It is my hope that the recent trend of newspapers actually dropping their guards a bit and talking to each other (and who knows - maybe even cooperating a little) is going to increase. Not just because it's nice to see all the kids in the sandbox play nice, but because this looks like the only way the industry is going to come out the other side of this crisis. [...more]
The Big Scary Project that I’ve been yammering about for the last five months is finally live & open for business.
The way out of the maze just got a little easier (click for larger image).
The Audience Planbook was designed to guide newspaper execs through the process of transforming their familiar (but no longer safe) businesses into popular & profitable New Media information centers. Here’s what the front page looks like:
This Planbook is an answer to one of the most persistent and trenchant objections to all this “New Media Strategery” — that is, that previous case studies and industry analyses have been long on strategy, and short on tactics. There are hard drives bursting with essays, webinars and podcasts calling for “disintermediated information flows” and “leveraging Web 2.0 to enhance user experience,” but the practical means by which to transmute these philosophies into concrete policies & procedures has been lacking.
No longer.
I’d like to publicly thank & brag about my writers:
Chapter 1: Stacy Lynch writes about how to assess your current situation to spot where opportunities exist – even in this down economy & print-hostile environment.
Chapter 2: Heather Schlegel (aka Heathervescent) shows how to construct User Personas to start focusing in on audience groups that you want to turn into readers/users/contributors/evangelists.
Chapter 3: Chris Willis takes on one of the toughest problems in media organizations: the change-resistant culture, and shows how to start the internal change that will then manifest itself as an external renaissance.
Chapter 4: Francis Pisani brings a breath of fresh air to the product launch process – his experience as an “Alpha Blogger” in France & Spain brought him into contact with tech teams that are doing spectacular things.
Chapter 5: Sean McDonnell uses his experience of working to build communities for the banking and financial sector to show off the newest viral marketing tools.
Chapter 6: Erik Johnson shows how to push, pull, coax and haul our audiences up the engagement ladder; because an engaged user is far more valuable than a drive-by browser.
Chapter 7: Janine Warner dissects the business and organizational structures that New Media companies are using to produce this kind of content.
Chapter 8: Kevin Featherly takes the results of all this labor, and shows how to make an informed decision to “hold ‘em or fold ‘em.”
I am tremendously proud of the work that they all have done. We are all trying to peer into cloudy crystal balls here, and they have uncovered some real gems.
The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom. A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle [...] [...more]
The last couple of months have seen the weaker papers in two-newspaper towns file for bankruptcy, fire their staffs & announce impending doom. A lot of this can be written off as the natural consequences of a contracting ad market and an epically bad economy; the announcement today by Hearst that the San Francisco Chronicle is facing yet another massive & painful round of layoffs came as both a surprise and not. The gut-clencher came a little bit down in the story:
The Hearst Corp. today announced an effort to reverse the deepening operating losses of its San Francisco Chronicle by seeking near-term cost savings that would include “significant” cuts to both union and non-union staff.
In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be accomplished “quickly” the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year, Hearst said.
Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a front-runner for the role.
Over at Content Bridges, Ken Doctor muses about the other struggling Bay Area newspapers, and wonders why a viable web-based alternative hasn’t sprung up yet, in an area that’s within a hurled semiconductor of Silicon Valley (hell, I can’t figure that one out either). However, he gets close to what I think is the underlying story here:
Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don’t expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has “visibility” in future revenue, which is a nice way to say no one likes what they see ahead.
Maybe, Hearst and MediaNews, once close, but now more distant partners, can figure out some new cost-sharing plans that will pass government review. If not, we can now imagine the Chronicle indeed closing, if it doesn’t get the “significant” cost reductions it wants. My guess given our times, is that it will get reductions, and then reduce itself in product and people to some sense of immediate sustainability. It may keep publishing, though it may scrap days like Detroit or whole sections like many of its brethren.
My read on the threat of folding the paper is that they have run up against a wall of union contracts, and want to get around them without having to resort to Chapter 11. The “concessions” that Hearst wants are going to be ugly – over at Newsosaur, Mutter spitballs them at nearly 50%.
