Wishful thinking, newspaper edition

From the wishful thinking dept. at Editor and Publisher.:

Returning to print shouldn’t be seen as taking a step back. Many readers still rely heavily on the print edition. A Pew Research Center study found that around half of newspaper readers in three U.S. metropolitan cities (Denver, Colo., Macon, Ga., and Sioux City, Iowa) only read in print.

With the saturation of news, the toxicity of online harassment, and the amount of poor Web experiences, readers will soon want to come back to print. This resurgence must take place if we want to keep print around for many more years, and publishers can accomplish that by immersing readers—not with virtual reality headsets—but with ink on their hands.

That's at the bottom of a mishmash, way-too-long piece that tries to make the case that poor woeful newspapers are being victimized again by technology, this time ad blockers (BTW, there's an easy way to get around Forbes' ad-blocking message and many other publishers').

That Pew statistic? It's a nice way of deception. Remember, it says half of all newspaper readers. It doesn't say what's happening to the overall number of newspaper readers (in other words, if there are still two newspaper readers and one reads only in print, you've met that stat -- but it's hardly a viable business model).

I'm a big fan of "newspapers" if you mean the term to refer to robust news orgs. If you mean it to refer to ink on paper, however, I'd like to introduce you to the dozens of students I interact with every semester. You know, the future higher income, higher educated readers your advertisers want. "Newspaper" is not in their daily universe.

This, of course, from the same people who have been telling themselves for years that as people age and buy houses, have kids, etc., they'll start reading newspapers -- despite every bit of solid social science research that's debunked that.

So how's that working out?

Allyson Bird's "Why I left news"

Allyson Bird, one of the best students I've ever had, writes at length about why she left journalism. You should read it.

I think there's a lot to chew on here:

I don’t think the Internet killed newspapers. Newspapers killed newspapers.

People like to say that print media didn’t adapt to online demand, but that’s only part of it. The corporate folks who manage newspapers tried to comply with the whims of a thankless audience with a microscopic attention span. And newspaper staffers tried to comply with the demands of a thankless establishment that often didn’t even read their work. Everyone lost.

People came to demand CNN’s 24-hour news format from every news outlet, including local newspapers. And the news outlets nodded their heads in response, scrambling into action without offering anything to the employees who were now expected to check their emails after hours and to stay connected with readers through social media in between stories.

There was never such a thing as an eight-hour workday at newspapers, but overtime became the stuff of legend. You knew better than to demand fair compensation. If any agency that a newspaper covered had refused to pay employees for their time, the front-page headlines wouldn’t cease. But when it came to watching out for themselves, the watchdogs kept their heads down.

Combine it with the latest from the State of the Media report and it's observation that "nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to," and I think it's time to reassess.

 One of the things I'm going to suggest to the S.C. Press Association this weekend: Do Less With Less - but do it better.

I think our audience is telling us very simply: We can get the "more" if we want it very easily. But if you want our loyalty and engagement, the formula isn't more, but better - do what you do well. Show us you care -- about us and about your own profession. And while you're at it, show us you're having some fun, because to read most news sites and papers these days is no-fun city.

(There's an interesting debate about some of this at Slate between author Matthew Yglesias and the reaction by the commenters on his article that argues journalism has never been in better shape.)

Death of Newspapers Documentary: 'Black & White and Dead All Over'

Well, if the trailer is any indication, Black & White and Dead All Over should be an interesting documentary.

Two things seem to be apparent from the trailer

• There's going to be a serious amount of "feel good" here for traditional journalists (hey, I wanted to get up and salute).
• It appears to center on the Philly Newspapers upheaval (though Bob Woodward, for instance, makes the obligatory Watergate reference).

It also appears the bogeymen in this are those greedy or clueless "owners" -- you know, the "hedge funds." As one person sniffs in the trailer: "We're dealing with people who are not necessarily newspaper people, whereas we are newspaper people."

Some other pithy quotes:
"When you're dealing with hedge funds, you never know what's gonna happen next." (So true - just ask the tens of thousands of other people who face the same thing in businesses all across the country. Let's grow up, shall we?)

"They sold our iconic building." Yes, that's what you often do when you transform from an industrial business to a service one, which is what journalism is becoming. You try to get rid of as many fixed costs as possible. You work out of a storefront or your living room, if necessary. What does it matter where you work if your journalism is outstanding, accessible and worth it? This is the sort of edifice complex (including the still-lingering idea that the only true journalism has to, somehow, come out on dead trees) that has plagued us for years.

Here's the problem if this is all the film is.

