The revenue slide gets steeper
Alan Mutter was paying attention when The NAA tried to quietly dump its latest revenue numbers on the afternoon before Thanksgiving. And what he saw was grim, including continued falloff in all categories, and the second quarter in a row of declining interactive numbers.
The performance in the third quarter was affected only partially by the worldwide financial panic that froze the credit markets in mid-September, throttling the already waning demand for hiring, auto sales and home purchases.
The outlook for the final period of the year is worse, when the three classified verticals are likely to experience the full impact of the economic meltdown.
So it looks like I’ll need to update this chart I created at the end of Q2, showing constant-dollar print revenue at newspapers dropping below 1982 levels. When I made that estimate in September, I said 2008 print revenue would hit $36 billion, a number that needs to come down by at least a half billion (applying 2007 Q4 decline percentages, clearly an optimistic projection), if not a whole lot more.
Jarvis offers a year of good ideas, summarized in one post
Yesterday, 140 characters at a time, I hacked into Sam Zell and his far-ranging interview with Portfolio as signifying a man who is 1. very good at identifying the newspaper industry’s problems but (and this extends to his key advisor Lee Abrams) 2. woefully inept at articulating real responses to the crisis (other than to cut costs, which is necessary, and to add visual flash to the papers, which may or may not help), simply because as non-participants in where news is going (digital), he and Lee can’t begin to imagine its future.
On the flip side of that coin is Jeff Jarvis, who has been taking flak of late for being a supposed journalism hater, but who, in my opinion, has been a steady source of ideas over the years – mostly solid, a few shaky – for where we might try to steer this battleship.
A few days back, he gathered many of those ideas into one post. It’s step-by-step instructions on one (informed) guy’s recipe for saving the business:
Note well that none of this is new. The essential functions of journalism – reporting, watching, sharing, answering, explaining – and its verities – factualness, completeness, fairness, timeliness, relevance – are eternal, but the means of performing them are multiplying magnificently. That is why I so enjoy teaching journalism, because we need no longer pick a medium and its tools for a career but can select them every time we need to tell a story – and because journalism is no longer about preservation (it never should have been) but is instead about change and growth.
Could journalism die? Yes, but I have faith and optimism that it will survive, evolve, and grow. I believe there will be a growing market demand for journalism; I know there is a growing need.
Journalism doesn’t need THINK PIECES!! It needs solid thinking. Like this.
A cry from the heartland: “Don’t let newspapers die”
Thanks to Journalism Iconoclast (Pat Thornton), I just found the “Don’t Let Newspapers Die” Facebook “cause” page.
My first thought, especially after reading point #3 (“Newspapers are cool!”) was that this was a big fat furry sock-puppet created by the NAA. But instead, it appears to be a genuine effort from an Indiana mom. Who loves newspapers and thinks they’re cool. And hopes you’ll buy a copy to help save a journalist’s job.
I love journalism (as much as anyone can be said to “love” a craft or a skill or, even, a calling). Journalists are underpaid and undervalued by a society that often forgets that they help keep this Democracy thing moving.
But I’m not so sure I feel the same way about newspapers.
For several hundred years, newspapers were the most efficient way to transmit news and information. Cheap. Fast. Disposable. In many ways, the newspaper was the internet long before the httprotocol came along. It was a printed database, filtered for our needs by trusted agents (AKA editors) who did their best to assemble in the daily pages what we needed to know. Or at least what they thought we needed to know.
But do we need newspapers anymore – in paper form? I think the jury’s still out.
If you’re surer of the answer, you should check out their Facebook page and join the 10,000+ members of the group.
This is what’s killing the news business: piracy!
Fully-licensed stock photo, arrrrrrrrr!
The AP is again trying to blame bloggers for bringing about the downfall of the news business. In an article yesterday, AP reports the findings of a recent study by Attributor Corp. which claims that 1.5 times more people read pirated articles than legitimate articles, housed at their originating organization, or at a fully-licensed AP site.
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Attributor sees a Step Three: Profit! lining in that cloud:
However, the problem, flagged by copyright cop Attributor Corp., could turn into a golden opportunity if media companies figure out a way to mine advertising revenue from the traffic flocking to their pirated stories posted on blogs and other sites.
Attributor, which makes software that trolls the Internet for copyright violations, estimates the average Web publisher could collect more than $150,000 in additional revenue by selling ads alongside its unlicensed material.
It’s an unscientific estimate, based on an assumption that advertisers would pay $1 for every 1,000 pages of unauthorized material viewed on Web sites that aren’t owned by the copyright owners.
If anything, Attributor believes its calculations understate the opportunity for fleeced publishers. The Redwood City-based company already is working with a few media companies that could generate more than $1 million in annual advertising by enforcing their online copyrights, said Rich Pearson, Attributor’s vice president of marketing.
The problem, aside from still not understanding the benefit of having thousands of blogs pointing to your content? The excerpt above counts as piracy for the benefit of the study.
Attributor’s study, conducted from Sept. 12 through Oct. 12, reviewed 30 billion Web pages hosting copies of stories from more than 100 major Web sites. None of the sites belonged to Attributor’s current customers. After excluding all properly licensed content, Attributor then discarded any page that copied less than 50 percent or fewer than 125 words of a copyrighted story.
Oops. Just upped the word count again.
