I tried to oblige them with some insights onto why this kind of scandal keeps happening, and why. You can see the results of the interview in the segment below:

More on why the news business keeps getting hit with privacy scandals like this, and why it won’t stop after the jump…

I could tell in the pre-interviews that what CNN was really interested in was pretty much the same thing that the tabloids are: down & dirty tales about famous people doing Bad Things, and how tabloid reporters and paparazzi lie, cheat & steal in flagrant disrespect for the law.

Well, duh.

The deeper point, and one that it is difficult to do on television (although I did try to speak in TV-friendly sound bites) is that the real reason for the constantly recurring invasions of privacy, and for the generally rotten state of the news business (and not incidentally, society itself) is that the news business is no longer actually in the business of reporting news.

No, the business side of things now completely predominates, to the exclusion of just about every other consideration. This is because the last 30 years have seen newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and just about any other means by which reporters collect information and transmit it to the public at a large scale, bought up by increasingly larger corporations, who run things … well, pretty much the same way that every other Corporate America hellhole runs things. As cheaply as goddam possible, with utter contempt for the end consumers of their products (the whole “Make it just one tiny scootch about the level where people will vomit and refuse to buy it”) and complete & total hatred and fear of their employees and the (gasp!) prospect of those employees actually unionizing and demanding safe, sane and humane working conditions.

The fact that these statements are probably controversial says more about the nature of our denial of widespread reality than it does about the news business … although come to think of it, the fact that newspapers, network TV news (and the cable outlets that feast off them both) are so dysfunctional is probably in large part responsible for the “magical thinking” disease that has overrun politics and culture in America.

See, the problem is that every newspaper & TV station in existence (with a few exceptions) is part of a larger corporate behemoth. That corporate behemoth went deep, deep into debt to buy said newspapers and TV stations, back when the economy was sound and these media properties looked like no-brainer acquisitions. After all, newspapers had pretty much monopoly market positions in every city worthy of the name, while local TV stations were like owning your own mint. If you wanted to run a small-to-medium sized business in America, you had to advertise your products. And to advertise, you had to pay whatever the owner of the newspaper or TV station wanted to extract from you in this billing cycle. If you didn’t want to pony up … well, I’m sure your competitors did. And then they buried you, while your inventory grew cobwebs.

So with that long, flat, steady rate of return, all the projections for the future looked safe. And if there’s one thing that Corporate America loves more than anything else, it is the utter elimination of any hint of risk. A small rate of return over many years … well, they know how to make that dance. That’s how they turned home mortgages that pay 4-8% a year into financial instruments that paid 1,000% returns – by leveraging the living shit out of them. Borrowing huge quantities of loot, and putting it down on the Vegas craps table that is the U.S. banking system, meanwhile squeezing the budgets of these media properties to make the debt-service payments.

And to make those payments? Well, you gotta make sure that nothing disturbs that projected rate of return. That means for God’s sake, don’t do anything too daring or out of the norm. Second, bring in the efficiency experts to go over the budgets with a fine-tooth comb and start looking for any way possible to cut the budget. Fire people, delay buying new equipment, shrink the costs of the actual production of the news to the point that they can squeeze a couple more percentage points of profit out of the old Daily Beast.

These macro policies mean that the journalists who actually have to produce the content that goes into these media properties are running on the razor edge of make it/don’t make it; and the news editors are having to claw with every fiber of their being in the desperate attempt to make the quarterly numbers go up even a tenth of a ratings point.

And the way to do that … is to get the biggest possible audience. How do you get a huge audience without having to spend a lot of money on time-consuming, risky and potentially business-disrupting investigative reporting?

Why, lurid tabloid-style stories, of course.

That’s why the phone-hacking scandal at the News is only the latest iteration of what is a systemic problem. By that I mean, it is not the works of a few “Bad Apples.” It is the way that the whole goddam machinery is constructed. You could put the 12 Apostles into the modern Fleet Street newsroom and within a few months, they’d be doorknocking Amy Winehouse’s parents and rooting through Elton John’s trash. Or they’d be fired in favor of people who would actually do that.

The point is that the problems with the news business bear surprising resemblance to the problems of society as a whole. We’ve tied our fate to the unfettered free-market economic forces, without really taking notice of the fact that there are a few industries, at least, that are not prepackaged Cheetos. Where diluting quality and streamlining production schedules and all the other tricks of modern corporate management may work in the short term … but in the long term are not only killing the industry, but harming … well, basically putting Western Civilization in danger of collapse. If all we have are “Twinkie” news reports from chirpy, easy-on-the-eyes blondes, and the only way for politicians to prosper is to get on TV … and the way to get on TV is to spout lunatic jackassery … then we wind up talking about destroying the basic financial security of every person in the United States because a bunch of nitwits on talk radio need to keep their numbers up for Q3. 

On the panel with me, the delightfully funny and plainspoken Serena Ehrlich, who knows more about how to handle media in the digital age than the last three Presidential Press Secretaries put together. Although there is a marked resemblance there to C.J Craig of the late, lamented Bartlett administration. 

Anyway, this is a bit of an intro to what the conditions are like for the media, and what the big forces shaping the future are going to look like. 