1. "Journalists" (me included) are not innocent lambs in all this. Yes, 99.44% of them I've ever known stand for truth, justice, and ... well, you know. But they also have, to whatever extent (we can debate how much - I don't think it's as much as some critics would contend), been resistant to change until the Great Recession forced the issue. It's easy to get religion when you are staring death in the eye.
2. The big bad owners aren't necessarily the bogeymen either. That's too simplistic. It's a business, not a charity (notwithstanding some of the outstanding nonprofits that have sprung up). The comment about those folks not being from newspapers shows an enormous naivete on the part of those making it and a tremendous tribal instinct that has been part of the problem.
3. Whether journalists want to acknowledge it or not, they never really had the great trust of their audience. There were a few small windows when the polls looked good, but those were fleeting on the grand time scale. By and large, we are a nuisance to be tolerated -- on all sides -- and as soon as people could vote with their feet, they did. Trust, credibility, whatever you want to call it is no longer institutional but transactional. Put another way, it's earned, what have you done for me today, what have you done that's actually worth paying for? And that still hasn't penetrated significant segments of this business.

The "death" of newspapers (apparently defined here as major metros) is a complicated sociological and economic phenomenon. Complaining, as some do in the trailer, that people don't realize what they're losing reminds me of the guy in the cellphone commercial who complains about not being a winner (his screen's too small to play the game), and the old woman sitting next to him at bus stop looks up and says, no, "you're a whiner."

As Paul Gillin at Newspaper Death Watch notes, the filmmakers, Lenny Feinberg and Chris Foster, haven't put out much information beyond the trailer.

Let's hope the necessary shallowness of the trailer doesn't reflect the shallowness of the documentary. If it does, "Black & White and Dead All Over" will be more chest-thumping heat than providing light - ironic given newspapers' love of that and similar mottoes.

On the other hand, if you want a short video to try to inspire your students and reaffirm your ideals in journalism, definitely play them this.

Best line from the trailer: "I live in a game preserve of corruption."

Go team!


Update 1/12 
The site now has an explanation up:

Black and White and Dead All Over is an in-depth look at the newspaper industry as it struggles to remain financially viable and to keep the presses rolling. Through the voices of prominent journalists including Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and David Carr of the New York Times, we reveal an industry in the midst of a financial death spiral, as readers abandon print for online news sources. We see publishers and editors desperately trying to create a sustainable business model for their dying papers. Our film examines the importance journalism has on our society by following two fearless investigators into the badlands of North Philadelphia. With the economic crisis in the newsroom threatening to shutter their struggling tabloid, these courageous women bring down a dangerous and corrupt narcotics squad. If the American newspaper dies, who will conduct investigative journalism, who will hold public officials accountable?

And a new trailer that's a little more low-key

TRAILER: Black & White and Dead All Over TAINTED JUSTICE from Lenny Feinberg on Vimeo.

Support reporting

Columbia Journalism Review and Steven Waldman, special assistant at the FCC who authored its report last year warning about the dangers of declining journalism resources in local markets, have teamed up to try to bring the point forcefully home to the masses.

Check out http://cjr.org/supportreporting/

There's also a neat video that goes with it.

If you want to understand newspapers' future ...

Then you have to read the interview with Media General CEO Marshall Morton in RichmondBizSense.com about why Media General agreed to sell most of its papers to Warren Buffett.

Say all you want about "Mismanagement General" - and there's plenty that can be said. But Morton lays some stark truths on the line:

Although the bulk of its cash flow — 87 percent in the first quarter —comes from its TV stations, owning newspapers put Media General at a disadvantage when it came time to renegotiate its huge debt load.

That blindsided Media General, Morton said.

“The banks who had lent us the money no longer wanted to lend to media companies,” Morton said. “They just don’t have confidence in newspapers. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the value of newspapers in communities, but if you can’t get capital …”

And this:

Publishing revenues are down about 50 percent over the past five years, Morton said, but much of the costs— printing presses, delivery drivers, etc. — have held steady.

“There was nowhere to hide from these revenue declines,” Morton said.

“Over the past five years, our first thought was that this was heavily due to the recession and, like many other recessions in the past, that this was a cycle. You tighten your belt, freeze hiring and even drop the number of people.

“So we went through a couple years thinking that was the way to handle it. But it kept going.”

It wasn’t until the second quarter of 2011, Morton says, “that we realized the world had changed.”

I don't think Buffett is all nostalgic and doesn't understand the newspaper business as people like Clay Shirky suggest. In fact, I don't think he really bought newspapers at all - he bought cash flow from properties that, in general because of their location, are likely to throw off decent cash for at least a decade. He bought them at a fire-sale price. And he got the real estate and a 20 percent stake in Media General's broadcast operations as well (just as has often been noted, McDonald's is not so much a hamburger company as a real estate holding company that happens to sell hamburgers.

So when he's done getting he cash, he can flip the real estate (if not before)

Meanwhile, over at John Robinson's blog, in response to his skeptical post about paywalls, we continue to get from some of the comments the same old take-it-on-faith rubbish that as the younger generation gets older, has families, etc., they will become newspaper readers. Rip Van Winkle can't top that. Every stick of research in the past 20 years shows that each generational cohort reads the newspaper less and does not convert as it ages. Back to my rant last week about journalists failing to even read the research about their industry - and then waking up surprised.