At that point, mere eliminations of staff positions will not hit that target. To eliminate half of the staff would mean that the paper quite simply would not get out. There wouldn’t be enough people to run the presses, drive the trucks, or lay out the display ads from wackjob religious sects. Not to mention, report & edit news. That means the survivors of the cuts would have to take massive pay cuts. Maybe the newsroom staff would meekly submit to the replacement of a paycheck with a moldy roast-beef sandwich and a family pass to Hearst Castle, but those Teamsters, well, that’s another story.
The other unsettling prospect is that Hearst would either sell the Chronicle to MediaNews, the Dean Singleton empire that has been similarly troubled, or perhaps even demand back all the money that Singleton owes the Hearsts (which I’m guessing he does not have), which would mean that Hearst would wind up taking MediaNews titles like the Merc-News or Contra Costa as a barter-type payoff. Both moves have significant anti-trust problems, not to mention less than rosy implications for journalism in the Bay Area.
The big record labels’ entire business was built around moving little plastic discs around the world, similar to how a newspaper’s business was built around moving paper through a printing plant and on to you. That’s about 60-70% of the cost of producing a newspaper: getting the ink on it and moving the damn thing around. Moving things from place to place–be it plastic discs or bundles of paper–is very difficult and expensive. It’s the kind of business that rewards economies of scale and, as a result, allows for huge concentrations of power and money. It’s the kind of business that creates five major record labels and a dozen or so major news companies (that’s a generous number, actually, once you get past the first five or six you’re down to small town paper chains). It’s the kind of business that comes crashing down the quickest once its central complication–moving things from here to there–disappears. With the efficiencies of digital distribution, the established order is not simply threatened, it is broken.
So if size is a disadvantage in the New Media world, the teetering newspaper empires’ reflex to merge and merge again is perhaps the exact wrong move at this time. If the key to web success is that overused buzzword “community,” then an amorphous conglomeration that exists mainly to cater to efficiencies in distributing an ad sales platform that grows daily less relevant, is not a move in the right direction.
General interest sites, however ... well, let me put it this way. Check out the sode aisle in the supermarket next time you're there. Diet Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet Coke with Splenda, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Black Cherry Coke, Coke Blak, Regular Coke, No-Caffeine Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Caffeine Free Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Coke with Vitamins.
Each of those products exists because there is a niche out there that wants to drink them. Why would Coke want to waste its ad dollars for health nuts that want a soda that has vitamins and that they can delude themselves into thinking that is "good for them" ... on a site that has an audience of cigar-smoking red-meat-eaters?
The advertisers have had to fragment their products. Those fragmented products have to be marketed just to the people who are going to buy them, or they are not viable. That means that the platforms that those products advertise on have to be similarly well-defined.
The root of the problems with mass media isn't that there isn't interest in the information - it's that the advertising money is shifting away to places where the audience is better defined & targetable. [...more]
This is going to have to be quick – I haven’t had any spare time to blog, since I’ve been finishing up on editing the Great Big Scary Project, and I have to churn out my intros to said project, along with sprucing up my multimedia examples for my trip to Kiev.
But – two items this week converged (yeah, there’s that word) to illustrate one of the powerful, emerging lessons about New Media. It’s one that I learned years ago, when I first rode a couple of dot-bombs all the way down into the crater.
Big site traffic numbers do not necessarily mean big money. Read More
I still think that obsessing on the platform that the news comes across on is symptomatic of a severe case of Missing The Point. Let me say it again: viewing the newspaper crisis as being caused just because people don’t like buying paper anymore is akin to a 19th-century horse breeder thinking that people not [...] [...more]
But they don’t want to just be talked at. We want to talk to each other, connect to each other, and share things amongst ourselves without Big Media jamming their irrelevant messages in our faces. If that can take place in an old-school print product – as it does, among weekly newspapers, which are the one segment of the newspaper industry that is maintaining its numbers – then fine. Online, mobile, whatever – as long as it does the job that we want it to do, the People Formerly Known As The Audience will use it (and it might even attract some of that New Marketing money to support it).
Looking at the problem as something that can be solved by employing a magic doohickey is the worst kind of thinking. Like the cynical network president in “Scrooged” insisting on featuring mice on television, because the numbers are coming back that more people are leaving the TV for their pets to watch, and “we don’t want to miss out on this audience demographic.”