Zell’s many, many misdeeds, missteps and misstatements these past three years are probably filling many venemous former Timesmen’s memoirs even as I type. But while the wheels of corporate justice grind slow … well, in those cases in current America, where the wheels grind at all … where there are even regulators and prosecutors employed & willing to throw a shoulder to the wheels … OK, enough with that by-now-Abu Ghraib’d metaphor.  The point is that the more we learn about the circumstances under which Zell was allowed to buy the Tribune Corp & the LA Times, the more shady, unethical and perhaps even criminal the deal smells.

Now that the Tribune creditors seem to have grown a pair, and are starting to openly murmur about where all their money might have gone – in stark contrast to so many investors who have complacently plodded through the zigzagging pens of modern American Capitalism towards where the Bernie Madoffs, Angelo Mozilos & Magnetars of this world wield their blood-soaked financial sledgehammers – the word is out that Zell has reached the end of the plank.

So now what?

The villagers gathered around the moat look at each other blankly, their torches sputtering, pitchforks starting to droop. There is muttering in the ranks, a strange sense of deflation. What to do now that the monster has abandoned them?

Perhaps some new savior will arise. One who can lead them out of the bottomless cycle of self-asphyxiation and learned helplessness. A man who has “vision,” and who (with just the right sort of spineless boot-licking understanding board of directors) can restore the kingdom to its past glory. Maybe … maybe … yes. Yes! That’s it!

This shall be the image of serious news-gathering and investigative reporting in America.

We’ve earned it.

Tribune Company, Sam Zell, Michael Eisner, LA Times, bankruptcy, fraud, swindle, pension fund, corporate raider

I strongly urge you to listen to this great piece from This American Life about the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

They don't make 'em like this any more. Even so, the rear bumper had to be reattached.

It’s about how the U.S. auto industry could have saved itself by actually paying attention to the way its business was eroding, and listening to the people who came back from Japan and transformed the Fremont plant from a place that was “like a prison … with sex, drugs and alcohol freely indulged in during the working day … where the workers maliciously sabotaged cars, and the managers didn’t care, as long as they got their bonuses for churning out pure numbers…”

…into a place where the workers actually looked forward to coming to work each day, and where the quality of the cars they turned out was so high, that even now, 22 years later, many of those cars are still on the road. NUMMI stands for “New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.” and there is an excellent Wikipedia entry about it, if you want to get a little more background.

The situation bears a strong resemblance to the newspaper industry, and the reason papers are in the same place as the auto industry. Let’s take a look at the places where the news industry and the auto industry screwed the pooch:

1. Starting in the 80s and going through the 90s, sales declined, as customers were turned off by the shoddy quality of the product

In the auto industry: anyone who drove a U.S.-made car in the 80s knows what I’m talking about. Everything about the cars sucked. The seats were uncomfortable to sit in, the controls made no sense and were hard to deal with.  I drove a lot of rental cars in that era, and I can’t tell you how many times the A/C control knob came off in my hand. Or the windshield wiper knob was installed upside-down. In one case, the bolt holding the steering column up on a Chevy Cavalier came loose and the steering wheel dropped into my lap. Which is minor, compared to the engines seizing and misfiring, the electrical system shorting out, the windows not rolling up (or down), the doors sagging on their hinges…

In the newspaper industry: the buyouts and mergers started by the relaxation of the cross-ownership rule, caused many papers to skeletonize their staffs, and run big colorful graphics in the papers. And lots more wire copy. I worked at the Arizona Republic during this era, and I saw what they were doing on “Zone Editions.”  We had the same cruddy stories for Mesa, as we did Tempe, as we did Scottsdale. They were feature stories about things like a guy with a trained parrot that would whistle and dance. We’d run it one week in the Mesa zone, and then the next week, I’d see it in the queue again for Scottsdale. Mostly, the Zone Editions were there to snarf up the advertisers in those areas, and make sure that no competition sprang up to challenge the big paper. “It doesn’t pay NOT to advertise,” was the slogan, and it was true, because of the package deals the Republic was able to offer, sucking the oxygen out of the local markets.  Most papers had a monopoly position in their markets, and could pretty much be assured of making a profit, no matter what they did. Meanwhile, the readers were starting to notice that their newspapers were lacking … how shall we say this … news.

2. The workers felt ignored and belittled, so they began to act out, and a “give a shit” attitude took over

In the auto industry: the line workers had no power to offer suggestions, and indeed, were punished for speaking up. All that mattered was churning out enough cars to meet the quotas, no matter how shitty the quality. Resentfulness led to workers intentionally sabotaging cars, which led to even greater expense down the line, when the shitty cars had to be fixed by workers who really didn’t understand what was wrong with them, and just used the “bigger hammer” method to make cross-threaded bolts hold, or quarterpanels stick onto the chassis.

In the news industry: a kind of rebellious fatalism took hold in newsrooms, both in print and TV. The reporters knew the bosses really didn’t give a shit about the news, they just wanted something that would get good ratings and not get them sued. Every TV producer I have ever met would, with little encouragement, go off about the corporate “suits” that were putting the vise on the newsrooms to “pop a number.” Reporters that dared to try to make suggestions about long-term changes (like less coverage of O.J. Simpson, and more of things like the erosion of middle-class opportunities) were ignored. Newsrooms have always been “simmering cesspools of cynicism,” but this morphed into outright nihilism and rage.

