Proof that newspapers have a future

Dyson at Large

Message for all doom-mongers: if printed newspapers are supposedly in a dying fly position, how come I'm thumbing through a 236-page weekly right now?

Yes, you heard that right, the 236-page edition of the Chester Chronicle, dated 21 October 2010.

So huge, in fact, that the presses have to print the paper in two lots, both stapled, the first 'main book' made up of 112-pages, the second 'Classified' section containing 128-pages.

The latter was mainly a local house-buyers' bible, the first 103 pages packed to the rafters with property ads from 33 estate agents across Cheshire, more traditional sales, services, agriculture and motoring classifieds appearing from page 105 to 128.

These had to be carried over to the main book, with two pages of Public Notices, a page worth of BMDs, an eight-page 'Recruitment' section, two pages of entertainments and a four-page pull-out of reader holidays.

On top of this healthy revenue from classifieds, there were 96 display ads squeezed in throughout that main book, proudly showing that that in and around Chester the printed newspaper is alive and kicking.

As far as content is concerned, personally I preferred the page three lead to the choice of splash, although I'm sure experienced editor Eric Langton knows what his readers want.

He decided on 'REVEALED: £7M MARKET OFF THE WALL' for page one, unveiling plans for a new market hall linked by a footbridge to the historic city walls.

Langton is probably right, as we all know shoppers and market traders are among the most fervent of local newspaper addicts.

But I did like the page three tale, temptingly headlined: 'I will kidnap your baby, shoot your family and burn your house down.'

This was a report from Chester Crown Court, telling how a teenager with a grudge used Facebook to land the brother of his girlfriend in police custody before his cruel fraud was discovered.

Other stories that caught my eye on a first perusal included:

'Leave our cats alone' on page seven, an 11-year-old pictured pleading for yobs to stop throwing bricks at a colony of feral cats;

'Mind numbing tragedy' on pages eight and nine, a spread of reports on church-going Jean Laithwaite who shot her husband as he slept before committing suicide;

'TV's Stephen visits city to mourn friend' on page 11, telling how comedian Stephen Fry had twittered about his stay in Chester; and

'Firms plead guilty over fatal fireball' on page 21, reporting the inquiry into the death of a worker killed by exploding aerosols in a local factory.

In total, there were well over 450 individual reads in 74 pages of news, features and sport, including a six-page 'Celebrations' section, 10 pages of 'The Guide' covering entertainments, three pages of 'Community News' in six-point, four pages of business and eight pages of sport.

Not bad value for the Trinity Mirror-owned Chronicle with a cover price of 77p.

Like everywhere else, of course, recession-hit readers in Cheshire have been watching the pennies, and so there was a -7.5pc decrease in readers to 20,224 according to the Latest ABCs

But I still want to see Bob Satchwell waving a copy of this weighty title in the air when he introduces the session on the future of printed newspapers at the Society of Editors' Conference in Glasgow on Monday.

For within it lies proof that newspapers – if their custodians take a little more care of them – have a future that will extend far beyond the latest inane predictions.

Sex ad rating: a poor four out of ten. 'Mistress Dawn' and 'Top Totty' were just two of twenty adverts on page 109 of the classified book that I reckon might have been offering something more than a head massage.

Source: Holdthefrontpage.com

Singing the same old song of declining newsprint sales

By Greenslade Blog

I wish I could sing a different song just once when the monthly ABC figures arrive. For years, the circulation story has been depressingly similar - down go sales at every title and, of course, down goes the national newsprint market.

I do try to seek out reasons to be cheerful. And I concede that we can afford to smile about compensatory increasing online users. But we are talking about print here, and the situation continues to be gloomy.

The dramatic year-on-year falls for the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian (14.7% and 11.3% respectively) have to be seen in the context of dropped bulk sales. But it is clear that both are losing real sales too.

The Times, having forsworn user volume with its online paywall, is also watching print readers desert (down 16.2% on the year and 1.6% on last month).

The Independent's sale requires close analysis because its 2.4% year-on-year decline is only part of the story. It would be in double-digit free-fall too if it has not boosted its bulk sales from 40,000 to 64,000.

Mind you, it has cut its foreign sales from 45,300 to 23,660, which sounds altogether more plausible than previously.

So, the Indy's real sale last month - the number bought at full cover price - totalled 87,235. Next month we will get to see whether its new sister publication, i, has any impact on its sale.

The middle market story never changes. The Daily Mail declines slightly while its alleged rival, the Daily Express, declines at a faster rate.

As for the daily red-tops, the most noticeable fact is the sudden slump of the Daily Star, as Mark Sweney points out. It went up when its price was cut and it has gone down since it has been raised.

The Sunday market, which is falling at a faster rate than the dailies, was a blizzard of negative figures, some due in part to the end of bulks (Observer and Sunday Telegraph) and some simply due to a growing disenchantment with taking papers on Sunday after bumper Saturday editions remain unread.

Who would be a Sunday red-top editor? Even sensational and scandal isn't a guaranteed seller any longer. The News of the World continues to shed readers, as does The People (despite its editor's best efforts).

The Sunday Mirror enjoyed a good month, but its 6.1% year-on-year dip shows the reality of the downward trend.

But I am going to finish on one slightly upbeat note. In October, the Mail on Sunday climbed back over the 2m mark for the first time since January.

Of course, it will be said, rightly, that it benefited from promotion and marketing to achieve the rise. But that's part of the game, isn't it?

Source: guardian.co.uk

Why I believe in print: Giovanni di Lorenzo

Giovanni di Lorenzo, Editor-in-Chief of weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Germany, believes in the future of newspaper, despite the current crisis. In his speech "Why I believe in Print," di Lorenzo emphasized the importance of economic sustainability to finance quality journalism - both in print and online.
And although he acknowledges that new media could be a possible source of income in the future, he stated: "As long as we do not make money out of online journalism, we have to concentrate on print." He challenged the prophets of a digital revolution and reminds the audience of the virtues of print journalism. "In times of crisis the readers demand for analysis and orientation". In his view, print caters for both. "Newspapers of the future are not the river but the shores" he says. They are providing guidance for the flow of information.

Nevertheless, di Lorenzo received the World Editors Forum's proclamation of the "The Tablet Year" as a new chance for journalistic work: "We need to understand the iPad as a promising device to monetarize high-quality journalism in the digital world - simply to keep this independent and unadjusted profession alive." But meanwhile, he questioned the progressive tone of some colleagues."When journalists declare the end of print in the newspapers and publishers promote the internet, I wonder about this pleasure to diminish their own profession."