A different way to look at new community newspapers study

A new study from the Reynolds Institute and the National Newspaper Association is being framed as "readers in areas served by community newspapers continue to prefer the community newspaper as their sources of local news and advertising."


From the release:

The survey, in its sixth year, shows consistent trends.  

Readers prefer the printed copy to the online version, with 48 percent saying they never read the local news online. 

They prefer to receive advertising through the newspaper (51%) instead of on the Internet (11%). And only about a quarter of respondents said they had found local news through a mobile device in the past 30 days. Slightly more (38%) said they had received local shopping information by mobile device.  

They also have a strong preference for government accountability through newspaper public notice, with 80 percent saying the government should be required to publish notices in the newspaper.

Let me suggest a slightly different interpretation. If a quarter of your market said it was using a device to access your product -- in this case mobile -- would that be an "only" to you or a cause for management to start thinking strategically in that area?

If more than a third said they received local shopping information on a platform -- mobile -- and the suggestion was that perhaps not all of them are going to your site, would that be a cause for concern? Or are you willing to write off more than a third of your audience - a segment likely to grow? (Unfortunately, the release talks about a "trend," but provides no trend data or a link to the time series raw data files. You should also read the footnote to the study carefully because the methodology has changed a bit.)


Yes, it's clear community papers continue to have an important place in the media mix of consumers, but I don't think it's all unicorns and rainbows as the release might suggest with this quote:

"The survey shows a majority of respondents believe that the newspaper does a better job of providing background and depth on stories essential to citizens,” Anfinson said. “Further, the newspaper is more useful to them personally than any other news source. It not only highlights the strong bond between local communities and their newspapers, but demonstrates that people do value good journalism."

If I'm running a business, I'm not willing to give up a quarter or a third of my market, yet I've sat in many a meeting in recent years where community publishers defiantly act as though digital is the enemy or, if they have digital assets, seem largely clueless about them. Bad move.


(Also published on the Community Journalism Interest Group blog.)

RIP Gannett's 'Moms Like Me'

At one time not too long ago, niche sites like Gannett's "Mom's Like Me" were being touted as one of the ways to pump needed life, and revenue, into traditional newsrooms' flagging online efforts.

Such sites, not branded to the paper or TV station, were a core part of the Newspaper Next initiative from the American Press Institute. Now, word that Moms Like Me is being shuttered shows the strong headwinds both inside the industry and outside that continue to make such initiatives difficult.

Steve Buttry, one of the people tasked by API with trying to spread the "N2" gospel (and one of those I respect for trying to effect real change), put it this way in a recent blog post:

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

N2 was a worthy effort that delivered what the newspaper business needed. We presented tools and concepts for newspaper companies to focus more clearly on meeting the needs of their communities with multiple products doing valuable jobs for businesses and communities. We spurred development of some niche products, some of them still in operation. We guided some innovative projects. But the default settings of the newspaper industry were too strong for anyone to embrace the thorough organizational transformation that N2 championed.

It wasn't just the industry, of course. Social media, like Facebook, has moved in on at least part of the space these sites hoped to occupy.

It highlights, for me, trad news orgs' continuing struggle with the "community" part of the three-legged stool necessary for success online (content, utility and community) Many of these sites were put up more in an "if you build it, they will come" mode without significant input from the hosting newsrooms.

It's not all Facebook. It's also a lesson that it's tough to pick niches that can work on the scale that a lot of chains feel is needed to generate acceptable ROI. (And if you think about it, there's a bit of an oxymoron there - a "scalable niche"?)

High school sports appears to be viable, and for now at least Gannett is keeping its HighSchoolSports.net.

But is this best done on the national scale Gannett is trying? Or more on a local scale as the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News has done admirably with its Pigskin Review? We'll see ...

Newspapers: Some things never change

From Sean Ireland's latest column in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin:

A group of newspaper publishers came to some clear conclusions about their future as they gathered for an SNPA symposium.

They agreed that “newspapers of the coming age will be smaller, better-edited, higher-priced and able to hold their own against any kind of competition.”

The publishers predicted higher costs, decreasing revenue, rising taxes and a growing threat of punitive legislation. Perhaps most importantly, they closed with this: “Newspapers should give more thought to their public relations. We need friends.”

“The Newspaper of the Future” was the discussion topic at the SNPA meeting, and though it was held 70 years ago – in 1941 – the conclusions drawn then seem no less relevant for the newspaper industry now.

Sigh - some things never change.

Will print be dead by 2020?

Russell Viers contends much of print will be dead by 2020 - and he's making the argument aimed at community papers, not the big metros. Interesting debate at his blog with Kevin Slimp and others. Worth considering the graphs.