Hearst had been looking at flexible screens for its new e-paper, but Plastic Logic spokeswoman Betty Taylor told Crosscut that while her company’s wireless e-reader can operate on flexible material like plastic film or foil, Plastic Logic’s consumer testing shows readers prefer a more rigid display. Plastic Logic’s reader will be about a quarter inch thick and have a considerably larger screen than Amazon’s wireless e-reader, the Kindle. Both devices are wireless and use the same low-power, high-resolution E Ink display technology, which is partly owned by Hearst. While the Kindle shifts screens when users press the sides of the device, Plastic Logic’s screen will be touch sensitive, turning pages with a finger swipe across the screen.
I think that experimenting with e-delivery of a newspaper is certainly a good thing – insofar as the experiments also extend to making it possible for the users to have two-way conversations and to be able to share things amongst themselves that they find interesting and/or useful. Trying to maintain the top-down informational control systems of the traditional media on a new electronic platform will certainly be interesting, but ultimately doomed.
Short takes, because I’m editing stories these days, as well as writing 9 of the little buggers myself. First, there’s the news that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is up for sale, and that if it doesn’t sell in the next two months, it’ll either be liquidated & turned into a web-only brand, or taken out back [...] [...more]
Short takes, because I’m editing stories these days, as well as writing 9 of the little buggers myself.
“One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division.
Well, that’s pretty stark. No chance that the Dead Tree edition will be able to sputter along for a while yet? Damn. The ad market must really be eating it up in the Pacific Northwest … well, at least for paper editions. All the dweebs, nerds & propellerheads in the area (you know who you are) have long since sworn blood allegiance to information arriving over the intertubes.
Others have pointed out that, just as wolves pick off the old, sick & lame in the herd, so too do economic forces strike first at the most vulnerable. In this case, that vulnerability was that they were 1) the 2nd-place paper in a 2-daily town, and 2) a paper in a market where ad revenues were either getting tight, or moving to other platforms.
The part of the sick & lame reindeer in this metaphor will be played by the Detroit Free Press & Detroit News, and the Rocky Mountain News.
The San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times are having trouble keeping up with the rest of the herd, and the wolves are licking their chops.
The Atlantic article asserting that the New York Times could croak this spring has been pretty ferociously fisked. As has been pointed out (ad nauseum) elsewhere, the revenues that come in from the digital editions still don’t add up to even 1/5 of what the paper edition brings. Of course, people are starting to notice what the dour Norwegians did a coupla few years back – the profit is lower, but so are the costs. I wrote about this, and the slides showing the relationshipsbetween costs & revenue are online.
Here’s what Poynter (in the link above) had to say:
But one of the most intriguing issues in considering partial or complete conversion to online is that the cuts would not be distributed equally through the enterprise. Distribution, paper and pressroom costs would be reduced dramatically or eliminated. That could leave a much higher share of the remaining budget for the smaller company to devote to newsgathering.
I don’t begrudge Hirschorn his meditation on a future in which print’s role is minimal or disappears. I don’t happen to think, as he does, that Huffington Post, with its mix of unpaid opinion blogs, news lifted from elsewhere and hype, is the model.
How about getting your political news from Politico, your sports news from ESPN.com, your showbiz news from EW.com, your international news from an assortment of options, and your local news from somewhere to be determined? In short, the news would come from professionally reported and edited sites with standards — just not the single unifying standard of The New York Times or other quality publications.
It all may come to pass within a decade or sooner. Not, however, at The New York Times in May.
First day of the new year, reading through the S.F. Chronicle, ho-hum. Governator Arnie’s got a plan, despite being holed up in Sun Valley skiing, the local sports columnist wonders if Barry Bonds might make it back into the major leagues, despite facing Federal prison for allegedly lying under oath, and the fog obscured the [...] [...more]
First day of the new year, reading through the S.F. Chronicle, ho-hum. Governator Arnie’s got a plan, despite being holed up in Sun Valley skiing, the local sports columnist wonders if Barry Bonds might make it back into the major leagues, despite facing Federal prison for allegedly lying under oath, and the fog obscured the New Year’s Eve fireworks (a personal bummer, since we expended much energy to ensure we had a good view of the Bay).