Di Lorenzo added that although it was true that fewer young people read the paper today than did so in the past, it is not true to say that only interested in how many friends they had on Facebook. Indeed, most new readers of Die ZEIT are in their twenties or thirties. "We have to concentrate on those who still do read rather than run after those that we cannot reach anymore anyway", he said.
However, newspapers and weekly magazines have had to change, too. They have had to get to know their readers better and listen to what they were interested in, di Lorenzo said. Not only journalists but readers too can create great content. An example he gave was that print media can try to embrace a very digital idea of user generated content. For that reason Die ZEIT introduced a new section that gives readers the opportunity to write about what they are angry about, what quotes they liked - something they would normally do online. Di Lorenzo explained that on this page, readers nominated their "hero of the week", protested against political decisions and wrote letters to prominent personalities. The feedback was amazing, he said. And this content could be transferred on an iPad as well. However, the boundaries between professional journalists and readers should never be blurred, he stressed.
In times of change, print media must dare something instead of freezing in fear, di Lorenzo said. They should risk failing with a new section rather than not giving it a go in the first place. "I call that, in the style of the military, 'flexible response'", he said.

Source: editorsweblog.org

We thought the internet was killing print. But it isn't

There is no clear correlation between a rise in internet traffic and a fall in newspaper circulation. Some papers are growing in both formats, others are succeeding in neither, according to new research

The woe, as usual, is more or less unconfined. September's daily newspaper circulation figures, as audited by ABC, are down 5.31% in a year: Sunday totals are 6.7% off the pace. And, of course, we all know what's to blame. It's the infernal internet, the digital revolution, the iPad, laptop and smartphone taking over from print. Online is the coming death of Gutenberg's world, inexorable, inevitable, the enemy of all we used to hold dear. Except that it isn't.
A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition.
But "in the UK at least, there is no such correlation", reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. "This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well on the web also do better in print… Understandably worried traditional journalists should know that the internet is not a threat."
Chisholm's aim is to prod British publishers into renewed web action – citing the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent particularly for producing the highest ratios of monthly unique visitors to their sites when compared against print circulations. (The Guardian, with a 125 unique-visitor-to-print ratio, is far higher than any other European paper he can find, and also generates over three times the number of UK page impressions relative to its circulation). Moreover, UK national papers as a whole score well on such tests, clear top of the EU league and walloping German performance nine times over.
Could they, and British regionals, do better, though? Indeed they could. "The issue is not one of total audience, but of frequency and loyalty – and online, as in print, newspapers are great at attracting readers from time to time, but they don't attract them often enough, and they don't hang around."
At which point, perhaps, it's time to look at the flipside of Chisholm's findings. If the name of one game is frequency and loyalty – via investment, innovation, constant linkages and promotions – might that not also be an answer to drooping print sales as well? If you reject the net as an agent of newsprint doom, then reverse scenarios also apply.
Go back to ABC circulations before newspaper websites really began – say September 1995 – to make the point. One, the Daily Star, is doing better than 15 years ago with no net presence to speak of: 757,080 copies in 1995 against 864,315 last month. The Daily Mail, at 2,144,229 this September against 1,866,197, is well up, with a website growing by more than 60% a year. Some – say the Mirror, down from 2,559, 636 to 1,213,323 – have suffered direly. See: no correlations?
The Guardian, Times and Telegraph are all down by around a third, and the Sun has lost more than a million: but again there's no mechanical relationship here. Price matters. It always does. But investment and innovation matter as well. They always do. And you can't help by being struck how little of that goes on in print these days. A pull-out section vanishes, and comes back. Single-theme front pages come and go at the Indy. The Telegraph still looks for somewhere else to put its features. Nothing much changes. Another researcher (at Enders Analysis) calculates that papers have lopped 20% of the pages they put in a decade ago in order to bulwark sharply rising cover prices.
No correlations here, either? Nothing to prove that the more effort and talent you put in, the more you get out? More, more, more ... and more research, please.

Source: guardian.co.uk

ABC changes US newspaper circulation rules to include digital reach

U.S. newspapers will completely change they way they report circulation beginning October 1, following changes to circulation rules made by the Audit Bureau of Circulations' board, Editor & Publisher reported.
The changes include newspapers now being able to count one subscribers multiple times; for example, a subscriber may be counted once for his print subscription, once for his e-reader subscription, and so on. This also includes online, mobile and other subscriptions. Another major change is that newspapers may include "branded editions" (products published under a different name, such as a commuter daily) in their total average circulation. "The board's aim is to establish a foundation for the future as more newspapers move to bundled print/digital subscription offers and hybrid publishing plans," the ABC board announced in a press release.

Source: editorsweblog.org

A new production model for news reporting: Outsourcing

When your cell phone breaks or your computer crashes you no longer expect to speak to a call center in the United States. Numerous companies have outsourced parts of their business operations to contractors in other countries in an effort to improve their bottom line and increase productivity. Regardless of the public perception of outsourcing jobs, there can be financial benefits. However, a domestic form of outsourcing now is reaching the struggling news industry. It was the topic of a recent Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz.
In The age of journalistic outsourcing, Kurtz argues that while traditional print media struggle, new journalism organizations, mostly non-profits, are “giving the restless and the jobless a second lease on life.” But why has it taken so long for the legacy media to realize the untapped potential of online non-profit organizations?
Many online non-profit news organizations have been around for decades. They produce quality investigative articles about a range of topics. They have been responsible for breaking news, exposing scandal and reporting stories traditional media miss. A new non-profit journalism organization seems to be appearing daily, and with that comes innovative reporting and a new approach to journalism.
However, it isn’t just the non-profit journalism organizations that are seeing the vast potential in providing journalism to the newspaper industry. Large multinational companies have recently launched or expanded their reporting capacity to meet this growing need. Included in the bunch is AOL, which is adding hundreds of journalists over the next year. Yahoo recently opened a Washington news bureau.
One reason for the delay in accepting non-profit journalism organizations as authentic news producers is the misconception that they are competition to traditional media. However, as Kurtz pointed out in his column, collaboration between non-profits and legacy media is producing terrific content that is changing the conversation in media, politics and households around the nation.
Non-profit journalism organizations are assets more print outlets should be taking advantage of if only for the cost savings that come with using non-profit news content. In fact, some of the online non-profits operate under a free “steal our stuff” model. At The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, we sponsor two news organizations -- Watchdog.org and Statehouse News. These initiatives fulfill a substantial hole in state-based news coverage, and that is why the content produced by Watchdog.org and Statehouse not only is free to the public but it is free to the news media.
Illinois Statehouse News (ISN), a product of the Franklin Center, is committed to filling the growing vacuum in state-based coverage. Since going live in December 2009, ISN’s daily content has been used by more than 40 daily newspapers, 11 television stations and numerous radio stations. The coverage is an example of why non-profit journalism organizations are a desperately needed resource for local newspapers as well as national ones.
Non-profit journalism is playing a vital and needed role in the news business. The thirst for news by the American public is not diminishing just because a newspaper in a community collapses. Although traditional media has an important place in the news business, non-profits are a big part of the future of news and should be accepted as such.