3. A temporary bubble allowed the industry to rack up easy profits and postpone change

In the auto industry: The Bush-Cheney “let’s consume as much oil as we can” faction pushed through a tax break in the early ’00s that meant that people who leased a “light truck over 6,000 pounds” could write off the cost of the car.  Free SUVs for Everyone! What this did was support the Big Three, despite their declining market share, because they were making so damn much money off producing big fat gas-guzzling SUVs and selling them for massive mark-ups.  The SUV was actually pretty cheap to make – but Detroit was able to charge about $10-$20,000 more for them. And, of course, when the tax break ran out — and gas prices skyrocketed — the end of the free cars on the taxpayer’s dime era left GM without a viable product to sell, as consumers looked for more efficient cars.

In the newspaper industry: the subprime mortgage/real-estate boom created a huge advertising windfall for newspapers. The Homes section of the LA Times was often larger than the rest of the newspaper combined.  Thousands of pages of expensive classified ads, paid for by realtors who were so awash in free money that they didn’t care what the cost was. Of course, the rest of the classified business was absolutely cratering at this time.  When the real-estate market imploded, and advertisers abandoned newspapers, looking for more efficient ways to sell their products, newspapers were also left without a viable product to sell. 

4. The industry blamed the people who were honestly pointing out the flaws

In the auto industry: the Detroit execs blamed Consumer Reports for pointing out that the cars they were inflicting on the American people were utterly without redeeming community value. They claimed that the Dirty F’n Hippies at Consumer Reports were biased towards the Japanese, were anti-American traitors, and were unfairly criticizing patriotic Americans. The U.S. cars were better, if only people would realize that.  The industry was in complete denial about how the auto-buying public had turned against it, after years of enduring an abusive and exploitative relationship, and how even Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers who fondly remembered their high school days when they got their first muscle cars, were fed up with cars that broke down or rolled over, killing their families.

In the newspaper industry: the newsrooms blamed the internet. They still blame the internet. They see the competition on the internet as being anti-American, that the public was deluded by web-based hucksters, and that imposing paywalls would make people realize how much they really needed to pay for news. No matter that the readers and advertisers have made their preferences clear – they must be MADE to come back and obey.

I’ve been in the Bay Area for a convention of “[fill in blank] for Dummies” authors and various business meetings, and I’ve taken the opportunity to scope out what the San Francisco Chronicle has been doing with its much-ballyhooed investment in glossy magazine-style paper for the front pages of its sections, and the use of high-quality color images.

This is a strategy that is also being pursued in New York by NY Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman, who has invested more than he would like to admit to (millions? hundreds of millions?) into high-tech printing presses, capable of churning out massive print runs with razor-sharp color. The 15-tower, triple-width ultra-compact Commander CT press looks a lot like the last-generation Nikon F6 film camera. It was the apex of film technology, what many analysts recognized at the time as “the perfect camera” – but that alas, was rolled out just as every working professional made the move to use digital.

I think we’re going to look back at the newspapers and magazines that come out on paper in the next couple of years the way that photographers look back at film cameras.With affections, a certain amount of nostalgia, and the still-existing impulse to pull the old film-based warhorse out of the closet and go snap a few frames with it.

And then we’ll all go back to using the thing that has become indispensable in our daily lives; the tool that “just works better,” and that has grown up an entire ecosystem of other industries around it that were not possible, or even conceivable, ten years ago.

The color pages, as you can see here, are absolutely gorgeous in their color registration, and some even have pretty good graphic design.When I opened the Monday sports section to see this layout of photos from the Niners game, I stopped in my tracks and took a minute or so just to drink it all in.  The only paper I can remember that tried something like this was Frank Deford’s late, lamented The National. And it did the same thing in its final days, right before it slipped beneath the surface of the waters forever…

The problem is the same one that the newspaper industry has been failing to come to grips with for the last twenty years: advertising.

On the first day of the “New Look Chronicle,” there were some retailers that had obviously chosen to take the plunge with the newspaper. You can see some of the advertisers gamely checking in on the inside pages with splashy, colorful ads. But look closely.

Note in the lower left corner.

That’s right. An old-school black-and-white ad. One that takes absolutely no advantage of the new capabilities. Ask yourself how this happened. Imagine the frenzied ad sales campaign that led up to the premiere of this issue of the Chron; don’t you think the ad sales staff was working the phones, day and night, lining up advertisers to pay through the nose for the privilege of being among the select few to have the opportunity to make their mark with this new blah blah blahdy blah…

And not only was the Monday paper thin enough to shave with – which we’ll get back to in a second – but to flesh out the pages, they had to mix in old-school gray ads with the bright & colorful new ones.

How depressing.  Well, if you’re still clinging to the belief that somehow print editions can turn it around with just a few tweaks here and there, maybe a little more flash&dazzle will win back advertisers, who will surely see the value of paying more money to reach a smaller audience. Right? Right? …hey, where ya going?

The difference between the retrograde thinking that these pages embody, and the optimism and confidence that I saw at the recent OMMA-Mobile conference in LA (and I owe a long post about that, and will do it once I get back to LA), is massive. The chasm between people who shriek and cling to these kinds of gimmicks and the ones that are grabbing the future by the throat and learning things every day … is like the Grand Digital Canyon.