If Attributor – and the AP – wanted to find actual piracy, they should look for whole-article lifting. That happens every day, and should be attacked and stopped.
But focusing only on the actual pirates wouldn’t get them to the big shocking number they want, to make their wrong-headed point, now would it?
Dispatches from behind the locked doors of the API Summit
Mark Potts brings news of a rogue liveblog that made it through the virtual razor-ribbon today at the super-secret API newspaper crisis summit in Reston.
Big ups to Chuck Peters, CEO of The Gazette Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for 1. knowing how to use Twitter and coveritlive.com to get the news out fast attempt to bring more participants into the room, even if only virtually and 2. having the guts to do it, at the risk of the rolled eyes and possibly hostile glares of his CEO co-summiteers.
Chuck Peters: Just cutting costs is most likely “incorrect action”, without reengineering to meet key consumer needs.
Chuck Peters: Do you agree with Steve Yelvington that we have “painted ourselves into a corner” by following our success, like GM? Check out http://www.yelvington.com/node/501
Peters kept the news conversation flowing for several hours, eventually fielding questions and suggestions from participants on the liveblog and on Twitter. It ultimately became impossible for one person to both participate in the conference and field all the questions and suggestions flowing through his liveblog. Too bad the room wasn’t filled with others such as Yelvington, Potts, Jarvis and others to bring some perspective and other voices.
But for now, Chuck Peters, your colleagues and friends salute you. And congratulations for making it out alive!
UPDATE: What kind of coverage can you expect to get when 50 newspaper CEOs gather in one place to discuss the future of desperately struggling industry? Apparently, once you get past one brave soul with laptop and an EVDO card and some media-bloggers outside of the mainstream media, not much. Run a Google search for “American Press Institute” and, as of this writing at least, there’s nothing. Search the Romenesko blog – the industry gossip and tip sheet – and there’s nothing, not even a link to Chuck Peters’s liveblog.
What’s wrong with the U.S. newspaper industry? In this case, a stunning lack of curiosity, it would seem.
UPDATE 2: Made a few edits based on Chuck Peters’s comments below. I still think what he did today was great, but if he chooses to not call it strictly reporting, I’ll abide by that.
Finding the next business model for news
The theme of CUNY’s “New Business Models for News” summit didn’t emerge contextually throughout the day. It was staring everyone in the face from the multiple monitors spread throughout the newsroom taken over by about 125 industry thinkers and leaders yesterday. It was this:
“Do what you do best. Link to the rest”
Linking in this case could be the literal A HREF hyperlink, but was often also about thinking about new ways to focus on the core and find ways to either jettison non-core (leaving it to others to pick it up) or find links through outsourcing, freelancing and mobilizing armies of bloggers and citizen journalists.
Jeff Jarvis, the chief provocateur for the day and organizer of the summit, set the tone early. “There won’t be any silver bullets today,” he cautioned. “If there were, we’d have already used them.”
The goal of the day was to provide an opportunity to start an intentional and ongoing conversation about how to rethink the business model for news gathering and reporting, largely at daily newspapers, but also in television and in national niche media. How do you take a business that is built on the scarcity model – there’s only one or two newspapers per town, allowing for the growth of eight- and nine-digit annual revenue streams - and rethink it for an age of information-ubiquity?
I won’t even attempt a blow-by-blow of the day when so much of it is available for watching and reading on the News Innovation web site. Also check out the contemporaneous Twitter stream. But here are some random highlights that jump out from my notes:
Edward Roussel of The Telegraph: If you’re a newspaper company, your technology sucks. Outsource it!
Dave Morgan, formerly of Tacoda: It’s time for newspapers to face reality. It’s a market problem, a business model problem and a cost problem. “Prepare for disassembly.” Newspapers, he said, need to disaggregate and start thinking about reporting, distribution, ad sales and direct marketing, printing and digital as different businesses and treath them accordingly.
Morgan on leveraging the existing structure: Newspapers have the best marketing and sales organizations in their markets. They could become strong local ad agencies if they’re untethered. Printing is either an area of opportunity – if newspaper do a whole lot more of it – or an albatross, that they should outsource.
Morgan on Digital: Making digital a sidecar to the newspapers is killing digital. Only divided (as businesses) can newspapers and digital endure.
Michael Rosenblum, Rosenblum TV: Both in the larger session and in the break-out, Rosenbloom hammered at the notion that it was absolute folly for newspapers to hire any journalists who were not absolutely adept at the full suite of digital reporting skills, including photography and videography.
Adam Davidson, NPR and creator of the excellent Planet Money: Respect people’s intelligence.
Samir Arora, Glam: News organizations need to be curators of content. The network has more value to the consumer than the brand.
Upendra Shardanand, Daylife. Before long, everyone will be a news publisher. How can you offer the best navigation of the world beyond your own content? News organizations need to do a better job of curating the world around their content.
Jay Rosen, NYU: There is a wealth of information available that your connected and interested users would be happy to share with you to make your product better. Publications that get to this point start their days with inboxes full of great ideas. How to make this happen? 1. Be two-way in your approach to reporting. Invite contributions. 2. Be clear that you need people to help you and that you will use their contributions.
More to come on the topic and goals of the day, but it was an excellent first step. Thanks to CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and, of course, Jeff Jarvis.