Source: The Online Journalism Review

More than 166 U.S. newspapers have closed or stopped printing since '08

Since 2008, more than 166 newspapers in the United States have closed down or stopped publishing a print edition, according to Paper Cuts, SFN's Million Dollar Strategies for Newspaper Companies reported.
More than 39 titles did so in 2008, and the number rose to 109 in 2009. So far in 2010, more than 18 papers have closed down or stopped publishing a print version.
According to Paper Cuts, there have been nearly 35,000 job losses or buyouts in the U.S. newspaper industry since March 2007. From March to December 2007, more than 2,256 newspaper jobs have been reportedly eliminated or offered buyouts.
The numbers increased to more than 15,992 in 2008 and were at more than 14,783 in 2009. As of May 2010, there have been more than 1,797 job losses or buyouts in newspaper companies in the country, according to the report, Million Dollar Strategies for Newspaper Companies, released by SFN and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

Source: SFN Report

Murdoch on newspapers (and other things)

News Corp Chief Executive showed up for his latest interview on the Fox Business Network (which he owns) on Monday. Here is a transcript of some of his remarks. He covered a lot of ground, from tonight’s union concession vote at The Boston Globe to the future of newspapers and the inclusion of software on computers sold in China that will block access to certain websites. We are providing excerpts — we trimmed for length, most notably excising his comments on healthcare and taxes (We know it’s the Internet, but we had to shorten it up a bit. You can see or read the whole thing here.

On FOX Interactive possibly looking at job cuts:
“It’s too early to talk about job cuts. … We’ve put new management in there, they’ve been there three weeks and they’re making a close examination of it and they’ll no doubt set some new directions, strengthen other very strong parts of it, and you know, the advertising is at least double what Facebook has and it’s in pretty good shape. But there will be, I’m sure, changes with the new management.”

On Chase Carey assuming the titles of deputy chairman, president and chief operating officer July 1:
“No, we’re not making any commitments on that [being an heir apparent] at all. Chase is coming in to be my partner and right-hand, he was with us for 17 years before. I think he’s like coming home.”

On the upcoming vote for The Boston Globe:
“You know, Boston is a very highly unionized place and they may find that difficult but it’s a great newspaper and a great institution, the Boston Globe, and I can’t see it disappearing. Like all newspapers, I think it will change. We think of newspapers in the old-fashioned way, printed on crushed wood so to speak, with ink. It’s going to be digital. Within 10 years I believe nearly all newspapers will be delivered to you digitally either on your PC or on a development of the Kindle, shall we say…something that’s quite mobile and you can take around with you.”

On the future of newspapers and print media:
“Communications are changing totally and we’re moving into the digital age and it’s going to change newspapers. But if you’ve got a newspaper with a great name and a great reputation and you trust it, the people in that community are going to need access to your source of news. What we call newspapers today, I call ‘news organizations,’ journalistic enterprises, if you will. They’re the source of news. And people will reach it if it’s done well, whether they do it on a Blackberry or Kindle or a PC.”
“I can see the day maybe 20 years away where you don’t actually have paper and ink and printing presses. I think it will take a long time and I think it’s a generational thing that is happening. But there’s no doubt that younger people are not picking up the traditional newspapers.”

On China requiring PC makers to include censorship software:
“I’m not worried because we don’t do any business there, or so little that it doesn’t matter. Foreign media is not generally welcomed there. There are opportunities to have 5% of this or invest in new things that are happening there. But you cannot go in and say, start a newspaper or television or whatever. We have a little television channel we make in Shanghai which is allowed to go on cable networks in the Southeast to a fairly limited audience. We have a license for MySpace there and that will grow and be a very good site.”

On whether PC makers should go along with China’s requirements:
“They would have no option. It’s either those PCs or no PCs at all. You can’t expect great companies like Dell or HP to say we’re going to sell no computers in China at all. It’s too big, it’s too big a part of the world.”

On the recovery of the U.S. economy:
“We’re in very early days yet. Wait until unemployment goes to 10, 11%…and it will…Unemployment is going to go up. It’s going to take some time to get down. Perhaps three years to get it back. We probably and hopefully have hit a bottom here, where things will be pretty stable from now on, not nearly as good as they were a little while back, but it’s going to take time to climb out of it and so that’s okay. As far as we’re concerned, we know we can grow. We have a lot of things happening like new cable channels, we’re having a great few months now in our film company so you know we’re in pretty good shape.”

Source: reuters.com

The Stick Your Head In The Sand Approach To Saving The Newspaper Business

Over the past few years, as the newspaper business got in deeper and deeper trouble, we seemed to increasingly hear some particularly clueless suggestions on how newspapers should save themselves -- almost always revolving around some sort of backwards effort to put the genie back in the bottle, such as by all banding together, violating all sorts of anti-trust rules and colluding to charge for content. Of course, this also ignores basic economic reality on how people view information and news. It also, falsely, assumes that newspapers are the only source for news, and that in stupidly taking themselves out of the market, upstart competitors won't fill the void.
Yet, it seems there's no shortage of silly suggestions along those lines. Mathew Ingram recently pointed to two such examples, with the San Francisco Chronicle publishing journalism professor Joel Brinkley's unoriginal suggestion that newspapers openly collude to start charging and the NY Times' David Carr's misleading profile of a tiny newspaper that has "thrived" by "ignoring the web."
Along those lines, a few people have submitted a rant by another old school newspaper guy, saying that the internet is the "cause" of all of the newspaper industry's woes, and that things would have been fine if all newspapers had simply stayed off the internet entirely. Now, obviously, these are journalists, rather than economists, but anyone with even the most basic understanding of economic principles or just the basic history of markets and innovation would know what happens to companies that ignore how a market is changing. The buggy whip makers didn't thrive by ignoring the automobile industry. They went out of business.
The newspaper industry won't be saved by putting its collective head in the sand (or by agreeing to some anti-competitive price fixing.) The newspaper industry will be saved by finally realizing that their "product" is their community of readers, and that anything they do to serve that community better is the future, not by clinging to a past when there was no real competition.