How newspapers resemble the auto industry

In this month's Tennessee Press, the publication put out by the Tennessee Press Association, Jeff Fishman, publisher of the Tullahoma News, speaks truth to power in his withering comparison of the newspaper and auto industries.

Reprinted by permission:

Newspapers should learn from G.M.
Jeff Fishman

The U.S. auto industry could have saved itself earlier by paying attention to the way its business was eroding and listening to the people who were stealing its market share. U.S. auto executives came back from Japan and refused to transform their work environments from lumbering, stodgy bastions of tradition into places where workers
were encouraged to be creative and innovative.

The situation bears a strong resemblance to the newspaper industry. Let’s take a look at the places where the news industry and the auto industry screwed up:

In the ’80s and ’90s, sales declined as customers were turned off by shoddy quality.

Auto industry: anyone who drove a U.S.-made car in the ’80s knows what I’m talking about. Everything about the cars was sub-par. The seats were uncomfortable; the controls made little sense and were hard to deal with. These were minor issues, compared to the engines seizing and misfiring, the electrical system shorting out, the windows not rolling up (or down), the doors sagging on their hinges.

Newspaper industry: the buyouts and mergers started and with the accountants in charge instead of passionate content creators, many papers gutted staffs and started to run big colorful graphics and lots more wire copy, instead of local content for and about their neighbors. Most papers had a monopoly position in their markets and could pretty
much be assured of making a profit, no matter what they did. Meanwhile, the readers were starting to notice that their newspapers were lacking…how should I say this…news.

The workers felt ignored and belittled, so bad attitudes and fear took over.

Auto industry: the line workers had no power to offer suggestions and, indeed, were punished for speaking up. All that mattered to management was churning out enough cars to meet the quotas, no matter how bad the quality.

Newspaper industry: a culture of irrelevance took hold in newsrooms. The reporters knew the bean counters didn’t care about real news; the accountants just wanted something that would generate money and not get them sued. Many journeyman news professionals I met would, with little encouragement, go off about the corporate “suits” that were putting the vise on the newsrooms to “pop a number.” Reporters that dared to try to make suggestions about long-term changes (like less coverage of city/county government and more enterprising reporting like the underlying reasons for the continuing erosion of middle-class opportunities) were ignored or worse, discarded.

Temporary economic bubble created easy profits thus postponing needed change.

Auto industry: America’s “let’s consume as much oil as we can” faction pushed through tax relief in the early ’00s that meant people who leased a “light truck over 6,000 pounds” could take advantage of tax breaks. What this did was support the Big Three, despite their declining market share. The Big Three were making so much money from SUVs, because they were pretty cheap to make, and Detroit was able to charge about $10-$20,000 more for them than a typical sedan. And, of course, when the tax break ran out and gas prices skyrocketed, they were without a viable product to sell as consumers looked for more efficient cars.

Newspaper industry: the mortgage/real estate boom created a huge advertising windfall for newspapers. Many real estate sections were often larger than the rest of the paper. Thousands of pages of expensive classified ads, paid for by realtor estate agents who were so awash in cash that they didn’t care what the cost was generated huge profits. Of course, the rest of the classified business was under siege at that time. When the real estate market imploded, advertisers abandoned newspapers, looking for cheaper ways to sell their products. Thus newspapers were also left without a viable product to sell.

The industry blamed others rather than conducting an honest self-appraisal.

Auto industry: the Detroit execs blamed Consumer Reports for pointing out that the cars they were building were utterly without redeeming community value (remember the Chevette or the Chrysler Cordoba). They claimed the people rating cars were biased towards the Japanese and were unfairly criticizing patriotic Americans. The U.S. cars were better, if only people would realize that! The industry was in complete denial about how the auto-buying public had turned against it as a result of its collective apathy. Long gone was the nostalgia of people who fondly remembered their first car as independence. They were fed up with cars that broke down as a result of shoddy engineering and the industry’s appetite for greater profits.

Newspaper industry: many publishers viewed competition from radio, cable news, shoppers and yes, the Internet, as being anti-newspaper. The truth was, they had stopped listening to the market, which was craving instantaneous, colorful, creative solutions for news delivery. Not listening to the market was a complete departure from the reason they were successful in the first place. They were successful because they listened and then responded to what they learned.

Transportation, not cars; information, not newspapers

Let’s stop building SUVs and listen to our customers and respond with relevant, thoughtful, engaging, vibrant products that meet the needs of our readers. The public’s desire for credible information has not and will not change even though the delivery method might. Newspapers have been a part of American community life since 1690 and will continue in one form or another for a long time as long as we continue to invest in our core product, information.

The US auto industry finally realized they are in the transportation business, not the auto business. They created innovative, solution-oriented products designed to respond to market changes. The quicker newspapers embrace the fact they are information brokers, not in the traditional newspaper business, the better off the country will be. Our customers, both advertising and readers, are not hesitant about expressing their opinions, positive and negative, on how we are doing our job. News organizations just need to listen and react to their customers’ desires.

