Photo by Hushed Lavinia

Martin Langeveld reports on a conference focused on the notion of an “InfoValet.” It sounds like attendees at the conference spent a lot of time thinking of ways to describe what they’re onto, but I’d put it this way, from a consumer perspective:

A universal logon system whereby users “pay” for access to information with (secure) information about themselves, rather than with dollars.

Langeveld says, “While a system like this will not necessarily save newspaper publishers (because, for one thing, it will take some time to gain traction), it has the potential to help save journalism by enabling online news publishing at a different scale. While the New York Times could be an InfoValet network member, so can a blogger or micro-local news site, and each can benefit proportionately to their traffic and content value to advertisers and consumers.”

Interesting idea, though any attempt to build a new ecosystem from scratch is going to meet with a certain amount of stubborn resistance. Perhaps the recent announcements by Google and Facebook, opening their logon systems to other sites, might provide some readymade structure for the InfoValet idea.

As she often does, Amy Gahran got me thinking today, this time about the average-at-best job local news organizations do covering consumer news. She asks whether news orgs could focus on shopping year-round, and not just on Black Friday, to do a better job of offering utility to readers.

The short answer: yes. The long answer, though, needs to also address the nagging question of why newspapers aren’t doing this already.

Ultimately, I think the problem is how we define what journalism is. And under currently-accepted definitions, helping shoppers find deals isn’t up there with Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable. The irony is – especially in our current economy – data-driven consumer reporting could be of incredible value to local communities.

To figure why this is – why What’s On Sale is relegated to the commercial side of the house – let’s step back for a second and look at what newspaper do cover.

Is this journalism?

I think we’d all agree that covering the intricacies of local government counts as journalism. Certainly tallying the numbers and types of crimes – whether through narrative journalism or in a database – is journalism as well. Grading a movie? Tracking baseball stats? Charting the financial performance of local companies? All journalism.

But what about sales and deals? What if news organizations reported on that? Where are the best shoe sales? Which grocery chain has the cheapest milk? Which stores have the worst parking lots or the shortest check-out times? Is this journalism?

And what about auto mechanics? Who can you trust? Who specializes in Mini Cooper repair? What’s the going rate for an oil change? Is this journalism?

These examples may not read like dream assignments, even for someone fresh out of J-school. But they could very well be exactly the information that people in our market are looking for, but can’t find. Anywhere.

So, if it is journalism, why not do it?

So the question is simple, but provocative: if it’s just as difficult to report on the machinations of a complex government bureaucracy as it is to scope out the best deals this week at Big Box Mall (both can’t be effectively automated and both require reporting) why do news organizations choose to do one and not the other? And are we sure that readers would agree with that choice?

I’d argue that if newspapers want to grow readership and revenue, they to do both. They need to think even more broadly about what they mean when they talk about “reporting.” And they need to think of new and more useful ways to deliver that information that gets to the user when she wants it and needs it. This flips the existing reporting hierarchy upside-down:

Imagine a team of reporters whose job it is to cover consumer spending – arguably one of the most important drivers of our local economies and something all of our readers spend many hours doing – from the point-of-view of the consumer. And not in the traditional way, through columns and slice-of-life narratives, but with real-world data that will make it easier for people in our markets to live their lives. How surprising and welcome would that be?

And imagine a structure that would allow for data to come from multiple sources – reporting shoe-leather, data-feeds from participating retailers, reports submitted by readers – and distributed at the moment of greatest need: when a reader is at the mall, in the supermarket or in the car.

For a significant portion of the local audience, this is exactly the kind of high-utility, relevant information they need and that a large, organized newsroom is uniquely qualified to provide.

If only we’d agree that it’s journalism.

Who’s doing this well? Any examples of any US newspapers marshalling significant forces against retail data reporting?

So the American Press Institute has declared a national emergency, grabbed the newspaper industry by the lapels and summoned its leaders to a hotel ballroom the API campus in Reston Virginia.