Source: techdirt.com

Developing a Multiple Business Model Strategy

A recent report about the global newspaper industry published by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), and aptly titled “Moving Into Multiple Business Models,” identifies the key questions newspaper execs should be asking themselves in these troubled times.

* Is your brand identity clear - both internally and externally - and focused on what differentiates you from your competitors?
* Are print and new media run as separate operations or as simply two different distribution mechanisms for the same core activity?
* Do you have an integrated paper and online advertising sales team?
* Are you using online to extend your core audience beyond the traditional print readership?
* Will video journalism and print journalism co-exist online?
* What does your audience want from you - and do you know what they will pay for?
* Can areas of non-differentiation be outsourced?
* Have you identified non-core activities that should be downsized or stopped?
* Are you investing today with a clear view of the payback on that capital allocation?
* How will you deal with the cultural aspects of change so as to maximize quality and minimize inefficiencies?
* Have you maximized the mass-market nature of your total readership (print and online) in discussions with advertisers?
* What sort of business will you be running in five years’ time?

In my conversations with people inside numerous U.S. newspaper companies recently, I’ve heard some of these issues discussed, but not most of them. For example, too many metro dailies still keep their print and online operations separate — not a good idea.
Integrated ad sales teams, a multimedia content (and advertising) strategy, outsourcing generic aspects of the operation, and effective brand management are never near the top of the strategy discussions I’ve been part of, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that industry execs aren’t aware of them.
The one question every U.S. newspaper company has addressed repeatedly is downsizing. But the PWC list is a reminder that papers have many other avenues to pursue besides cutting staff if they want to survive the transition to tghe new media age.

Source: bnet.com

What Business Are Newspapers Really In?

Sitting at breakfast this morning in Washington, DC, I heard a familiar tale of woe from my friend. Both he and his wife are talented, experienced, and recognized journalists. He has first-rate credits as an op-ed page editor, she has won outright or shared in two Pulitzer prizes. But today she is an ex-journalist, having taken a buy-out from her paper and then gone on to form, with several other former journalists, an investigative service firm that does work for hire, often taking on difficult in-depth projects for law firms or corporations looking to use the skills of a proven reporter. He has endured involuntary furloughs and passed up, so far, various buy-out offers his paper has offered.
It was a familiar and sad story. The papers he and his wife have worked for have huge brand names--and also impenetrable bureaucracies. Like General Motors, they seem impervious to signals that tell them they must change, sluggish in their response to dramatic shifts in customer habits and preferences, indifferent to changing capabilities in technology, and stubborn in their insistence that they are right, they are important, they are special--and that if there is a problem, it must be that their competitors aren't playing fair or their customers aren't sufficiently grateful for what they have to offer.
Soon breakfast was over, ended with a sad shaking of hands and shaking of heads as both of us considered the almost inevitable demise of once-proud and once-great journalistic institutions. He headed back to work and I headed to the airport to board an Alaskan Airlines flight to Seattle.
In the course of the almost six hour flight I found myself re-thinking that breakfast conversation. Did it have to happen? Are newspapers doomed to extinction? What if, I wondered, I applied one of my favorite rules from my new book Rules of Thumb," Rule #6: If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture.
It's a rule that I learned from Harvard Business School's late, great marketing guru, Ted Levitt. In his legendary Harvard Business School article, "Marketing Myopia," Ted essentially invented the concept of re-framing. The problem with most failing businesses, he argued, was that they didn't understand what business they were really in. The demise of the once-great American railroads, he argued, was due to the fact that they thought they were in the railroad business when, in fact, they needed to see that they were in the transportation business. A company that made power tools thought it was selling drills; but its customers were buying holes.
What business are newspapers really in, I wondered? Clearly not the newspaper business--that is too prosaic, and clearly too one-dimensional. Only a fool would think he was in the newspaper business today and expect to survive. So what business--or businesses--are newspapers really in?
How is a newspaper like a comedy show? Jon Stewart ranks as the fourth most-trusted source of news in America today--and by his own description, he's proud to call himself a comic. What he offers that is so valuable is the truth behind the news--the truth that only comes clear through exaggeration, distortion, and outright lying. In other words through comedy. But it's not only Jon Stewart (and Stephen Colbert) who make sense of the news by making fun of the news; so does The Onion--to great success in both print and in web-based video. British newspapers, famously, take far more risks and make far more fun of the newsmakers they cover. When did American newspapers start taking themselves do seriously? Is it conceivable that reading a newspaper could be fun again?
How is a newspaper like a consulting firm? It's not just my friend's wife who's decided to take her core competency as an investigative journalist and ply her trade digging up material for lawyers and companies. There's a firm in Denmark that consists of a dozen or more former journalists who offer the same service--and who are flourishing in their new business. What is a newspaper if not the talents and skills, the experiences and capabilities of the people who work there? It's certainly not the sheets of newsprint and the ink--that's just the product. The paper itself is the applied intelligence of the people who work there. So why couldn't a newspaper offer investigative reporting services to outside clients? Well, in fact, at least one does: The Economist. The Economist, which is the magazine that both Time and Newsweek wish they were (and which calls itself a newspaper, incidentally), has its intelligence unit, an operation that does exactly the kind of work my friend's wife is setting up to do--because her newspaper didn't have the brains to see that it could be in that business itself.
How is a newspaper like a talk show? As an op-ed editor for one of America's great daily newspaper, my friend has carefully and thoughtfully built a stable of op-ed contributors who supply the paper with commentary, analysis, and opinion. And as large as that stable is, there's always room for new voices and fresh insights. But here's the problem: the stable of contributors is much larger than the op-ed page of the paper. Voices go unheard for long periods of time, simply because there isn't room in the paper to contain them. A phenomenal asset is going under-utilized. But what's to prevent the paper from becoming a talk show--both metaphorically and literally? Why shouldn't my friend conduct regular conversations with op-ed contributors, under the newspaper's auspices, and post them on the web? Right now we've got Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry King, Charlie Rose, and Oprah--and every aspiring author, pundit, and pontificator pines to be on their shows. Why not launch a newspaper-sponsored web-enabled talk show?
How is a newspaper like a credit card company? Membership, as the old credit card marketing saying goes, has its privileges. Why shouldn't newspapers sell memberships, instead of subscriptions? For a base level membership, you get the base level newspaper: standard-issue coverage of the news of the day, news as a commodity. Want to reach the level of a silver card holder? That gets you a slate of op-ed columnists, behind-the-scenes sports commentary, access to the newspapers pundits and sense-makers. Ready to go for the gold? With gold you get the investigative unit, the behind-the-scene interviews, the bells and whistles that a great newspaper now gives away for free. And platinum! That gets you a weekly conference call featuring the paper's top editors, smartest columnists, and coolest reporters--and chance to get briefed, along with other platinum members over the web, over the phone, or, on special occasions, in person.
How is a newspaper like Alaska Airlines? The airline industry is, arguably, as bad a business to be in as newspapers. But somehow, Alaska Airlines, on which I'm currently sitting, makes it actually pleasant. Despite an unendurably long flight, everyone on the plane is in a good mood. In part that's because the flight attendants are amazingly friendly, courteous, even funny. In part it's because the plane we're flying on is brand new. It's clean, it's fresh, the seats are comfortable, the carpet isn't worn, and the rest rooms are spotless. But it's also the way they do business. After we take off, the flight attendants come down the aisle with personal video units. For a small fee, you can rent one and watch movies all the way across America. A little while later, they come down the aisle with food carts. Want to buy a cheeseburger? A neatly packed variety of snacks, trail mix, pastry, or chocolates? It's all ala carte, you have to pay for it, but it's done well, it's done pleasantly, it's done with service, and it's done with a smile. If people are hungry for the news, or eager for some entertainment, can't newspapers serve those up ala carte, too? No self-respecting airline thinks its actually selling a seat on a plane. When will newspapers figure out they're not selling newspapers?
They've just announced that I need to shut off my computer; we're landing in Seattle. Seattle, a city that recently suffered the loss of its newspaper, Seattle, home of the defunct Post-Intelligencer. It died, undoubtedly because it thought it was in the newspaper business.