But if you get a chance, check out the SF Chron, and drink in all the pretty, large-format pictures.

I’m guessing this is going to truly be a limited-time opportunity.

Page design at Rue89.com looks a little like what splatters on the side of the carny Tilt-a-Whirl after you load it up with a buncha 10-years olds who've spent the day eating cotton candy and mystery meat hotdogs. I think the boxes up & down the sides are supposed to be clickable ads, but they were inert when I tried them... (click for larger)

The illustration here is of a new French news site that is apparently taking off at Rue89; I can’t decide whether the chaotic design is totally off-putting, or intriguing because it basically violates every rule of page design.  Also, I can’t hear the word “Rue” in a title without flashing to “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Or some B-movie villain twirling a moustache and chortling, “You’ll rue the day, Rex Manly!”

As a bonus, this week I’ve broadened the focus a bit to include some big-picture thinking from some of the unusual suspects; Doc Searls has a post wherein it is posited that what we think of right now as the internet is just a finger pointing in the direction of what this thing is actually going to grow into.  Which should fuel a couple of late-night dorm-room debates, if nothing else…

Jeff Jarvis comes out in favor of doing the exact opposite of erecting paywalls, and dubs it “Hyperdistribution”  http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/08/25/hyperdistribution/ In a nutshell, it’s the idea that news organizations have to splash their content all over the web to try to make up for the lower ad rates by compensating with larger audiences. Nut graf: “I have stood in and before no end of conferences when I or someone else recalls what that student said in The New York Times said a year ago: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Waiting for her to come to our site won’t work – and it especially won’t work if, once a peer links her to our site, she finds a wall. No, we have to take news to her.”

PaidContent.org says that “The Future of News is Scarcity” http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-future-of-news-is-scarcity/ and that the mistake newspapers are making is that they are focusing on

A new take on the "trust/verification" function of news organizations.

the wrong problem. Instead of trying to come up with ways to preserve the content model that has worn out, he says that “every abundance creates new scarcities and this is where the news industry must go to make money in the 21st century. The scarcities created (and enabled) by abundant news are interesting stories, thought provoking analysis, conversation and community, and trust/verification. (snip) The successful news company of the future will have to take all this on board and deliver it with a radically lower cost base than this industry is used to.”

From the BBC, an article about what the music industry can teach television (and perhaps newspapers) about fighting with the internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/08/what_can_music_teach_telly.html Sample thoughts of what lessons to draw from the fight the RIAA has waged against its users: “Music biz teach TV? Greed, backwards thinking and lack of respect for the end consumer.” And “How to alienate its customers by treating them all as likely criminals.” One of the links will take you to this page, laying out the numbers of piracy of popular TV and movies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8224869.stm

Over at Media Bullseye, they reference Star Trek villains, in a piece entitled “The News Aggregator-Borg: Resistance is Futile”

Does this mean Arianna Huffington is going to start sporting external cyborg prosthetics? 'Cause that'd be cool...

http://mediabullseye.com/mb/2009/08/the-news-aggregator-borg-resis.html The author, Robert Quigley, is the social media editor for the Austin American-Statesman, and is considered one of the smarter New Media thinkers around.  He says that journalists should take the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to aggregating content in & around the web, pointing to the success CNN had in covering the attacks in Mumbai and unrest in Iran as examples of using the power of aggregation to shape & expand coverage.

Y Combinator, the startup incubator that has a heavy-duty track record, is calling out for business models to pave the way to “the Future of Journalism”: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html Y Combinator has a strong history of funding companies like Reddit, Omnisio and Zenter, and they are looking to dump money on anyone who thinks they have a realistic business model to support news production.  The RFS (“Request for Startups”) is being issued because, according to them, ” Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time. ”

Many people have pointed to the success of Amazon’s Kindle as proof that the future of news & newspapers lies in e-reader and portable devices like that. However, just as many people point out that Amazon demands 70% of the subscription revenues, which is spurring a lot of competitors.  Slate magazine has an article about how to compete with the Kindle http://slate.com/id/2226503 Basically, just look at what all the would-be competitors to the iPod did – and do the exact opposite. Key point: “The service matters more than the device itself. Every time I dismiss the Zune, Creative Zen, or some other MP3 player as an also-ran, I get letters from loyalists who insist that their gizmo far outshines the iPod. Sometimes they’re right-but what they miss is that the iPod isn’t a standalone device. It’s part of a music-delivery ecosystem, the most important feature of which is iTunes.”  Basically, the article lays out what publishers will have to do if they really want to deliver content to e-readers and make a profit.

In that vein, Editor & Publisher asks “Will E-readers Help Save Newspapers?” http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004007001 It appears that the

I tried to look at this on the Kindle. Not so good.

USA Today is hanging a great deal of hope on e-readers, along with a lot of other leading publishers. Nut grafs: “What’s interesting about e-readers is that they will most likely resemble the best aspects of print. The missing link, however, is the advertising model. (snip) Without advertising, newspapers stand very little chance of making any meaningful revenue from the e-reader platform.”  The article goes on at length to address many of the technological, social and business obstacles standing in the way of just eliminating the costs of paper distribution in favor of sending Quark page layouts to a Kindle-like device.  Oh yeah – and here’s a link to the announcement of the Sony device http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685746.html

At the Knight Digital Media Center, the possibility of establishing “membership options” to charge for news is dissected: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/rather_than_a_pay_wall_consider_membership_options/ This borrowed somewhat from Mark Cuban’s suggestions (covered last week) to build a “News Junkie” membership which offers multiple services.  The ASNE chat that this comes out of is located here http://208.88.72.149/tabid/122/Default.aspx (you do need to be a member or paid subscriber to see this – and yes, I recognize the irony inherent in all that).