AsianWeek, an influential force politically and culturally for San
Francisco Asian Americans for 30 years, will publish its final print
edition on Friday, another victim in the shrinking newspaper industry.
AsianWeek will continue to publish online, at www.asianweek.com,
and produce special editions about Asian American business,
professional development, heritage and other issues and will still host
events, but the print edition is going away because of economic
realities, Ted Fang, editor and publisher, said in an interview
Wednesday.
AsianWeek Front Page: No mention here that the print edition is dead.
Oh, great. It’s a new year, and the first day in, and already I’m getting hit with more news about the newspaper crisis. I just spent the last week masticating the implications of the death of big-market dailies. I’m editing stories over the break that are all about the moves that papers should make, tools that they should use to reinvent themselves. And still…?
“There are fewer major newspapers, fewer newspaper readers and fewer
newspaper advertisers than ever before,” Fang and his brother, James
Fang, the president of the company, write in a letter to readers
published in Friday’s final edition. “A faltering economy has
accelerated the decline,” they write.
This is particularly troubling for me, because on the surface, this paper would seem to have a lot of the attributes that a Print 2.0 operation going into the future should have – that is, tightly focused on a well-defined niche market that’s under-served. The potential audience is affluent, and there are many local sponsors that should be anxious to reach them. So why’d the Fangs kill it?
So what was it? Was the audience too assimilated to really crave a niche publication? Was the content strategy wrong and in need of adjustment? Did the ad sales staff do its job right? Despite the announcement, the website is still accepting subscription money (and quite pricey subscriptions they are, too).
I find it interesting that they are still maintaining the web presence. So either they feel that the audience in tech-savvy San Francisco & its environs has all migrated online … or they’re just doing this as a stopgap measure while they prepare to let the paper just fade away. Looking at their website, it’s hard to imagine that they’re really making a lot from it – the ads are pretty sparse and there doesn’t seem to be that much inventory. If they’re preparing some master stroke, some game-changing niche multimedia play, I’d love to see it. The columnist for the paper wrote a fiery epic about what having an independent voice dedicated to an overlooked ethnic group meant to the Asian community.
But if that’s true, then why did the paper fail?
It’ll be interesting in the next couple of months to see which papers manage to survive and which decide to follow the growing lead, and kill the print edition entirely and move to the web.
I've fallen prey to the digital triumphalism. I'll admit it. It's really easy to hang on the rim and hoot, when you're on the outside looking in. This provokes a reaction much like the one we're seeing here.
The digital enthusiasts feel like the crews on lifeboats, trying to pick up survivors after the Titanic has gone down, only the survivors are shooting at them with pistols, yelling "You smug bastards in the lifeboats! You don't know what it's like here in the freezing water! Sure, it's easy to be warm & dry when you're in a lifeboat! Bang!"
Meanwhile, to the guys in the water, what they see is the lifeboat crew saying "Sure, we'll give you a hand up. But first you have to sing a tune apologizing for how stupid you were while we pee all over your head. And maybe we'll smack you around with the boathook. But you have it coming."
And what both sides are missing is that while the lifeboat is a good stop-gap solution, the oars seem to be missing, and the crew in the lifeboat is arguing amongst themselves as to which direction they would row in, should the oars ever be found, while others say that rowing is so old-school, and that what we should concentrate on is inventing a nuclear reactor that would provide endless propulsive energy, while still others think that the whole lifeboat thing is wrong, and we should jump back in the water in the hopes of evolving gills. [...more]
Let’s set the stage.
First, Ron Rosenbaum unloads on Jeff Jarvis for being “increasingly heartless” about newsroom cutbacks, layoffs & the general death spiral.
A sampling:
Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know, content—”subjects,” writing about real peoples’ lives—to figure out that reporting just isn’t where it’s at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.
But Jarvis believes the failure of the old-media business models is the result of having too many of those pesky reporters. In his report on his recent new-media summit at CUNY, he noted with approval one workshop’s conclusion that you’d need only 35 reporters to cover the entire city of Philadelphia. Less is more. Meta triumphs over matter.