Source: huffingtonpost.com

Get Out of the Printing Business, Moody’s Tells Newspapers

Unless newspapers can figure out how to reduce their high fixed costs of printing and circulation, their already low credit ratings could fall even farther, Moody’s Investors Service warns in a report relased Thursday.
The newspaper industry’s fundamental problem, Moody’s Vice President and Senior Analyst John Puchalla writes in the report, is that is spending far too much on producing and delivering a printed paper than on creating its content and selling the product.
Moody’s calls it a “structural disconnect” with just 14% of cash operating costs, on average, devoted to content creation, while about 70% of costs are devoted to printing, distribution and corporate functions. The remaining 16% of costs are related to advertising sales — another example of devoting too few resources to the principal revenue driver.
“This disconnect is a legacy of the industry’s vertical integration beyond content creation and into the production and distribution of newspapers,” Puchalla said.
The high fixed costs — combined with high debt among many newspaper companies — is squeezing cash flow as revenue declines.
“Ultimately, we expect the industry will need to reverse the vertical integration strategy through cross-industry collaboration and outsourcing print production and distribution processes,” Puchalla said. “Although newspapers may lose some of their in-house control over press time, they would also release resources to beef up investment in content and technology.”
Moving to an online-only model is probably not practical right now, Moody’s adds, but it says a “hybrid model” combining a greater emphasis on Web content with reduced print frequency might be the answer.
Moody’s says this “structural disconnect” also threatens the credit ratings of newspaper companies, which are already depressed compared to historical levels. Nearly all publicly traded newspaper companies now have credit ratings considered below investment-grade, or “junk” — including such respected chains as The New York Times Co. and Gannett Co. Inc.
Low credit ratings increase the cost of borrowing, and reduce access to money not just from lenders but from institutions that will not hold stock in junk-rated companies.
The bad news, Puchalla said is that as low as newspaper credit ratings are now, “additional downward pressure remains.”
“If newspapers can’t monetize the content in new digital channels at the same level as with print, or cut structural costs enough to keep up with the changing competitive environment, the prospect of additional recapitalizations or shutdowns will grow, adding further pressure to
ratings,” he added.

Source: medios.org.ar

News matters so much more than what delivers it

By Jeff Jarvis

Portable reading devices were described as offering "a glimmer of hope for the embattled industry" in these pages last week. Having spent the past two months reading two newspapers - the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal - primarily on my Amazon Kindle, I'd say that glimmer is dim.
The problems with the Kindle could be - and no doubt will be - solved. The reader works wonderfully for books. But it also tries to turn a newspaper into a book, starting us on the first page of the first story and nudging us through its awkward user interface to proceed a page-turn at a time through the entire product, as we used to on paper. The digital among us, however, no longer read news in this way. Online, we search and link and flit and explore. We are in control of the experience, not some editor somewhere.
Online, news has been freed from its packaging. Indeed, that is a key architectural underpinning of the web itself: content is separated from presentation. The same text and media can be fed into a web page, or into an iPhone app or an RSS feed. Substance parts company with style. All of which makes me wonder whether we will ever see the iPod moment for newspapers.
News Corp, Hearst and other publishers are reportedly working with manufacturers to develop flat electronic substitutes for their beloved paper. Their assumption is that we are pining for a familiar, nostalgic presentation of content. They hope that when electronic news reminds us of print news - that is, when editors can once more package the world for us - we'll again be loyal to and perhaps pay for their work and brands.
Sorry, but I think the opposite is occurring. We care less about the form of news and more about the information it imparts. That is the key strategic problem for editors and publishers hoping to charge us online: once news is known, it is knowledge that can be spread through conversation, which means it can no longer be controlled behind a pay wall. News is spread in the speed of a tweet. The half-life of a scoop's value is lessened but the value of links grows.
These economics were driven home to me as I read the Journal on my Kindle. Since my days on an expense account, I've subscribed to the Journal online, paying more than $100 a year. For the last two months, I was paying an additional $9.99 a month for it on the Kindle. But in that time, I saw just how few Journal stories I read or needed to read after I'd gone through the New York Times and my RSS and Twitter feeds, which send me to a dozen sources. It's links that most often get me to read articles.
In the emotional frenzy to find a way to make us pay for news again online, the Journal is reportedly mulling the idea of micropayments, in the hope that this will attract a new audience unwilling to subscribe but wanting to get that unique Journal story - folks such as me who come in via links and search. I see unintended consequences ahead. I may end up paying cents for stories instead of dollars for a subscription. Indeed, when the Journal raised its Kindle price to $14.99, I hit my limit. I cancelled.
I will still read news on gadgets, of course. The New York Times has a brilliant iPhone app that is constantly updated and ad-subsidised and free (as I wish the Kindle were). The Times also has a new version of its PC reader that more closely mimics the experience of reading the paper; it's appealing.
But in news, neither the device nor the form matters nearly as much as the information and its timing. This requires that publishers unleash their news on every device possible. But no single gadget will be their saviour. None will bring back the good old days - if they were that - of news and the world delivered in neat little packages we paid for.