Speaking of Cuban, he’s off on another unlikely crusade – this week, he’s decided that the internet has been “dead and boring for a while now,” and that two new technologies WebHooks or PubSubHubBub are going to CHANGE EVERYTHING!!!! (emphasis his) http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet-is-about-to-change/ If you can get past the jargon (i.e. “Cloud-based distribution hub”), there might be something there. I’d be interested to see if he’s got any money invested in these, he’s banging the drum so hard. To me, it sounds like just another variation on “push”

Why do these wireframes look like the Tinkertoy stuff I made when I was 6?

technology, where a publisher crams information down the pipe to subscribers before it makes it available on the website. Me? I prefer the AP news alerts I’ve set up on my iPhone. For free. If you’re interested, Impact Media has a slightly more measured description of PubSubHubbub http://www.impactmedialtd.co.uk/blog/internet-news/what-is-pubsubhubbub/

If you’ve got the time for a “think piece” about what the long-term solutions to the revenue problems faced by companies trying to migrate their analog businesses to a digital platform, check out Doc Searls (one of the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”) in “Thinking outside the Internet box” http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/08/28/thinking-outside-the-internet-box/ Here’s the Keanu Reeves “Whoah!” moment: “I’ve written often about how hard it is to frame our understanding of the Net. Now I’m beginning to think we should admit that the Internet itself, as concept, is too limiting, and not much less antique than telecom or “power grid “The Internet” is not a thing. It’s a finger pointing in the direction of a thing that isn’t. It is the name we give to the sense of place we get when we go “on” a mesh of unseen connections to interact with other entitites.”

Another “deep thought” piece comes from Fast Company, setting out “Three Possible Economic Models” for the digital future: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/three-possible-economic-models-part-ii This is not directly related to the paid content debate, but it’s some interesting thinking on what kinds of companies are going to be viable in 10 years or so.

A piece on MinnPost talks about how the Journalism Online project launched by Steve Brill to such fanfare, perhaps … overstated … the number of newspapers that have signed on. http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/08/19/10972/star_tribune_not_part_of_online_fee_venture Apparently, the Star-Tribune and Pioneer-Press have not, in fact, signed up.

This is a post from last week that I’ve just gotten around to including – Alan Mutter writes “Why aren’t we paying for news?” http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-arent-we-paying-for-news.html Be sure the check out the comments section – there are notes there from some papers that recently either went behind, or emerged from paywalls. In the article, Mutter blames fear of change as the reason that everyone is talking about paid content, but very few people are actually doing it – yet. “Publishers can’t figure out how to charge for content without throttling their web traffic and the online advertising that comes along with it. (snip) Individual publishers are afraid to move unilaterally to begin charging for content but also unable to coalesce as a group around a common philosophy and platform for doing so.” Part 2 of Mutter’s epic trilogy is here: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-stops-publishers-from-charging-for.html And he winds it all up with: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-publishers-can-make-web-content-pay.html

Journalism.co.uk takes on the issue of free vs. paid content by stating that “Free is just another cover price” http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/08/

In the little time I've spent here, I actually quite like this scrappy little paper. Damn shame Rupert kicked it to the curb...

27/comment-free-is-just-another-cover-price/ They dissect the real reasons behind the demise of Murdoch’s thelondonpaper freesheet, and conclude that “thelondonpaper isn’t closing because the model

was flawed, but because News International either couldn’t make it work in the current economic climate or was unwilling to give a paper, still in its infancy, the time it needed to become commercially viable.”

The Newspaper Innovation blog writes at greater length about thelondonpaper, and whether this is really the death knell for the freesheet model http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/index.php/2009/08/24/freesheet-no-longer-viable-model-and-other-myths/

For readers interested in what’s happening with the whole “let’s regulate that crazy, dangerous internet” debate in Europe, the European Journalism Centre has a long post up about all the laws being debated around The Continent that might affect journalists http://www.ejc.net/about/blog/media_laws_spur_summer_debate_autumn_actions_likely/ The proliferation of laws designed to criminalize filesharing shows that RIAA and MPAA lobbyists are still very much on the job.

King Kaufman gets a little lathered up by the column in the LA Times that I linked to last week, writing that “We must kill press freedom to save it” http://open.salon.com/blog/future_of_journalism/2009/08/25/we_must_kill_press_freedom_to_save_it Somehow, I don’t think that managing editors are going to be going around holding up a Zippo to the printing presses anytime soon, but OK, he’s upset. In fact, about halfway through he gets into an imaginary conversation, which quickly turns into what the Brits call a slanging match. Viz: “Have you met the people, Tim? I hear they’re lovely once you get to know them. They’re the ones who have been saying for years, with their actions, “If you charge us for online news, we will abandon you. We do not support newspapers or anyone else charging for online news except for news that’s highly specialized.”  King’s basic point is that by trying to form a consortium to crush internet competition, the news industry is in fact acting against the public interest, rather than for it.

