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas is timely.

The conference is celebrating its 10th anniversary, so on day two, the first panel looks at what has happened over the past 10 years and what the next decade holds.

The panel brings together the people who were here 10 years ago.

Gerry Barker, Digital Operations Revenue Manager, The Palm Beach Post in Florida, recalled the optimism of 1999, with Belo Interactive investing $100m in the web over five years. That initial optimism evaporated around 2004.

Fast-forward to 2009, and the world is upside down, said Barker. Old enemies such as Yahoo are now friends of newspapers, the underlying economics of the news business are crumbling, localized niche sites are springing up everywhere, newspapers are going online only and mobile is finally coming into its own as a viable platform.

His advice: be a risk-taker and don’t be afraid to fail. He quoted industry analyst Ken Doctor, saying we are at the end of the beginning, rather than the beginning of the end.

The entrepreneurial journalist

Steve Sullivan, Multimedia Editor of The Baltimore Sun in Maryland recalled the early days of online, which largely involved training reporters to work across platforms.

Looking to the future, he said versatility is still necessary. But Sullivan said he was also looking for entrepreneurial journalists who can grow audiences and revenue, and look for places where established media haven’t been before.

Janine Warner, Digital Alchemist with Artesian Media described how things have changed over the past 1o years. In 1999, the big worry was the Y2K bug. Now it is bankruptcy.

In 1999, everyone wanted big portals, whereas now, said Warner, it is all about niche sites. Ten years ago, everyone wanted stock options, today everyone fears the pink slip.

Warner also pointed to the increasingly importance of entrepreneurial journalism – the importance of the personal brand, rather than the institutional brand.

Peter Zollman, Founding Principal of the AIM Group took the plinth by joking how the conference was recycling panelists and themes.

“I still believe in newsprint,” he said, but newspapers will be very different.

Looking ahead, he argued that the future lies in video. And the future is in mobile, in community and in niche audiences.

Filed under: academics, journalism, newspapers, online ,

April 17, 2009 • 12:22 pm 2

The perils of bringing together print and online newsrooms

The first afternoon panel at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas sought to answer the question: Is newsroom integration working?

The response from Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive, Dallas Morning News was a blunt “No”.

He highlighted two reasons for this. Firstly, what the newspaper is asking journalists to do is significantly different from what they are used to doing. So there is a skills gap and training has had limited success.

But there is also a huge cultural gap to overcome. Moor said journalists and editors still consider themselves as “owners” of a product – the daily newspaper – rather than as audience owners.

Since most of the revenue comes from the print, time-based product, that tends to be where people focus their attention, explained Moor.

The paper tried integrating the online team as digital evangelists to lead the conversion in the newsroom, but that didn’t work.

Instead, Moor said the newspaper is trying to shift the focus of journalists from the time-based print product to a focus on producing news throughout the day for their audiences.

One way the Dallas Morning News is trying to do this is through beat blogs. These would become the place for content and community.

The print takeover

Former Executive Editor of the WashingtonPost.com Jim Brady also gave a “No” but qualified it by saying that it depends on how the integration of newsrooms is managed.

In his view, the merger of print and digital newsrooms tend to be like the merger of Germany and Poland in 1939.

What tends to happen is a print takeover. But Brady argued that the integration of newsrooms should take place if a news outlet considers the web as a medium in its own right.

Brady said that a merger would only work if you allowed the website to maintain enough autonomy so that it can push the boundaries, with digital people in positions that can affect real change.

He admitted that he left the Post as he was concerned that the autonomy of the website would disappear under the weight of the print newsroom.

The Yes man

By contrast, Sewell Chan, Bureau Chief of City Room Blog at the New York Times, gave a “Yes”.

From a journalistic perspective, integration has worked at the Times.

But he went on to say that integration isn’t the main issue in the newsroom, but rather the talk was about business models.

Chan explained how meetings on stories focus not just on what should be done for the paper, but also discussions around the best multimedia way to cover a story.

One practical example of integration in action at the Times is the huge number of blogs.  The paper has 70, maybe too many joked Chan.

The early adopters tended to be political reporters, rather than necessarily younger journalists.

A different medium

Torry Pedersen, Chief Executive Officer, VG Group from Norway, joined the No camp. He argued that integration might make sense for a small newsroom, but not for a large, national publication.

He compared integrating newsrooms like having one Olympic skier who is a world champion in one discipline compete in another discipline. Print and the internet are different mediums, different disciplines.

Pedersen also compared online and newspapers to a waterfall and bottled water.  The net is like a waterfall – raw, unlimited, real-time, continuous flow of news.

Whereas a newspaper is like bottled water, with limited space, distilled, refined and contained.

Online is the big now, whereas the newspaper is the authoritative version of the news, he argued.

If you merge the newsrooms, warned Pedersen, the newspaper will get the upper hand and slow online development.

Rather than integration, online and print newsrooms should be best friends, but keep themselves separate.

The broadcast perspective

The final panel speaker, Jonathan Dube, Vice President at ABCNews.com offered the view from a broadcast news outlet.

For him, integration is working at ABCNews. He cited the example of Brian Ross and The Blotter, saying it is regarded as a programme, rather than just as an add-on to broadcast activities.

Filed under: journalism, newspapers, online , ,

April 3, 2009 • 11:58 am 0

Inside the new Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor has produced a video to explain its mission now that it has abandoned a daily print product in favour of a shift to the web and a new print weekly.

Filed under: internet, journalism, newspapers, video ,

March 15, 2009 • 10:50 pm 6

State of the Media report for 2009 is ‘bleakest’ ever

The comprehensive look at the media in the US by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has just been published.