The API Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis happens on November 13th. Here’s what they’re saying about it:

The summit conference will be a discussion on the theory, practice and application of techniques of corporate renewal. Facilitating the discussion will be James B. Shein, Ph.D., a former turnaround CEO for several companies and currently clinical professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Prof. Shein will lay out for us:

• The predictable path to decline that our industry is taking
• How to determine where an organization is on that path
• Strategies for reversing the decline.

All discussion will be on a non-attribution basis. At the end of the day, participants will have a greater understanding of available tools for engineering the renewal of our industry, and a shared vision of the way forward.

Lauren Rich Fine of paidcontent.org, recently made the intriguing point that, until newspapers start forcing advertisers to take a hard look at interactive, the industry will remain locked in the same 10-20% range for interactive revenue as a slice of the whole pie. She suggests killing the print edition, as painful as it will be, to be the bitter but necessary medicine that will start the healing.

I wonder, though, if there isn’t a bridge to that future that allows for a hybrid print-online model that would be worth discussing at the API summit. So, with all the hubris I can muster, herewith is my straw man for the publishers in Reston later this week.

1. Combine all your staffs. If you have an interactive team, a community newspaper team, an online entertainment product team, a TV interactive team and a print newsroom, put ‘em all together. You’re going to need a multi-disciplined content team for the plan I’m proposing.

2. Pour out a 40 for your beloved daily broadsheet. Here’s your new product mix:

• Daily free tabloid, limited to 48-60 pages. (Editorial/Ad mix 50/50 or 45/6555) It’s not time to give up on print. The readers you have aren’t ready and lots of your advertisers aren’t ready. By printing a Monday-Friday news tab, you continue to serve their immediate needs, while keeping a significant piece of the print revenue pump flowing. Assuming you do a good job of it, and you actually pick up readers through a combination of smart editorial focus and zero-friction for pickup through the free price-tag, you could very well get into the kind of scarcity-pricing that is common in television and radio. When demand from advertisers increases, you don’t add pages; you raise the prices on the ad spaces you have.
• Weekly Magazine, paid, 100 pages or more. (Editorial/Ad mix 60/40) This is where you publish your best print work. Think of this as a Newsweek for your local market. It’s the publication that doesn’t get recycled at the end of the day; it sticks around for a week (or longer). For years have been telling daily newspaper publishers that they don’t have time to read a paper every day, that they felt guilty dumping so many unread papers. This solves that, providing the insight and perspective that only a major newsroom can, at a print frequency more attuned to the needs of modern readers. (Big question to be solved: how to carry inserts, a huge part of weekend revenue. Should this be a standard magazine size, poly-bagged, or would a stitched, tabloid-sized publication work? Need to balance the revenue needs with the shelf-life objectives for the publication.)
• Significantly enhanced digital presence. A 24/7 digital newsroom is a given. Everybody who is in your newsroom – with the possible exception of the page designers – works for digital first. This is where you will meet the promise to your local market of being the preeminent local news organization, reporting news and data in whatever digital form your market needs it, including enhanced phone delivery, consumer-searchable databases, open APIs into your reporting and datastream, and an aggressive program of outreach to the rest of the local web in your market. And, yes, web sites. Not just one uber-site (though that’s welcome), but also a family of niche-focused thin sites that meet the unique needs and desires of your markets. These thin sites, built around events databases and social media tools, can be run by a single reporter-blogger who’s passionate about a topic that ma

Even writing this, I can think of a dozen arguments for why this is not the perfect answer. Good. Because these aren’t times for perfection. These are times for experimentation. The readership trend and the revenue trend are both heading in the same direction. They’ll eventually hit zero if we do nothing. But with the right attitude and a little bit of risky behavior, I believe both of those trends can improve.