Trying to get users off their asses, to participate? Well, hot-button issues like the "Skank" blogger case are a good way to start...

In a slightly more constructive piece, Dan Gillmor, one of the authors of We the Media, announced that he is launching Mediactive, a site dedicated to getting the audience more involved in the news, but transforming them into “active users” rather than “passive consumers.”  The announcement piece is here http://mediactive.com/2009/08/24/moving-along-mediactive/

The Nieman site has a piece up on how the New York Times is monetizing its journalists by offering online courses in the Knowledge Network, to be taught by Times columnists http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/newspapers-find-a-new-way-to-monetize-their-journalists/

Two journalists are attempting to sell “kits” that would allow recently laid-off journalists to establish hyper-local news sites http://www.jiltedjournalists.com/News.html The effort is being called Dailytown.com, but the kits don’t seem to offer much beyond what a savvy online journalists could do with a custom WordPress install.

Interesting experiment – reminds me of WindyCitizen.com.

A couple of French startup web-only news sites called Rue89 and Demotix, are experimenting with multiple unconventional revenue streams,

but agree that “paid content is a dead end” http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/03/04/the-future-of-online-journalism-according-to-rue89-and-demotix/

And finally, just for reference, the Columbia Journalism Review sets out the difference in value between a print and an online reader – a print reader generates about $709 a year, while an online reader only generates $46 http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/post_11.php

I am also posting this over on the AIM Group blog, as part of what I think might become a regular feature, “This week in the paid content debate.” The best of the bunch is the back-and-forth between billionaire Mark Cuban, and the bete noire of many print publishers, Michael Wolff, who runs the Newser.com content-aggregation site.  Cuban actually suggests something that shows that he’s put more thinking into the issue than the kneejerk “Up with the paywalls!” bunch.  I note below the flaw in his plans – my ex-roommate used to describe for me in detail how impossible it was at Time-Warner-AOL to get the jealous VPs of Home Video, say, to play nice with the guys from HBO and pay-per-view. Why make someone else’s P&L sheets look good? That just means they are going to get the Exec VP slot faster than you…

This is an example of a newspaper that has developed multiple, reliable, alternative revenue streams. UOL in Brazil is doing quite well, thank you. They planned ahead, unlike so many complacent U.S. papers.(Click for larger)

Anyway, the discussion in all cases gets heated very quickly. Insults are thrown around, fisking takes place in the comment threads, but a few actual new ideas & fact-based analyses sneak in here and there. The fact that some very smart entrepreneurs are actually interested enough to toss in some innovative thinking is rather heartening, actually.

• Mark Cuban gives some free advice to fellow billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch: http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/08/my-advice-to-fox-myspace-on-selling-content-yes-you-can/ Basically, he advances the idea that to get consumers to pay for news, you have to bundle it up with other goods, services and content that exist within giant organizations such as Fox or Time-Warner. A “Newsjunkie” subscription would come with access to special sections of Fox News, a couple of books from HarperCollins, magazine subscriptions and DVDs of 20^th Century Fox movies.  Commenters point out that such “synergies” remain elusive in these big media conglomerates, as each of the divisions is still in its own silo, with its own P&L, jealously guarding its own turf. Cuban paid special attention to aggregators, suggesting that newspapers ban links from aggregators such as Michael Wolff’s Newser.com.
• Michael Wolff responds with a post entitled “Mark Cuban is a Big Fat Idiot” http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/237/mark-cuban-is-a-big-fat-idiotmdash3bnews-will-stay-free.html Highlights include “some people” finding Cuban bumptious, arrogant and rich only through a dot-com fluke. Wolff maintains that news will always be free and ad-supported, and suggests that Cuban must be “smoking something” …
• …leading to Mark Cuban responding with a schoolyard-taunt opus: I’m Rubber, You’re Glue http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/12/to-michael-wolf-im-rubber-youre-glue/ Not sure what it means when the discussion over paywalls degenerates so quickly, even amongst intelligent and successful publishers.  Apparently, Cuban takes umbrage to Wolff calling him a “big fat idiot,” and in turn, taunts Wolff by criticizing his “outdated model” of a site.
• The fallacy of the Link economy: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-the-fallacy-of-the-link-economy/ This is another assault on the value of inbound links from Google and other news aggregation sites.  Arnon Mishkin says that even sites that publish a headline and short description of a news story appearing on another site are destructive, because readers mostly skim stories, and therefore get the news content they need without having to click through. No word from him on what he thinks newspapers should do on newsstands – perhaps they should be like old-school porn magazines, in plain brown wrappers.
• Ken Ellis responds on NP-Harder: http://npharder.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-fallacies-of-arnon-mishkin/He picks apart some of the assumptions as to what constitutes value from links, and concludes, “All that being said, I still agree in principle with his final three points.  However reclaiming value from aggregators isn’t going to help publishers much.  They need subscribers and a pay wall.  Not an iron curtain, but a permeable pay wall along the lines of the Wall Street Journal.  There’s no save-my-business-model pot of gold out there in the hands of aggregators to help you pay for all that good journalism.”
• TechCrunch proclaims “The Media Bundle is Dead,” http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/the-media-bundle-is-dead-long-live-the-news-aggregators/ Erick Schonfeld addresses paid content by claiming that back when newspapers still enjoyed local monopolies on news, “80 percent of the stories in the paper sucked,” but that the audience was still forced to buy the paper because there was no alternative.  Kind of like the argument that the music industry has failed because people are no longer willing to pay $15 for a CD that contains one song they like, and 9 others that are crummy.
• Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Failing: http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reasons-why-newspapers-are-failingOnly the first point really addresses paid content, but the suggestions at the end of the piece on how to transform a newspaper into a web-based news operation that will produce the type of content that readers will actually reach into their wallets and pay for – is very instructive.
• A post drawing an interesting parallel between Microsoft’s dilemma on how to compete with Google’s free Open Office product, while still maintaining its huge profits from its own MS Office suite http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/08/future-of-local-news-about-more-than-paid-content225.html
• A rather scathing piece on how Reuters should take advantage of the AP’s “suicide” http://techdirt.com/articles/20090724/1533155652.shtml
• From “Scooping the News” a post entitled: Newspaper Access Fees Destined for Failure: http://www.scoopingthenews.com/2009/08/newspaper-access-fees-destined-for.html He compares the paywall solutions to pop-up ads.  He lists five points that he claims explain why access fees will not generate that much revenue. Basically, the argument against boils down to the “internet readers are used to getting information for free, and they have lots of alternatives, so they’ll never pony up when newspapers start slamming down the paywalls.”
• Steve Outing gets psychological in explaining what changes to user behavior will have to take place before consumers start paying for news: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003997955
• And finally, another piece about how raising the paywall will “kill the buzz” around quality content, pointing out that even print newspapers get shared, picked up, discussed in the pub and curated. http://23musings.com/2009/08/15/raise-the-paywall-stop-linking-kill-the-buzz/