For more than 300 years, newspapers have endured the scrutiny of many and will continue to bring relevant news to the citizens of the communities they serve, in print, online with video and audio, or some yet-to-be-realized technology. Newspapers must continue to illustrate a commitment to our trusted customers by respecting tradition while embracing change.

Quick read - culture change in newsrooms

From the recommended reading list, a blog post by Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association, about the need for culture change in news orgs.

Strip away the predictable anti-union, the CEO-as-hero stuff (Ex: Because as easy as it is to blame CEOs and shareholders for the mess our industry is in, the dirty truth is many of them are fighting daily for change — but their companies are populated by newsrooms, pressrooms, unions, and fiefdoms that are finding new and innovative ways to stop or slow the change), and Wilkinson makes some points worth heeding:

• Our industry’s response has been to cut people and newsprint, often without regard for priorities or the customer.
• The top publishers refuse to collaborate on anything meaningful such as industry innovation, incubation, or experimentation.
• When the analyst community five years ago gave publicly traded newspapers a green light to lower profit margins to heavily invest in digital, sales, marketing and research, publishers dabbled but mostly passed.
• The old beacons to whom we have turned in the past for inspiration and guidance — Editor & Publisher, Presstime, Deutsche Bank and other fantastic analysts who covered the industry — are all dead, dying, or irrelevant.

Wilkinson acknowledges the "crap deals that hamstrung their companies with debt" (help me out there; those were done by the CEOs, not the unions, etc., right, Earl?). And he lays out a good list of things that still need to be thought about more: figure out what differentiates you; invest in research; embrace the crowd; sell market solutions, not space; be willing to fail, but quickly; etc.

To Wilkinson's credit, he has been at the forefront of trying to bridge the research of academia and the needs of the industry. That's a herculean task on both sides of the aisle.

The INMA is no one's vision of a "liberal" trade group, so when it steps up and says it's time to pay attention - it's time to pay attention.

Media Culture, part deux - Filloux's take

It must be media culture day on the blogging calendar, and I missed it.

Earlier, I noted with some minor skepticism INMA's discovery that news/media organization culture is probably more important than trying to bolt on a strategy or, worse, trying to dictate a culture from the top.

In another aspect of this multifaceted gem of an issue, Frederic Filloux, in his Monday Note, does a good job of laying out why media and tech have such trouble just getting along. 

(I'm a little snarkier than he - I think a lot of it is the studied disdain, or at least suspicion, that media - and especially journalists - have projected for anyone who seems "smart." It's the old street wise, fedora-wearing idealized image of the "Journalist" outsmarting the more schooled - if not necessarily erudite - business and political classes.)

Filloux (whose post grows out of his presentation at the INMA World Congress - so not so coincidental after all) has some observations to chew on from those on both sides of the aisle:

“You guys, are geared to compete rather than collaborate. You’re not getting that collaboration is the new name for the game”. “Even among yourselves, you are unable to cooperate on key industrial issues, shooting yourselves in the foot as a result”. “Your internal organizations are still plagued by a culture of silos. The winners will be the ones  who break silos”.

Tech executives also underline they see media companies as co-managed with unions – the consequence being a wage system that discourages rewarding valuable individuals. Media companies are also viewed as having a tech-averse culture. “Media don’t understand that their business has become engineering-intensive. Their investment in technology is grossly insufficient”.

Symmetrically, I collected adjectives summing up media people’s perception of the tech world. “Arrogant, condescending”: true, old media people always have the feeling of being looked down upon by the guys in chinos. “Nerdy, left-brained”: well, it goes along with the flip-flops and the hoodie… “Wealthy”, (I’ll come to that later). “Alien to the notion of value for content”: also true; and that might be the most difficult obstacle to a reconciliation. ...

The only identical critic, evenly spread on both sides, concerns bureaucracy: medias point at intricate technostructures staffed with legions of people working on the same subject; tech people mock news media needing six weeks to sign the innocuous non-disclosure agreement covering a routine project.

That sounds like a prescription for Kumbaya, eh?

Yet, as Filloux notes, tech companies need media. Despite all the predictions that a big tech company could buy a media company or two and be done with it, it largely has not happened - because the cultures are different, and producing software and hardware is not the same vein of creativity as producing a hit publication or show.

Likewise, as he observes: Medias have a lot to learn from tech companies. The way they conduct projects, their relentless drive for innovation, their bold imagination, coupled with a systematic and agile “Test & Learn” approach…  For the news industry, drawing inspiration from such a culture is a matter o[f] survival.

Filloux argues for "rapprochement" between the two. Perhaps we should look for detente first. After all, the first, hesitant cross-cultural exchanges eventually became the things that helped thaw the Cold War.