Source: guardian.co.uk

A newspaper business model that's working

We make community news free and have watched profits soar.

By Dan McDonough Jr. and Alan Bauer

It's widely reported – and has become generally accepted – that the newspaper model is either dying or already dead, when, in fact, thousands of newspapers across the country are doing quite well. Thousands of newspapers deliver for their readers and advertisers every day. Thousands of newspapers are positioned to embrace – not be destroyed by – emerging technology.
But we don't get to read much about those newspapers. Sure it's news when giant corporations crash and burn and lives are disrupted. Stories that report on incompetent leaders who, ironically, receive outlandish compensation are widely read. Documenting the downfall of powerful entities, whether they are governments or businesses, is a legitimate pursuit. But, as any respectable journalist knows, when you tell only half the story, the story is incomplete – or just plain wrong.
In this instance, the half that receives little to no attention from big media involves the men and women in the newspaper industry who write the stories, sell the ads, print and deliver the papers and update the websites every day, without fail, for media companies that are far from dead.
The National Newspaper Association (NNA) last month reported on a study that showed community newspapers were far less affected by the challenging economy than the industry in general (or the economy in general, for that matter). The Suburban Newspapers of America and NNA's reporting group showed 2008 fourth-quarter advertising revenue of $428.7 million, only a 6.6 percent decline from the same quarter in 2007. The Glennco Consulting Group estimate was much worse, however, for the overall newspaper industry. There it showed decline in fourth-quarter advertising expenditures of 21 percent, according to the NNA.
So while advertisers cut their spending by 21 percent across the industry, the impact to community newspapers was less than 7 percent.
In addition, 26 percent of the SNA/NNA reporting group launched new products in 2008. Indeed, many community newspaper companies are growing.
The fact is that gains among progressive community newspaper companies are offsetting a large part of the massive losses being suffered by the staid, big newspaper companies.
"Community newspapers certainly are not immune to the economic downturn that is affecting all businesses, but, as the primary and sometimes sole provider of local news in a community, they remain strong and viable," NNA president John Stevenson said in the article.
These "strong and viable" companies recognized and adapted to the changing economy in a way that larger newspapers – for the most part – are not. They adapted to evolving reader habits and emerging business models. They abandoned the traditional, head-in-the-sand mentality of denial and exploited the opportunities presented by their often larger, but undeniably obsolete, brethren.
At Elauwit Media, we learned long ago that people don't want to "pay" for their news anymore.
We know that, for advertising to be effective, people have to actually see the ads. Our business model and philosophy of making sure "Everybody Gets It. Everybody Reads It." pushes us to bring local news not found elsewhere to everybody who has an address in town. It fills a very specific need for our readers and it works so well that, for the past two years, we have been listed among South Jersey's 10 fastest-growing privately held companies. We've gone from a start-up in 2004 with $100,000 in revenue to a thriving company with revenues in excess of $2.4 million in 2008.
That's certainly not the story we're hearing about newspaper companies today. But that's the story of so many of us smaller newspaper companies that have adapted to the changes in the market.
This success is no great mystery – it's the American way. Ingenuity, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit always have been rewarded. The newspaper companies that have altered circulation methods and policies, have focused their content and developed news delivery methods to fit today's audience and advertisers are thriving. They found new streams of revenue and ways to reduce costs that didn't eviscerate their core products.
In other words, they ran their businesses the way businesses ought to be run. For instance, huge regional daily newspapers would do better to stop requiring people to subscribe and instead deliver the paper to everybody in their target demographic (the market that key advertisers want to reach). If big newspapers would charge the advertisers, not the readers, they could still turn things around. That would be a bold way to evolve. It is highly doubtful they'll do that. We did.
So as the giant media conglomerates continue to watch their kingdoms crumble, and the self-styled scribes of truth chronicle their every misstep and blunder, the rest of us will continue to vacuum up their former readers and advertisers. We'll continue to grow. We'll continue to adapt. We'll continue to profit. And we'll do it all while upholding the standards of journalism that make newspapers so important. And therein lies the future of newspapers – one that's not so gloomy for everyone.

Source: csmonitor.com

Power of Print Conference: redefining newspaper format

For two of the speakers at the Power of Print Conference in Barcelona, completely new approaches - and publications - were the required missing element of the newspaper industry. Peter Vandevanter, vice president of Targeted Products spoke about his company's personalised newspapers - for which he has coined the term 'Individuated'.
Readers receive home delivery of their 'Individuated' newspaper on the days they're free to read it, and personalised 'I-News' delivered digitally on the days they're not. 'I-News' is also available in a printable format for readers that choose to print it, alongside coupons for coffee or other products they ask for - an advertiser's dream! Vandevanter said that advertising rates for the I-product are ten times print advertising rates.
Martim Avillez Figueiredo, publisher and editor in chief of new Portugese publication I described how it "deconstructs the newspaper and rebuilds something different." He explained that "the idea is not to build a new daily paper but to try to build a new media brand."
I differs from traditional newspapers in a variety of ways, most noticeably its layout. Steering away from separating the publication into sections such as politics, sports and economy, I is instead divided into sections that follow people's reading patterns. It opens with editorial and opinion in the first section, small news summaries in the second, in-depth articles for the third and a 'mélange' of news including sport for the fourth.
Both methods are new takes on a printed newspaper, and contradict declarations of the "death of the newspaper", which Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers and CEO of Independent News and Media described as "misleading" in the conference's opening speech. Whilst these two new projects cannot single-handedly turn the industry around, they are representative of the kind of innovation that it requires to move forward.

Source: World Association of Newspapers Press Release

Newspaper Circulation Grows Despite Economic Downturn: WAN

Despite the global financial crisis, newspaper circulation grew 1.3 percent world-wide in 2008, the President of the World Association of Newspapers said Wednesday in a speech that contradicted “misleading” reports predicting the imminent death of newspapers.