“This current economy has stimulated a new marketing consciousness,” said Laurence Boschetto, president-CEO, DraftFCB. “Clients are saying they want accountability for every dollar they spend, and they want cause and effect. Clients will continue to rally behind ideas that build business, and we as an industry have to accept that things will never revert back to the pre-recession mind-set that wasn’t totally focused on accountability.”

At every conference I’ve attended this year, especially OMMA and Digital Hollywood, I’ve sat in the room with media planners and ad buyers (AKA the guys in expensive suits who write the multi-million dollar checks to buy 30-second spots on American Idol), and listened to them piss & moan about their jobs.

“The goddam clients are calling me every day and screaming in my ear,” groused a Tums-chomping buyer for a major food company. “All they talk about is ‘The Board,’ and how everyone is shit-scared of winding up on the front page of the New York Times for blowing millions while we’re in a Depression.

“The orders have come down from on high that every nickel they spend has to be tracked, assessed, spreadsheeted and connected to a dollar in sales. Well, it all rolls downhill to me. I have to show results for everything, and when it comes to print and broadcast, that’s getting harder and harder to justify.

“Even if the scale and the reach aren’t there yet, when I’ve got a Google Analytics spreadsheet tracking the ad buy, at least I can walk into the client meeting with more than my dick in my hand.

“I’ve got a $300 million budget for the next year. Zero point zero zero is going to print. Nada. Nothing. I can’t justify it anymore. And broadcast TV is next.”

This came to me via the Media Giraffe project at UMass (and a very special h/t to Janine Warner, currently filming a video for Microsoft up in Seattle), and I was inspired to write a long comment in response to it.

Basically, Circulate is the creation of a team at the Donald Reynolds Journalism Institute that includes Martin Langeveld, who blogs for the Nieman Journalism Lab.  Langeveld made the announcement of its existence on the “News After Newspapers” blog, and I was initially somewhat blase about it, due to these early grafs:

Circulate is a holistic, user-centric solution aimed broadly at sustaining journalism in a digital world, with specific relevance to the ongoing exploration of paid-content models for newspaper Web sites. Circulate enables experimentation with subscription and per-item user charges, but as a user-centric content discovery tool, Circulate goes well beyond the announced features of other systems that have been proposed in that space.

Circulate will be rolled out in phases. Initially, it will be a browser add-on that you can have always handy as you move around the Web. Circulate will function on multiple platforms to allow full portability: a mobile application is planned, possibly first as an iPhone application, along with user start page and e-mail notification options.

Oh Christ, I thought. Not another scheme to try to gin up a variation on the paywall strategy that has been a disaster everywhere it’s been tried.  Well, let me qualify that – it’s been a disaster when erecting the paywall was thought to be the only measure needed to “solve” the “problem” of the internet. 

As a Circulate user, you’ll be able to have an account with a home-base publisher, like the local paper, and optionally profile yourself. Then the Circulate system will go to work and discover and present to you information that’s really relevant to your interests. You’ll be able to set alerts if you want, but you don’t have to. Circulate won’t start out carrying advertising, but eventually when it does, you’ll see advertising that matters to you, not blindly-aimed mass-market ads. And it sets up the possibility that you could optionally subscribe, through your home-base publisher, to valuable information at hundreds and eventually thousands of news and other websites, all at a low monthly blanket rate.