INMA's Wilkinson: Culture trumps strategy

Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia (formerly Newspaper) Marketing Association, professes surprise at the theme coming out of the INMA World Congresss - that changing newsroom culture trumps strategy.

Or, to put it another way, all the paywalls in the world and all the gimmicks and marketing strategies don't mean scratch if your organization continues to project the kind of thinking about deadlines, story forms, priorities, incentives, etc., that had become standard in newsrooms for about 45 years (I say 45 because, really, it was from the 1960s on that we began having that strange confluence of factors that produced halcyon days for newsrooms until the bottom fell out in this decade).

I like Wilkinson. I've chatted him up at j-prof conventions, and he was the main force behind trying to get AEJMC to produce more research relevant to newsrooms (though whether news managers ever read what was there already and was pretty damning was always open to question).

But forgive me if I suggest that INMA and its members are coming a little late to the party. Research on newsroom sociology and culture has for decades, and certainly in the past decade, pointed out the corrosive effect of existing culture and the tremendous challenges - but also urgency - needed to change it.

Here are Wilkinson's take-aways:

1. Separate the business model from culture in print vs. digital discussions. Or, as he puts it: The emerging consensus from New York was that a digital business model can't replace a print business model. Instead, the digital model must be additive to the print model — if for no other reason than the inclusion of print is part of a publisher's USP vs. media competitors. I suspect he'll get his share of blowback on that - that it still elevates the declining print model to the detriment of digital. But in the context he puts it - that it is a way to differentiate a full-service media organization - it can make some sense.
2. Encourage speed, place small bets, be willing to fail (fast). How long have those watching the evolution of digital been saying this? At least since 2006 and API's "Newspaper Next" project. So far the results have been, shall we say, less than stunning. I'll believe it when I really see a newsroom culture that allows failure. In fact, if there is one defining point for me, it is that. But that raises all sorts of questions. For instance, can there be journalism fail as part of that? If so, to what extent will it be tolerated? It seems to me that's the tough nut. Is it desirable or even possible to have a split organizational personality: Well, yes, you can fail on the "business" side in the name of taking chances. But on the journalism side, nope. It's that fear of failure that makes news organizations still even reluctant to handle corrections with the comprehensiveness and alacrity that digital allows. It still pervades many newsrooms, and, like a poison gas, it seeps through all layers of the organization.
3. Transparency will change your mindset. Let's just say Wilkinson's concern with transparency is not quite the same as others writing in the same space.  His seems to be a marketing perspective. The [Financial Times] paywall allowed for a transparency in viewing its audience and segmenting its readers based on their engagement — in turn, driving its audience and advertising strategy in ways once thought unimaginable. INMA is hearing this repeatedly from publishers who are implementing paywalls. While the user data is overwhelming, there are mind-bending lessons that are emerging from people willing to pay for digital content — distinctly different lessons than from people only willing to view your content if it's free. Let me put it this way: people willing to pay for digital content are not reading what you are producing. Your differentiators online are different from your differentiators in print which are different from your differentiators on the mobile.
4. Relentlessly focus on differentiators. Changing the corporate culture to focus on strategic differentiators and cut away non-differentiators was another recurring conference theme. Actually, as coldly marketing as that sounds, I rather think it's something important journalists need to think about - how is what I am doing different from the others and how does it bring utility to users/readers? It's utility that sells in digital, rarely content alone.

All in all, if this means executives are coming around to the idea that you can't a) dictate culture (or strategy, for that matter) from the top down and b) you can't just bolt new ideas onto existing newsroom cultures, then progress is being made.

Worth reading: Ken Doctor's predictions

Ken Doctor has a thoughtful post on all those things we "know" that are likely to be tested in the next year.

Worth Reading - Kramer's take on the future shape of media

At Seeking Alpha, former Marketwatch and CBS Digital head Larry Kramer has what I think is a pretty well-measured, solid take on where media is heading. To sum: Lots of different pay models, focused content.

Nothing tremendously new, but it's very well laid out.

The once and future Charlotte Observer

Walker Lundy has written a wonderful - if bittersweet can be called wonderful - piece for Charlotte Magazine on the wrenching times at the Observer.

The vacant desks at the Observer today sit like tombstones for the departed staffers and monuments to better times in the news business. It is the same in hundreds of newspaper and television newsrooms across the country. The impact is painfully clear: The Charlotte Observer is no longer the paper it was and likely never will be again.

The 124-year-old Observer has been the scourge of crooked Carolina politicians and winner of dozens of national awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes and a share of a fourth, and a finalist in 2008. But today, with 100 fewer journalists chasing the news, readers are learning less about how Charlotte works—and when it doesn’t. Because information is the lifeblood of a democracy, a healthy, aggressive paper can be among a city’s most important institutions, whether or not readers always like what it publishes. A newspaper is a combination blabbermouth and conscience for a community. No one else can play those roles as effectively.

