Nov 29, 2008
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.
Nov 23, 2008
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.
Nov 18, 2008
Print less to save the paper and the business
This is just about the most challenging and possibly true sentence I’ve read in weeks:
Two fat newspapers each week and a robust web platform will have more impact than five or six skinny papers and a site that’s not foremost in the newsroom’s mind.
Martin Langeveld, who blogs at News After Newspapers, makes the case that local newspapers are on the road to ruin if they continue to publish every day in print. His recommendation: Print two big papers weekly, on Thursday and Saturday. Profits do shrink under his new model, but at the end of five years, he says they’re much more robust than they would have been following the existing 7-day model to its slow death.
I do hope he posts his spreadsheets, though, so we can all poke and prod at the assumptions.
People like Langeveld are reinventing an industry, idea by idea.
Read the entire proposal here.
Nov 14, 2008
There is great hope for journalism in people like David Cohn
Recent posts have been especially dark on my part. Which isn’t entirely representative. I believe that journalism – especially that journalism practiced by the organizations that today publish daily metro papers – is essential, and can have a very bright future if we stop thinking about the last 150 years and focus on maybe just the next 10.
And let the smart people lead.
For instance, people like David Cohn, creator of Spot.us.
I am writing this post physically exhausted but emotionally charged. I feel like a lion. As if I could talk down the curmudgeonist of curmudgeons. Not because I know the answer(s) – but because if we can’t even talk those people down, then we might as well just crawl into a whole and give up. F- that! We are moving forward with or without them.
The answers are out there in every startup (journalism focused or otherwise), community, blog, micro-blogging, micro-financing and CMS on the web. The internet is ours for the taking if we only reach out and grab it with as many hands as possible.
Breathe deeply. This stuff is good for what ails you.
Nov 13, 2008
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.
Nov 10, 2008
Saving newspapers from the scrap heap: a plan
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.
Nov 5, 2008
Why people had to have a paper today, and what does that tell us about a business model?
Photo by Adam Fagan
I’m hearing and reading a lot today from people, largely inside the newspaper business, who say today’s coast-to-coast sellout of newspapers proves that people really do respect the power of the newspaper and that the public maintains an emotional connection with the paper that lives just below the surface, ready to be reborn with the right stimulus.
I think that overreaches. I do, however, believe we were shown some key facts today that just might serve as guideposts for newspapers looking to pump some life back into the print edition. Here’s what I believe we saw:
If you have created something people want…
And if it better suits their purposes in paper form than in electronic form...
Then they will buy your paper.
Notice there’s nothing in there about emotional connections or even journalism. The people buying papers today had an emotional connection with Barack Obama, not the paper. They used the paper as a permanent, undeniable record of the moment. Look how many people you can find in flickr posing with the paper, in the mirror image of a hostage photo taken to prove the captive was still alive on a particular day. The paper better serves this purpose than a print-out of a web page. It’s more real, it’s cheap, and it is easily portable through time.
Of course, we all joked that this solves the newspaper industry’s business model crisis: simply have Barack Obama win the election every single day from now until the end of time. Funny. But we need to ask how we can fulfill the logical flowchart above in smaller ways on a daily basis.
We spend so much time thinking about how to make digital better than print, but if we’re going to keep print alive or even turn it around, we need to ask ourselves in what ways can print be a better delivery vehicle than digital? Are there ways in which the daily paper can better suit some readers’ need than digital can? And, if so, is that how we are focusing our newspaper efforts?
What do you think?
Me, elsewhere