“The simple fact is that, as a global industry, our printed audience continues to grow,” said Gavin O’Reilly, President of the World Association of Newspapers and CEO of Independent News and Media.
“But you might say that this growth is taking place in the developing markets of the world and masks a continued downward trend in the developed markets. And to a degree this is true, but not the whole story, as newspaper companies in these markets have embraced digital technologies to further improve their audience reach,” he said in a speech opening the World Association of Newspapers Power of Print Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Predicting the death of newspapers “seems to have reached the level of a new sport,” said Mr O’Reilly.
“That this doom and gloom about our industry has largely gone unanswered is, to me, the most bizarre case of willful self-mutilation ever in the annals of industry,” he said. “And it continues apace, with commentators failing to look beyond their simple rhetoric and merely joining the chorus that the future is online, online, online, almost to the exclusion of everything else. This is a mistake. This oversimplifies a rather complex issue.”
Mr O’Reilly said:
1.9 billion people read a paid daily newspaper every day.
Newspapers reach 41 percent more adults than the world wide web.
More adults read a newspaper every day than people eat a Big Mac every year.
“Whilst it may be true to say that in some regions, circulations are not a boom sector, newspapers continue to be a global mass media to be reckoned with, achieving a global average reach of over one third of the world’s population,” he said. “So if we are a declining industry, the definition of declining is a strange one. We are an industry with massive reach of the global population and one that achieves massive revenues.”
And while the financial crisis has clearly had a serious impact on newspaper revenues, the downturn is not worse for newspapers than for other industries. “This is not to deflect the seriousness of the situation, and it is very serious, but it remains a fact - all major media are suffering alongside our colleagues in other major business sectors,” he said.
Mr O’Reilly’s speech was based largely on preliminary data to be included in World Press Trends, the annual report from WAN to be published next month. The data shows:
Global newspaper circulation increased +1.3 percent in 2008, to almost 540 million daily sales, and was up +8.8 percent over five years. When free dailies are added, circulation rose +1.62 percent in 2008 and +13 percent over five years. Europe is the hotbed for free newspaper development - 23 percent of daily newspapers in Europe were free in 2008.
Newspaper circulation increased +6.9 percent in Africa last year, +1.8 percent in South America, and +2.9 percent in Asia. It decreased -3.7 percent in North America, -2.5 percent in Australia and Oceania, and -1.8 percent in Europe. But in many mature markets where circulation is declining, newspaper reach remains high -- many European countries continue to reach over 70 percent of the adult population with paid newspapers alone. In Japan, it’s 91 percent. In North America, it’s 62 percent.
Circulation gains are not only occurring in the emerging markets of China and India; 38 percent of countries reported gains in 2008, and 58 percent saw circulation increase over five years.
Though newspaper advertising revenues were down -5 percent in 2008, print media still takes 37 percent of world advertising revenues.
While the digital explosion has a global impact, it is not a uniform impact. The United States and the United Kingdom are most affected; the UK accounts for 38 percent of digital revenues in all of Europe. And compared to all of Europe, the United States has 62 percent of the total market.
In the United States, combined print and online newspaper audience grew 8 percent. Fifty-two percent of online newspaper readers spend the same amount of time as they did previously with newspaper content, 35 percent say they spend more time overall with newspaper content, and 81 percent of online newspaper readers say they’ve read a printed newspaper in the same week.
Although falling newspaper circulations are routinely blamed on the internet, the evidence paints a more complex picture, said Mr O’Reilly. “Why is it, that something as sophisticated as media consumption always get relegated to an oversimplified spat between print and online? Why must it always be a case of either or? Is it just possible that the consumer is capable of multi-tasking; is capable of consuming a multitude of media and that it need not necessarily be just online?"

Source: wan-press.org

Newspapers will bounce back says Rothermere

by Paul Linford

Lord Rothermere today declared that his regional and national newspaper empire will "bounce back" despite a slump in revenues for the first half of its financial year.
Daily Mail and General Trust, which owns the Northcliffe Media regional publishing group, today published results for the period covering October 2008 - March 2009.
They revealed that advertising revenues at Northcliffe were down 31pc in the period, with profits for the UK papers down 91pc to £3.2m from £33m the previous year.
But in a video interview streamed on the company's website, DMGT chairman Lord Rothermere said the company would emerge from the recession stronger than when it went in.
"The newspapers will bounce back. They are going through a difficult time but that time is cyclical and consistent with the economic situation.
"DMGT is extremely well-positioned to come out of this recession in a stronger position than when we went into it."
Today's figures show overall revenues for Northcliffe Media fell 23pc from £216m in the equivalent period in 2007-2008 to £166m in 2008-2009.
Advertising revenues from property were down 54pc, recruitment 47pc, retail 24pc and motors 23pc, while circulation revenues fell 6pc.
The half-yearly report reveals that overall headcount fell by 500 as a result of the widespread cutbacks across Northcliffe announced in the first three months of the year.
This contributed to a 20pc fall in operating costs compared with the same period the previous year.
In his video interview, Lord Rothermere said he had found making the cutbacks "extremely difficult" and admitted he felt like he had let down those affected.

Source: holdthefrontpage.co.uk

The future of newspapers in a Digital Britain: MTM Roundtable summary

On 20 May, AOP attended an executive roundtable organized by strategic consultancy MTM London on the future of newspapers in a Digital Britain. Here is a summary of the key conclusions of the debate:

News consumption at an all time high

Few doubt that the demand for news consumption is higher than it has ever been, or that the increase in real-time delivery online and the growth of citizen journalism have changed the rules of engagement for traditional publishers.
However, print media is faced with declining sales, and advertising moving from print into cheaper and more accountable online alternatives. That situation is unlikely to change, even when the economy picks up.

Widening of news generation sources

There are of course some exceptions, but fundamentally news publishers need to move to new business models as the traditional model based on advertising revenues to fund editorial delivery is threatened.
A major challenge for the news industry is making online brands ultra-relevant to their audiences, for which embracing communities and democratising news creation are pivotal factors.
Debate may rage over the effect of the web on quality journalism, contrasting the output from trained journalists with enthusiastic amateurs, but the appetite for instant news and relevance to communities inevitably means a widening of news generation sources.

Paid content opportunities

Questions remain however as to how to make a viable business out of the changing culture of news delivery.
Subscriptions and micropayments for content are of course back on the table for discussion. While financial/business/B2B news specialists have built successful paid content businesses, the appetite for subscriptions among other news providers (and more to the point, their users) is still unclear.
Most believe there are still opportunities to develop digital business models that include paid content, but how, where and what readers will be willing to pay for in online media remains to be seen.