For all the hue and cry over the cuts, this story is not just about that. It’s also about a newspaper that is scrambling to reinvent itself. Even as its staff shrinks, the Observer is experimenting with new ways of news gathering and reporting, exploring previously unthinkable collaborations, and trying to work with the Internet instead of fight against it. It’s too early to know if any of the new strategies are long-term solutions, but at least the paper isn’t going down without a fight. ...

Of course, much the same thing could be said of many McClatchy papers, including The State here in Columbia, where you could fire a shotgun in the newsroom these days and have trouble hitting anyone.

Having said that, however, the paper did a wonderful piece of journalism this weekend looking at how state budget cuts are starting to affect health and safety issues such as restaurant inspections, truck inspections and forest fire protection.

With any luck - and call me skeptical - it will start a long-term conversation about what exactly the functions of government should be.

Worth Reading - are American newspapers the odd ones out?

Earl Wilkinson of the International News Marketing Association, has some interesting observations from Australia, where those in the news industry suggested America is not the best example of newspapers' future.

Among the observations he sends on:

The two trains of thought among publishers worldwide are that:

• The United States is an early warning system of consumer and advertiser behaviour.
• Or, that the U.S. publishers have so under-invested in their print products that they have no root system when disruption hits. Thus, the U.S. story is avoidable in other parts of the world. ...

 What the Americans get wrong in print, I was told, is projecting a templated, soulless environment for the consumer who wants to slowly browse. In the past decade, this is an increasingly gaunt-looking print environment reflecting poorly on local media brands that haven't gotten a workout in decades. While quality print newspapers should be platforms for deep engagement, U.S. publishers have created tools to get readers in and out of their print pages in shorter and shorter time increments.
Advertisers won't invest in such a platform, my friend said. They don't want to be associated with platforms devoid of sizzle.

Getting a journalism job - the view from London

Ed Caesar ruminates in a column from the London Sunday Times this past week about why so many folks want to enter journalism school even as he exposes the underbellied reality of getting a job in the newspaper business these days.

It's a good read, filled, of course, with delightful Britishisms (if you can ignore that the paper's Web publishing system seems to have randomly cut off the first letters of several sentences).

The shortcoming is that he frames it entirely in the concept of the newspaper - and the British nationals. Journalism is quite a bit more these days, which might explain why there is the demand.

Still, one truism remains - it's no place to get rich.

E&P RIP

A sign of the times ....

Nielsen Media says it will stop publishing Editor & Publisher.

Losing E&P is a loss, no matter how many have derided it as old media. Judging from the number of online pointers to its articles, it remains a valuable resource.

E&P now has its own announcement up. And Columbia Journalism Review has an interview with E&P Editor Greg Mitchell - he expresses some outside hope that outrage will at least keep the Web site operating.

Meanwhile, American Journalism Review drops from six to four issues a year.

And Harper's piece "Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper" is now online.

Seminal readings in the new age of journalism

At a great panel discussion at the Columbia Social Media Club this week, I suggested four seminal readings that, if you read and understand them, you will be able to filter out so much that is white noise these days.

As I think about it, there really are six, and I keep coming back to them because I think they stand the test of time:

The Next Great American Newspaper (2003), David Gelernter
He was trying to promote his own way to organize the Web, but in the process Gelernter hits on what I think is the essential point of the Web -- "story" becomes a slice in time, not a silo of text. We still don't get this particularly well. If we did, it might well upend the entire way we do journalism. I've built a Newsplex simulation around this called the "Acme Widget strike." It takes participants through various phases of the story, starting with the initial word at 11 p.m. (story's probably quick text, some file photos, etc. .... going to the first plant to walk out in Ireland overnight (story - wire service text) ... to having a video crew at the plant gates in the morning (the story is the video stream, later broken up into clips - why do we need much text if we just display those clips on the front page or on a microsite devoted to the strike? But the real game-changer is that midday your best reporter gets a database that lists everyone on strike. So what is your "story" now? The old way would be to go out and interview a bunch of people and write a "story."

But in the new world the best "story" might be a map - mouse over each neighborhood and get a summary of how many are affected, maybe links to video interviews or short stories, etc. Think about things like Halloween decoration stories, etc. A map is your best "story." Do you have enough kahunas next July Fourth to front a mouseover map of the local celebrations on your site (barring nothing blowing up, of course), instead of the usual rivers of text from the wire service and warmed-over features you've done. After all, isn't that why most people are likely to be coming to your site for those few hours?

The News Diamond (2007), Paul Bradshaw
Bradshaw has proposed a model that will really help you conceive of how journalism might function in the social media age. Of all the suggestions I've read and considered, Bradshaw's has the most clarity and potential of all. Still, you'll probably have to read it a couple of times to get its full import.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (2009), Clay Shirky
A lot of ink has been spilled over this already, and as with many of Shirky's writings, you'll want to read it two or three times and let what he's suggesting roll around in the recesses of your brain. The takeaway for me, however, is his discussion of what Dan Conover refers to as the interregnum. Shirky is the first one I've seen to really crystallize the idea that much of our "problem" or confusion right now is that we are in the middle of this unknowable period, where technology is advancing and unfolding at a pace really too rapid for us to absorb and understand it.