Circulate will feature social functionality, so that you can share and discuss content (but its content recommendations are not sourced through “collaborative filtering”). Over time, you will be able to select additional features on Circulate as they are developed.

Importantly, a core, fundamental value at CircLabs is user privacy. While Circulate will work best when the user shares information, that will happen with the user’s explicit permission, not by virtue of obscure language buried in user agreements no one reads.

Well, bravo.

Interesting concept, guys – although I have to admit that reading through the first few graphs, my stomach sank when I read “charging for online content.” Way too many collective clock cycles are being devoted to coming up with arcane ways to try to extract some kind of revenue stream from online readers.  Most tend to be veneers over the failed strategy of erecting paywalls over existing content, without really given a thought to how the core product has to be radically different for the consumer to be willing to yank out the wallet.

Reading further, it became evident that what you’re doing is a variation on the “Find Engine” concept – that is, that the app/site/widget/whatever will take over for the Almighty Google, and serve you up the information that you need, when, where & how you need it. 

OK, that’s interesting.

You also addressed the core problem with a Find Engine – that is, if the app/whatever knows enough about you to be able to accurately (and if it isn’t accurate, what use would it be?) know what you want, then isn’t that a treasure trove of information about you that could be hacked/exploited/sold?  Well, yeah. We all start to feel a bit creepy about the thought that something in the machine knows us & is ratting us out.  Despite the fact that it happens all the time …

Well, to a certain extent, it does. Big online ad agencies get quiet & change the subject when people bring up the idea of a “Universal Cookie.” Which would be far easier to implement if Circulate takes off.

Anyway – one suggestion. You talk about mobile, and indicate that one of the first moves might be to develop an iPhone app.  While I applaud your willingness to engage with this new platform, you might want to check the numbers.  At a recent Online News Association event I helped organize, Nick Montes of Viva Vision laid out the numbers involved with selling content – I’m posting the video and a description in the next day or so.

Briefly: the iPhone has market penetration of 9M handsets in a US market of 250M+ handsets. Nice, but not staggering.

But the real eye-opener was that Verizon makes about $20 billion a year from selling/licensing/streaming content.  The much-touted iPhone App Store is likely to make Apple about $300 million.

Basically, you’d be pouring sweat equity into constructing something for a platform that comprises about 1.5% of the money on the table…

Anyway – I look forward to seeing what Circulate looks & feels like. At least you’re trying.

Technorati Tags: Circulate, Find Engine, newspaper curmudgeon, online commerce, paywalls, charging for content, newspapers, information engine

In his letter, Vigil does raise a valid point, about how journalists are encouraged to criticize every other leader besides the guys in charge of the media companies that they work for.

Here’s my stupid question: Why is it that journalists are allowed (and even encouraged) to publicly challenge, question and criticize everyone else’s boss — except for their own?

(snip)

If we as newspaper journalists aren’t allowed to place the same kind of public pressure on our own authorities, who will? Does anyone truly believe that the leaders of The Chronicle and other dying newspapers across the country don’t deserve the same level of scrutiny?

It’s long been a truism in the industry that the story that the press covers the least (and the worst) is themselves.  The fruits of that neglect are now becoming clear to all of us.

What would have happened if, back in the 80s, the industry had really done an in-depth investigation of what was plainly obvious to anyone working in & around papers that were being snapped up by chains like Gannett?  Every journalist I knew then talked about how being bought by Gannett meant that the paper was stripped of everything that made it distinct, and the best talent was shipped off to toil at the USA Today, while the newly installed publishers were under tremendous pressure to “make their numbers,” and sought to do so by widening circulation by any means necessary. This model was quickly copied by other large & rapacious chains, who took advantage of the relaxation of media ownership rules to start a feeding frenzy on small papers and TV & radio stations.

Which meant that smaller staffs were whipped like dogs to produce copy that could be  wrapped around the ads.  That fat colorful graphic packages were produced to “engage” the readers and give them the sense that they were actually learning something from the paper, while longer investigative projects – and particularly those troublesome community-defending “crusades” were quietly taken out back and shot.

Yeah, I know, there are always exceptions to these broad generalizations.  I am quite certain that a lot of the smaller papers that get consumed by the big chains continued to do the best they could with what they had.

But the problems only accelerated in the 90s, and I recall very little mention of it at the time. Perhaps we had become inured to it by that point. It was the inexorable trend, so we might as well figure out how to exist under it.

Only…

What would have happened if, sometime in the 90s, reporters and editors had started making it as much of a priority to report about what was happening to the news business … maybe some fraction of the news hole that was allocated to oh, say, the O.J. Simpson case?

Again – I know – long analysis stories about the consolidation of news outlets hardly grabs the same numbers as the White Bronco freeway chase.

At some point in the last 20 years, the news business started turning out products that the citizens of the United States decided they could pretty much do without.  There were mutterings about it, but nobody really started screeching until we found ourselves stuck in this blind alley from which there seems to be no exit.

One last happy graf to leave you with:

The prestigious stock-rating firm of Morningstar says that two big newspaper chains, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises, may be worth zero. “McClatchy stock could be worth nothing,” says Morningstar, adding that Lee Enterprises “shares could lose their entire value.” Fair value of each is listed at $0.00. Both are deep in debt.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, SF Chronicle, stock prices, media, coverage, layoffs, cutbacks, biting the hand