The State of the News Media 2009 report paints a sombre picture:

Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder.

This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States.

It is also the bleakest.

The report points to two factors that have come together to create a perfect storm for legacy media.

First, the number of people going online for news accelerated substantially in 2008. But although many of these visited traditional news destinations, “the financial impact of that was a negative one”.

Second, the collapsing economy has hit the news industry hard: “the recession hammered advertising and diverted attention away from innovating new revenue sources”.

The combined impact is that legacy media is struggling at a time when there is a growing online audience for news and a need to invest in digital platforms, but it has less time and fewer resources to make the transition:

The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem—the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.

That makes the situation better than it might have been. But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.

However, the report points out that “the death of newspapers is not imminent, despite news of bankruptcies and even some closures”.

The problem is that the time the news industry has to “underwrite the gathering of news online, while using the declining revenue of the old platforms to finance the transition” has effectively shortened.

Filed under: journalism, media, new media, newspapers , ,

• 4:56 pm 1

CBC looks at the trouble with newspapers

CBC News Sunday featured a piece on the future of newspapers for which I was interviewed last week.

The piece airs on CBC-TV at 10:00pm in Canada and the segment is about an hour into the two-hour show.  For those of you outside Canada, the video is already available on the CBC News Sunday website (though I wish I could embed it here).

While newspapers do much of the original reporting we rely on for our news, it is the institution of print that is in trouble, rather than the institution of journalism.

Many of the newspapers in trouble are paying the price of questionable financial decisions taken on in times of plenty.

But the key question is whether we still need a print product, published once a day, that offers a bundle of news and information that aims to appeal to as many people as possible.

Once that bundle was the most convenient way to find out about the world around us.  Now the product has been unbundled and the internet provides the convenience.

The real question is where a product printed daily on dead trees fits into our news habits today.

Coincidentally, the Globe and Mail also looks at turmoil in the print news industry, asking if democracy written in ink is disappearing.

Filed under: internet, journalism, newspapers, online , ,

March 6, 2009 • 6:01 am 2

Video: Mathew Ingram on journalism and community

In November 2008, Mathew Ingram took on the new position of communities editor at The Globe and Mail. In this interview, he talks about how he is defining his new role every day, working out how social media can build relationships between journalists and readers.

(Shot on a Nokia N95)

Filed under: journalism, newspapers, online, social media , , ,

February 22, 2009 • 10:06 am 3

Marc Andreesen advises newspapers to shut down the presses

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen shared his provocative ideas on newspapers, the future of the internet and more on Charlie Rose.

Whether you agree with him or not that the printing presses should be shut down,
Andreessen is an engaging speaker and well worth listening to.

Oh, and he believes video gaming is a core human experience, and Gears of War 2 is his favourite game at the moment.

(Via Six Pixels of Separation)

Filed under: innovation, internet, journalism, newspapers , , ,

February 2, 2009 • 4:22 pm 0

Thinking beyond print to support investigative journalism

Nicolas Sarkozy, a watermark was present that ...
Image via Wikipedia

With traditional news funding models under siege, the former publisher of The Toronto Star John Honderich has taken a look at five potential options.

His main focus is how to ensure that quality, investigative journalism contines to receive the funding it needs.  The piece is well thought out and argued, aside from one underlying assumption – that this is about saving a media format, the newspaper.

From the start, Honderich asks: “Whither serious print journalism?”

He goes on to talk about various ideas to revive newspapers, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to pay for newspaper subscriptions for all 18-year-olds.

There is no denying that newspapers have been the vehicles for powerful, investigating journalism.  But it is time to stop equating a form of journalism with a format for delivering that journalism.

There is no reason to assume that print is the only or even the best vehicle for investigative journalism.

The newspaper is a delivery vehicle for news.  For a younger generation, that delivery vehicle is the internet.

As one of the comments on the story says:

My son is well educated but will not read a hardcopy newspaper. He is well read and takes in many different news sources but it’s all via the net. That’s the way that generation is. You need to capture and keep their interest ’cause we hard copy guys are leaving this earth!!

Let’s stop rehearsing tired arguments about journalism that are linked to a means of distribution.

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Filed under: Canada, internet, journalism, newspapers ,

January 28, 2009 • 6:39 pm 1

Visiting prof opening at UBC journalism school in Vancouver

We run a visiting professor scheme at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and the deadline for applications is fast approaching.

The aim of the scheme is to bring in professional journalists who are interested in coming to Vancouver to work with the students and teach a course in their area of specialty.  From the school website:

The incumbent is expected to reside in Vancouver for the 3 1/2-month period and be actively involved in the day-to-day life of the School. The Visiting Professor designs and delivers a three-credit graduate course in his/her interest area, helps supervise thesis projects and delivers one public lecture on campus and one outside the University.  Preference will be given to the candidate who has some journalistic teaching or training experience.

The deadline for applications is February 15, so if this is of interest, then e-mail the school director Mary Lynn Young at mlyoung@interchange.ubc.ca, with an up-to-date CV as well as a brief abstract on the course proposed.

Present and past professors include Rob Cribb, investigative journalist at the Toronto Star, Peter Klein, 60 minutes producer and now on faculty at the school, and Margaret Munro, a science journalist with Canwest newspapers.

It is a great opportunity to come and work at a vibrant school with an innovative integrated journalism program and talented students.

Filed under: academics, broadcast, internet, journalism, newspapers , , , ,

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Alfred Hermida
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