While this is often portrayed as a time of great business opportunity, and it is, reality is that it is also deadly for long-term business survival - you know, the kind of thing most people, including journalists, count on to get them at least part way to their retirement. Shirky points out that we don't know a lot about what happened during the last great communications interregnum either, the years after Gutenberg perfected his press until the modern form of the book was invented. It was a 50- to 70-year period of upheaval, not unlike that we are going through today (one wonders if the monks issued warnings as dire as some journalists have).

But the approximately 150-year period of stability (and ossification) we have had in the communications industry was unnatural. I suspect the meteoric change we have now will, at some point, level off a bit and we'll coalesce around some technologies, at least for a few years. It will never - at least in the foreseeable future - be as it was, but I suspect we'll advance in a series of stair steps, or plateaus, maybe lasting 20-30 years, where businesses will be built around a dominant technology but with the knowledge disruption is always possible.

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News (2009), John Temple
Temple certainly is not without a hand in the collapse of the "Rocky" and some of the overall boneheaded decisions and assumptions made in journalism. But not only does he come clean here and not try to make himself look like a hero or martyr, he provides a valuable look at the decisions and assumptions, why they were made and why they didn't work. A must-read for journalism management classes, but really for everyone to understand how things can go horribly wrong. The money quote: The following quote explains the dilemma newspapers found themselves in. “We were not used to the market telling us how things should be. We were used to telling people what we thought they needed and how they needed it,” is how a Scripps marketing exec put it. That has to change.

The Future of Journalism in a Distributed Communication Archtecture (1996), John Newhagen and Mark Levy
Newhagen and Levy were among the first to "get it" -- to understand where this all was going. The fashionable thing these days is to talk about editors, such as they are, really being curators, leading people to the best material available and putting it in context, etc. Here's what they wrote - in 1996!

Controlling the amount and content of news on the Information Superhighway (a.k.a. data compression) is a current hot button for journalists, and the function to which editors cling with the most tenacity. Journalists increasingly reassure themselves that even cyber-journalism on the Net will still need editors to tell "audiences" what is important. ...

However, information compression is not particularly well- suited as a data reduction technique in a distributed architecture such as the Net. Computer science and engineering are focusing on more efficient forms of filtering than compression for this architecture. That implies complex and potentially egalitarian power relationships between information managers and end users. This might be manifest in the role of a pathfinder rather than agenda setter, with this later function falling back to the user, whether editors like it or not. Editors derive their power from being able to say, "because of my position in the architecture you have to pass through me to find out what's important." On the Net the pathfinder might tell the user, "tell me what you need and I will guide you through this complex environment."

Editor as "pathfinder." Sounds amazingly like "curator" to me. Again, remember this was a decade before the true implosion and at least five years before newsrooms really felt the first heat (and them mistakenly reassured themselves after the tech collapse of 2001 that this wasn't a real threat).

You should go back and reread this article once every year or so because Newhagen and Levy pretty much said in a couple thousand words what everyone else blathers on about. The article was included in The Electronic Grapevine, one of those books I'd recommend be in your library.

(In fact, I'd recommend you check out much of Newhagen's work at the University of Maryland's Advanced Media Technology laboratory. I don't think it's gotten the recognition it deserves.)

The Meanings and Implications of Convergence (2003), Rich Gordon
We throw "convergence" around a lot, but Gordon sat down and dissected it, said what does it really mean? Using a two-point framework, convergence in technology and in organizations, he came up with eight key frames. Under technology fall convergence in content creation, distribution and consumption. Under organizations are convergence in ownership, tactics, structure, information gathering and presentation. Considered that way, it's a Rubik's Cube of possibilities. No wonder we have such a hard time getting all the sides aligned. This is another article you should read periodically, first to stay grounded but second to let all the possibilities and implications roll through your mind.

Gordon's work appeared in Digital Journalism: Emerging Media and the Changing Horizons of Journalism, another book that really should be in your library because the articles in it have legs.

Plus ...

Add to your library Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace (1997). Janet Murray got it before most what the new ability to link would really mean for storytelling. This book is too often overlooked and lost in all the lather that has followed. At times a bit dense, this book still is a road map for what followed.

And I'd recommend you bookmark Conover's 2020 Vision: What's Next for News. I think he gets it much more right than wrong, and I have a feeling not too long down the road this will be on my seminal writings list. We are headed to an era where the narrative bias of journalism will be severely modified, if not blown up. And if you'd scoff, remember, Epic 2015 (originally 2014) bought a lot of snickering when it came out, too. Who's laughing now?