He’s right, to a point. We do tend to dwell on the audited newspaper circulation numbers when they are reported twice yearly. But we do it largely because those are numbers that can directly affect a news organization’s ability to grow revenue. If circulation is up, newspapers traditionally have been able to charge more for ads. If it’s down, as it has been consistently in recent years, it adds to the revenue crisis by devaluing the printed product.

I’m a cheerleader for interactive, probably to a fault. After 12 years building the business, that’s my bias. But as much as online growth matters, print circulation matters just as much at the moment. Yes, digital audience is growing and digital revenues will carry news organizations forward, but due to the competitive environment online, there’s currently not nearly enough online income to make up for the shortfall on the print side.

So circ. matters, and I think it’s right to pay attention to the numbers.

But I’m puzzled by this piece of Baldwin’s argument:

Judging a newspaper by the number of copies in the market makes no more sense than counting the number of television sets to evaluate a TV station. To paraphrase a recent United States President, “It’s the audience, stupid!”

Counting distributed copies strikes me as the best – if not only – way to judge the effectiveness of the printed paper in reaching an audience. It’s not at all like counting TV sets; that analog would be counting newsstands or newspaper trucks. Counting circulation counts consumption of the print product. Whether a paper is paid or free, it’s essentially valueless until someone picks it up and reads it.

Newspaper companies have finally been reaching new people in new ways in the past decade, people who are establishing habits that may not include the printed newspaper at all. Interactive continues to be a substantial success and a growth engine in most markets. I get as frustrated as Matt Baldwin does that the stories about circulation declines – often written by print newsrooms – neglect to mention the enormous upside opportunities. But it’s far too soon to ignore print circulation – and its associated revenue – unless we’re ready to make the leap to an all-digital future.

And that’s a post for another day.

The Sun is typical of a mid-metro market newspaper in that even with the recent news, it remains the dominant media source for news, information and advertising in its market, but it has seen its position slip greatly over the years. When that slippage is reported in 6-month increments of a certain percentage, year-over-year, it’s hard to understand exactly how bad the story is. But, over time, the numbers are bracing.

The oldest reports currently available from ABC are from 1996, so that will be the base year.

In 1996, the Baltimore DMA had 906,100 occupied households. In the September, 1996 Audit Report, The Sun reports an average of 320,986 daily papers and 483,971 Sunday papers. In pure penetration numbers, that represents 35% for the daily and 58% for the Sunday. For every household in the Baltimore DMA, slightly more than one in three was touched by a daily Sun and a bit more than half of the households took a Sunday Sun.

Fast-forward to this week. Using population figures from the March 2008 Publisher’s Statement (not reported yet for September), there are 1,018,455 occupied households in the Baltimore DMA. In the September, 2008 figures reported by The Sun to ABC, the daily average for the paper was 218,923 and 350,640 on Sunday. By these numbers, daily household penetration had slipped to 21% and Sunday household penetration was at 39%.

Keeping in mind that the overall number of households in the Baltimore DMA grew 12% from 1996-2008, during this same period household penetration of the paper in the market dropped 40% on average on weekdays, and 33% on Sundays. While the Baltimore market added 112,355 households in that period, The Sun ended the period distributing 102,000 fewer papers on a typical weekday and 133,000 fewer papers on a typical Sunday.

Of course, in the same period, The Sun’s online audience went from nothing to more than three million visitors a month, from zero page views (The Sun’s web operation launched in September 1996) to more than 37 million a month in 2008. So it can be argued – credibly – that The Sun’s readership actually increased during the 12 years beginning in 1996.

But as robust as the online revenue stream is at The Sun and at similar metro news operations in other markets, the vast majority of revenue is still pegged to print. And when you look at the numbers across the past 12 years, it’s clear that local newspapers would be in a business-model crisis even without over-leveraged corporate owners or the current shaky economy.

Every indicator available to us says that print is not now and will not be the powerhouse driver of revenue it’s been historically. You can’t have your influence drop by 33-40% in 12 years and continue as if nothing’s changed. Slicing dollars and people off the cost structure isn’t enough. Newspapers need to start over, with a business model that acknowledges that the print cash cow has run dry and the digital future is still exchanging dollars for pennies as the audience and advertising moves.