It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting.
Oh, that’s nasty. Shorter Rosenbaum: “Jarvis is an substanceless, fluffy airhead, taking advantage of gullible publishers, peddling his New Media snakeoil & banking fat stacks while real reporters who actually work for a living are being thrown to the wolves.” Read More
This is getting really, really close to the vision of the future that all the e-Ink dweebs have been yammering about for, oh, the last 40 years or so. The idea of an object that marries the (perceived) strengths of a newspaper with the electronic display have become something of an obsession for old-guard newspaper [...] [...more]
For now, check out this nifty little Kindle-a-like…
I particularly like how the display can now handle much better grayscale, and especially how you can use a stylus (finger?) to control the display, write your own notes, etc. The form factor of stuff welded to a hunk of plastic is obviously just a “placeholder,” so the ugly industrial look right now doesn’t bother me.
We’re still missing the part where we can roll the damn thing up and stick it in a backpack or back pocket … but, given the delicate liquid crystals in the display, that vision of what the display can/will be is most likely a mirage anyway. Also, I don’t think I’d recommend treating any of the rather toxic & corrosive battery technologies with such cavalier violence either.
And yeah, I know. Focusing in on a physical object that the news is delivered on is like a restaurant critic obsessing over the china pattern on the plate that the duck a l’orange is served on.
However. To extrapolate to the more trenchant issues in the newspaper industry – it’s more important to focus in on whether the duck is moldy, or the duck appears a day after you order it, or the other diners start pelting you with the green beans almondine while the waiter steals your wallet and screams in your ear about a real-estate opportunity… [Wow! I think I just waterboarded that metaphor! W00t! Yay me!]
While I love the idea of using one of these things to read the news, to have it in my pocket or carried around with my other junk, constantly updating me as to what’s going on … my fear is that newspapers & media companies will focus in on this as a possible magic solution to their problems. This isn’t because the people in charge are bad, or stupid, or any of the other calumnies flung their way by the increasingly smug digerati (and mea culpa, I have been guilty of that myself on occasion).
It’s because newspapers are run by corporations these days, and corporate guys look to concrete, hard solutions to problems that they can wrap their minds around. Problems with product distribution call for investment in shiny new trucks or routing equipment or big heavy steel cranes … things that you spend money on, that are built of metal and that have big engines in them that make the floor shake a little bit, and that make you feel like you spent your money on something substantial, something that has value.
In contrast, spending a buncha coin on a squishy, touchy-feely thing like “changing corporate culture,” or “re-imagining product possibilities,” or empowering entrepreneurial spirit” … well, a good example of this is the war in Iraq. Or the war on drugs.
We spend massive sums on technological, physical solutions to what is basically a mental & spiritual problem. We bomb the shit out of Fallujah, or build big radar dirigibles to patrol the border for cocaine smugglers, and wonder what it is that went wrong when the problem just morphs into some other face, and continues somewhere else, away from the heavy iron Death Machine we’ve constructed.
Not a good week in journalism. And this cover story was, unfortunately, quite prophetic for a lot of Time, Inc. staffers. Of interest, amidst the “can you braid this into a noose for me please?”-type news, is the announcement by CEO Ann Moore that Time Inc. is cutting staff as part of a reorganization plan: [...] [...more]
Not a good week in journalism. And this cover story was, unfortunately, quite prophetic for a lot of Time, Inc. staffers.
…effective tomorrow, we are going to implement a much more centralized management structure, organized into three business units that will group together titles that share similar audiences, advertisers, and the talents and skills of their staffs. The goal is to enable our company to move faster, go to market smarter, save significant costs, and employ our editorial resources more efficiently.
* News: the existing print and digital properties in the TIME group, the Fortune|Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. John Squires, EVP Time Inc. will manage the News Business Unit. * Style and Entertainment: the existing print and digital properties in the PEOPLE group, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence. I will act as the EVP for this group so the Style and Entertainment Business Unit will report to me. * Lifestyle: the existing print and digital properties of Real Simple, This Old House, All You, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Health, Cottage Living, Coastal Living, and Southern Accents, along with MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Sylvia Auton, EVP Time Inc. will manage the Lifestyle Business Unit, while also retaining responsibility for IPC Media.
Apparently, this is to take advantage of one of the other key areas of the reorg, which is to set loose the Ad Sales staff on selling ads across a range of related properties. Which, in theory, would make sense — but I’m not sure that any internal measures are going to change the dynamics hitting national mags. When the Big Three automakers teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, offering them easier access to your ad pages because you can now sell them space in a dozen mags, rather than just a couple, is not really a game-changer.
Moore goes on to tout recent collaboration across Time Inc. properties, such as when Sports Illustrated shared photos to the TIME.com website, or the magazines sharing content, such as a Time cover piece on the economy that was written by a Fortune staff writer.
Why does this feel like making a virtue out of a necessity? Of course the SI photogs are shipping their photos to the TIME sites. That’s because TIME can’t afford to send their own photogs to Beijing to cover the events. And the fact that TIME has to rely on a writer from another magazine to provide the necessary perspective on THE GIGANTIC STORY OF THE MOMENT is evidence of the fact that TIME is getting so thin on staff that they have to reach out to magazines that still have core competency in economic issues to try to make sense of the global meltdown. Once upon a TIME, such people already on hand, working in the newsroom on deep, insightful stories.
BTW – I’ve been noticing that TIME hardly even runs ads anymore. Again, I remember the good ol’ days, when the mag was so crammed with ads that it was hard sometimes to read the stories, because they had to jump across so many pages. I can’t remember the last time I saw a double-truck car, computer or tobacco ad in TIME.
Likewise, missing in all of this is any real description of where the money is going to come from. Go ahead, click over and read the memo. I can’t figure it out. There’s brave talk about how the company is still profitable and making money, doing good work, the website is growing, yada yada … but other than streamlining some internal business processes, I can’t quite make out where there’s a description of the new revenue streams or multimedia products that TIME is developing that will grow to offset the circulation and readership declines.
And philosophically, creating more silos in your business is not really a step forward when it comes to the web. The mere fact of yanking a bunch of content from one arbitrarily created designation and sticking it under a newer, fancier title … really doesn’t mean all that much to the page traffic that’s coming in from Google.
Now then – if Time, Inc. had announced that it was going to be creating new topic verticals (retirement investment planning, children’s health, mobile electronics) as part of a wide-ranging web initiative … where the best writers, photographers, artists, etc., from ALL OF TIME’S PROPERTIES, clustered to create content for specific interest niches that would appeal to readers and advertisers alike … and that they were doing this as part of a long-term transition from a world where the branding on an ink-on-paper cover actually meant something … rather than a world where what matters is the SEO results that drive audience traffic to your content … and that Time, Inc, then went on to create these fascinating cross-property conversations between their writers … you know, something around which you also empower social clustering and affinity groups to comment on, add to, and repurpose your content …
…then that would have really blown me out of my chair.
I hate like hell to keep doing quick, off-the-cuff bites at such big topics, but maybe I should just resign myself to accepting the web ethos of not trying to do all things at once. Yeah, yeah, I know – “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.”So here’s an interesting coinkydink: two items I [...] [...more]
I hate like hell to keep doing quick, off-the-cuff bites at such big topics, but maybe I should just resign myself to accepting the web ethos of not trying to do all things at once. Yeah, yeah, I know – “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.”So here’s an interesting coinkydink: two items I bookmarked to read later – and actually got around to reading (pause here for an astonished gasp) – struck me as having a stronger relationship than was initially apparent.
First was this bit from the Economist, about how professionals are starting to really flock to online social networks:
On LinkedIn, the market leader, members have been updating their profiles in record numbers in recent weeks, apparently to position themselves in case they lose their jobs. The two most popular sites, LinkedIn and Xing, have been growing at breakneck speed and boast 29m and 6.5m members respectively. And, in contrast to mass-market social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, both firms have worked out how to make money.
The article goes on to raise two interesting points 1) if Facebook can start becoming friendlier to business users it might start actually making money, and 2) professionals are shit-scared about the economy and looking at social networks as great “Career Insurance” places to schmooze people you met once at a conference, snarfed their biz card and never had a use for.old friends.