Efforts like Jeff Jarvis’s recent summit on New Business Models for News and the News Innovation web site are good starts, but it’s time that we start treating this like the crisis it is.

This conversation could not have come at a more critical time. Circ. is down. Revenue is down. Staffing is down. If there is going to be journalism in the future, it’s time to change the model now.

Circulation is down, again, across the board at U.S. newspapers. According to the latest figures released this morning from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, overall daily circulation for the period ending September, 2008 was down 4.6%, and Sunday was down 4.8%

And these numbers were compiled before the financial panic of 2008. That will be taken into account in the numbers reported in March, 2009.

It’s time for creativity. Which major metro will transition to free distribution first? Who will convert to all-electronic? In any other business, this steady drumbeat of decline every six months would surely lead to a change in the gameplan that did more than redesign the packaging. Hint: A crisis gives you the cover to make bold moves, and this certainly qualifies as a crisis.

“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.

What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?

(Yes, we’d all like to swing in our newsroom, lay some boot heels on chests, hoist the black flag and change everything by the end of business on Monday — but the reality is, that ain’t happening unless you have a couple buckets of cash to buy a paper of your choice and a rusty saber.) So what are some realistic, real-world examples of free (or cheap) ways you can help fuel change at your newsroom.

Spend 15 minutes with the links on this page. You’ll get at least one idea you can use today.

And if I can talk my way into this party, here are some additional ideas I’d throw on the table:

1. Get to know local bloggers. Email them. Introduce yourself. Grab a coffee with. Link to them. You’ll find they have a good pulse on the community. It may be a different pulse than yours, but that’s a good thing. Be generous with your links to them, and you may find your organization with deeper tiest to the community.
2. Get in front of community groups. You and your reporters should be hanging with the Rotarians and the Community Organizers if you want to make a stronger connection with your local market. They’re just as plugged-in as the bloggers, but may not be blathering on about it on their blog. This is also a great jumping-off point for efforts to create a more-focused Citizen Journalism effort. What if you gave a Flip Mino (customized with your logo and message) to a neighborhood organization or school in exchange for a promise of weekly upates?
3. Encourage corrections. At the end of your postings/articles, ask a question: Did we get it right? Include a link to a form to add corrections, clarifications, and suggestions for further reporting. Great ideas and deeper connections follow.
4. Encourage your reporters to think like curators. I’ve beat this particular drum previously, so I’ll keep it short here. But you’ve got a roomful of subject-matter experts; having them just report is wasting more than half their brains.
5. Link. If you don’t link, you’re a dead-end.

Really?

In an awfully one-sided report on E&P, AP’s Kathleen Carroll says that going through with the move will burden local news organizations and their web teams, who will be unable to replace the service, not just in print, but in its multimedia offerings as well. “We are moving an ocean of content,” she says.

That’s great, but that doesn’t address the chief complaint against the AP: that they charge their members (a lot) for the privilege of giving away their locally-unique content in exchange for access to commodity national and world news now available through other channels.

The Associated Press is a collective – owned by the member organizations (read: newspapers) that exists to facilitate the sharing of news across the borders of cities and countries. So far, so good. If it didn’t exist, bloggers would probably be agitating for something like it.

But the problem is two-fold:

1. It was created at a time where its greatest benefit was carriage. Getting a news story or photo from halfway around the world was nothing short of a miracle. In 1849, when it was formed. Today, in the age of instant communication on the internet, the AP’s primary function has been rendered moot.

2. It unfairly treats original reporting by (mainly) newspaper companies as a commodity, laundering stories wholesale so that they can be picked up by competing media outlets (television, radio, local and national internet competitors) easily and with a clean conscience. This means that a story that a local paper may invest a week of time reporting can be re-reported with no effort – and no attribution – by the local tv station.