Next to this was a piece from BusinessWeek, another in the seemingly endless series of kidney punches from the biz community about how newspapers are doomed, done for, goners, forks stuck into them and vultures already descending.
So who would profit from a disappearing newspaper? Local TV and cable, for starters. The city daily is still the biggest single media entity in virtually any market. Its main pitch to advertisers is brutally simple: We have more craniums to dent with your message than anyone else.
(snip)
Which brings me to a disquieting conclusion. The obvious venues for all this displaced journalistic energy are a gazillion new independent online endeavors, be they individual blogs or bigger efforts like MinnPost.com. They will make for fascinating media ecosystems within individual cities, and some will become hits. It is much less certain whether ad dollars will follow. Ultracheap classifieds site craigslist has simply “destroyed revenue,” [emph. mine - dlf]says Dave Morgan, a former newspaper executive who founded behavioral targeting firm Tacoda, and revenue that no longer exists won’t shift to new ventures. Others point out that key newspaper advertisers—local auto dealers and realtors, say—already have many outlets for ads online, not least of which are their own Web sites or national sites such as Cars.com that serve up targeted ads.
For those sensing untapped riches in ads from pizzerias and dry cleaners, well, good luck, says Borrell. “Local is a very unorganized and dirty business,” he says. “People look at local as this one-ton gorilla, but in fact it’s 2,000 one-pound monkeys.” And no publisher can afford to sit down with a city’s 2,000 small fry to sell each a $50 ad. The bitterest pill of all for newspaper denizens is that, while nature abhors a vacuum and all that, in this case there may not even be one left to fill.
Yowch. So newspapers will all just die, and by this point in time, they’ve become so irrelevant and useless that nobody will even really notice that they’re gone? Sheesh. Start passing out the pistols & hemlock in America’s newsrooms, eh?
El Tiempo
I’m going to have to disagree with this nihilistic conclusion. Yeah, I know the local online niche ad market is impossibly fragmented, and it would cost a publisher more to pay an ad sales rep than that person would produce in revenue. Solution: don’t pay the ad rep. Do what El Tiempo in Bogota calls “auto-pauta,” or DIY ads. BTW, I really do recommend you click through on that link to El Tiempo. They are one of the smartest operations out there, they are making piles of cash off internet ads, and they are constantly (ruthlessly, relentlessly) refining their approach.
Moreover. When you look at what the social networking sites are really selling their users, you start to come to the conclusion that what a local newspaper – correction: what the local newspaper of the future – offers can be a lot more compelling.
Think about what the users really want from these social net sites. Chatting with friends, yeah sure. Blowing your own horn in a socially acceptable way, yessiree. Looking for the next step up on the ladder? Well, yeah … but the problem with a lot of the listings on the social net services is that they are from all over the place. Yeah, you can filter them. But we all know that most of the really good jobs are never spamadvertised like this. We find them through referrals – which is where recruiters/headhunters come in. And local friends & business acquaintances.
One of the fastest-growing areas on LinkedIn is the “Question” section, where pros reach out to other pros in their groups, and ask something that’s on their mind. They’re trying to have conversations.
That should be taking place at a newspaper site. Sooner or later, it will. Either the papers will replicate it and include it in their future selves, or they will do a Borg takeover. The paper is a much more logical place for this kind of activity – it includes access to the reference materials from the past, a panel of trained experts to step in and help moderate the discussions, or kick new discussions off with provocative questions, and a huge archive of relevants facts and materials that can be used to make the conversations that much more valuable.
Example: One of the questions I’m participating in on LinkedIn is where to put your money now that the market is tanking so badly. There are some very smart market analysts chiming in here. But it would be nice to be able to have a window/panel open on the screen showing the various stock tables, and perhaps links to content locally that makes the point that some foreign markets are going to be able to ride out this storm, while others just get crushed.
The fact that biz users, those who have education & disposable income, have had to range far afield in search of information that they need to use in their careers, is an indictment of the lack of creative thinking at newspapers. It will take time and effort to reverse the momentum … because the very users that papers covet most are abandoning papers.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
It ain’t about the pony! 