And, for this privilege, the current contracts have the newspapers paying dearly.

In a time when local newspapers are struggling to convince their markets that they’re valuable, the fact that the entire front page is leading the noon broadcast on Action News doesn’t help make the case.

Ultimately, there is a crying need for news organizations to share content. I think, though, that moves like Tribune’s to withdraw from the collective will become much more common in the coming months, as news organizations rethink the value of the AP in reaching the goal of better and more efficient news coverage. Also, bolder moves, such as those described by Scott Karp in his discussion of the link economy, may emerge as viable – and much less expensive – alternatives.

No matter what, the AP as we’ve known it, will not live to see 2010.

Seriously. If your calendar says 2008 or later, and you’re a metro-market news site, and you can’t handle a wave of traffic from Drudge or Digg or Slashdot or any of the popular linkfarms, you should rethink your server budget.

(Yeah. I know. I should be so lucky.)

UPDATE: I questioned posting this, because I thought it bordered on unfair. But now two hours later, the same article on tampabay.com is still being linked by Drudge and is still making their server swoon. Unsolicited advice: make it a static page for now.

UPDATE 2: As of 12:15 pm, the site appears to be stabilized. Glad they’re back.

But I like what they’re not doing even better: tagging every single story.

“We don’t use them for everything; there would be no point in geotagging Liverpool town hall for every council story, for example. But for location-specific articles they work really well.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the “everything would be geotagged to City Hall” argument against location metadata. Well, there you have it: just don’t tag those stories.

If the location metadata adds to the story, use it. If it adds unnecessary complexity, don’t

The map is here, though it seemed to be struggling with load when I checked last.

According to Valleywag, journo-tech whiz Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock.org and all-around likable oracle may be headed to Google, presumably to do some non-evil journalistic data stuff.

Google wants to buy Holovaty’s startup, we hear. Holovaty says that he’s had no conversations with Google, but did have lunch with a friend at Google’s campus last week, which he stresses was “a social matter.” The effort to buy his venture — there’s no “deal,” Holovaty tells us — has hit some kind of unusual hitch. It’s not clear what the holdup is.

This bears watching.

Edit to add: In the comments, Adrian points again to the Valleywag article where he “sets the record straight.” He says he was on the Google campus for a social visit. Valleywag quotes him, then goes on to talk about some “hitch” in the deal that Holovaty says doesn’t exist.

I’m going to err on the side of trusting Holovaty and call the Valleywag piece out for the unsourced bit of wishful thinking that it appears to be, until I see something more concrete.

(Original Holovaty photo by J.D. Lasica here)

It links. The Beast links, prominently.

That such a thing is noteworthy here at the tail end of 2008 is a sad commentary, but I’m going to be glass-half-full guy and celebrate it.

Just not today.

Today, in a stunning and sweeping mea non culpa, Greenslade, a journalism professor and former reporter and editor, looks at the shrinking audience for newspapers and echoes The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi in a clear and ringing voice: “Don’t blame us!”

There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves – the reporters, sub-editors, photographers, feature writers, columnists, page designers – cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the “products” that contain their work.

In case that’s not clear enough, here it is more succinctly, in his own words: “It isn’t our fault.”

Greenslade correctly points out many of the other factors that come into play – including the general economic turmoil, bad management and changing media-consumption habits – but for him to say that the content itself has no part – no part at all – in the decline strikes me as ludicrous, and a marker for how deluded some still are.

Any other business with declining market share since The Eisenhower Administration would at least consider that the product might be part of the problem.

Otherwise, you’re just blaming your audience for being too stupid to appreciate all you’ve done for them.

UPDATE: Steve Yelvington, as usual, has a thoughtful and reasoned take on this topic:

The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution — in fact, they could be the last mass medium standing.

But you can’t do it with a 20 percent market penetration, and that’s what you’ll have if you continue producing a 1968 newspaper in 2008.