The news landscape in 2015

Finally, the panel was invited to offer a view of what the news landscape of 2015 will look like. It was generally agreed there will be some casualties and consolidation, leading a smaller sector with fewer bigger brands and the emergence of new online-only brands.
Consumers will access content across many platforms, relevance and quality will be key, and brands will continually need to reassess how they engage with audiences.

Source: ukaop.org.uk

So much news, but so little comment

Papers went big on foreign news and story counts were high, but celebrities, features and columnists were a rare commodity

HOW did readers know what to think in 1984? Once you get over the minuscule, blurred pictures and the lack of colour, the first thing that strikes you about the newspapers of that year is the paucity of opinionated columnists. The finger-jabbing, red-faced anger of today's commentariat, the passionate, omniscient certainty with which they declare opinions, scarcely existed 25 years ago. Incredibly, the Sunday Times – under that most opinionated of editors, Andrew Neil – did not then have a single serious regular weekly columnist, its political pundit Hugo Young having recently decamped to the Guardian.
The paper had three, sometimes only two, bylined comment pieces. They contained few surprises: the deputy director of the National Farmers Union demanded the government "be fair to farmers" while Michael Meacher, then Labour social services spokesman, defended the welfare state. The Daily Telegraph had one bylined comment a day, with only TE Utley and John O'Sullivan appearing regularly.
Some days, the Daily Mail offered no opinions on anything except through leaders and, by implication, headlines. On Thursdays, its op-ed carried reviews of six, sometimes eight, hardback books. Even the Sun, edited by a swaggering Kelvin MacKenzie, had only one serious weekly columnist: John Vincent, a Bristol history professor. Richard Littlejohn he was not: "Neil Kinnock's recent promise to renationalise everything that Mrs Thatcher has denationalised was, perhaps, a shade impetuous," began a typical column.
Although 24-hour radio news stations had been established, TV equivalents were some years away. Newspapers believed that their prime duty was to report what had happened the previous day. The pages may have been fewer – the Sun (owned by Rupert Murdoch) was typically 32 tabloid pages, the Telegraph had 36 broadsheet pages in one section – but the number of news stories was, if anything, slightly higher than in today's papers.
Nearly all stories had "yesterday" in the first sentence. The future tense – "the minister is expected to say today", "Club X will this week sign Player Y" – was rare. Foreign news had a higher priority: the Daily Mail put it on page four, while the Telegraph published front-page bulletins about the declining health of the general secretary of the Italian Communist party.
The broadsheets offered daily coverage of parliamentary debate – but no commentator or analyst gave any context; readers were left to make up their own minds.
Celebrity culture was in its infancy. The comedian Dick Emery was exposed by his ex-wife as "a flop in bed" ("Even my pink undies didn't turn him on") while a "playgirl", in the News of the World's first tabloid issue, revealed "my frolics" with Prince Andrew. Ron Atkinson, then Manchester Utd manager, had an extramarital affair that provoked Jean Rook, the Daily Express columnist billed as "the first lady of Fleet Street", into a paroxysm of rage.
Rook, and her Daily Mail counterpart Lynda Lee-Potter, were just about the only columnists offering advice to erring celebs who, even in the tabloids, made the splash only if they were royal. It now seems a strangely innocent time. The scandal was mostly in the missionary position, the only sex aids were frilly undies and nobody apparently snorted or tried bondage. As for the broadsheets, they remained aloof from popular culture. When the Sunday Times reported a musician's secret love affair, it was the long-dead classical composer Edward Elgar. Neil introduced a spread called "People" which included the head of a civil service union and the former head of a thinktank. Guardian readers got a diet of trade unions, green belts and polytechnics; on a lucky day, they might get a story about a cat up a tree.
Features were sparse, and confessional journalism almost unknown – the Telegraph's features, for example, included: "Taking a close look at stitching through the ages" and "Showing the best of British baskets". Similarly, the Sunday Express, still a broadsheet, followed a formula which required exactly the same type of story on the same page each week.
Were newspapers then better or worse? By today's standards, they certainly seem calmer. The big story of 1984 was the miners' strike and Margaret Thatcher's battle to crush it. Readers could have been in little doubt where most papers stood. Headlines and stories, particularly in the Sun and the Mail, portrayed the miners as "thugs" and the pickets as "a mob". In a leader, the Express announced itself "SICK to death of this violent, meaningless and unnecessary … strike".
But the effect was less overwhelming. This was not just because newspapers had fewer intemperate columnists. It was also because even the miners' strike did not dominate page after page, creating a kind of emotional tsunami, as a similar issue might now. On the broadsheets particularly, width of coverage counted for more than depth of coverage. Over the past 25 years, we have come to learn more and more – and to be given more definite opinions – about less and less.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Obama: Government without newspapers not an option

SPEAKING at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington DC on
Saturday 9 May, president Barack Obama said that "a government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America."
In what was mostly a speech packed with jokes and humorous anecdotes, Obama ended his discourse on a serious note about the state of journalism in the country, acknowledging that there were many good journalists who had recently found themselves out of a job.
Appearing before a mixed crowd of journalists, media chiefs, politicians and celebrities including actor Ashton Kutcher, who is one of social media tool Twitter's most high-profile users, Obama outlined the plight of journalism, with newspapers clearly at the heart of his speech. He insisted that the ultimate success of the industry is essential in ensuring the preservation of America's democracy, before referring to a quote from the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson: "If he had the choice between government with newspapers or newspapers without government, he'd choose the latter."
"When you are at your best, you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and following in the easy political games that people are so desperately weary of and that kind of reporting is worth preserving not just for your sake, but for the public's," Obama said. "This is the season of renewal and reinvention. That is what government must learn to do. That's what businesses must learn to do and that's what journalism is in the process of doing."
Before stepping down from the stage, Obama offered journalists his thanks and pledged to support the industry. His comments are timely, given that last week the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet convened at a hearing organised by Massachusetts senator John Kerry. The hearing entitled the Future of Journalism examined the plight of the newspaper industry, the knock-on effects of new media and what steps government - if any - should take to ensure its survival.
By the end of the hearing, whilst guest speakers helped to paint an accurate image of what newspapers were going through, what the role of government should be during this time remained elusive. There was no consensus on whether a government-lead bail-out would actually be enough to guarantee the long-term survival of the newspaper. Notably, those who were against the idea of government intervention, including the likes of Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, were confident that those newspapers which choose to embrace digital media and new advertising models, would not just endure, but indeed flourish.
President Obama's talk has, on the one hand, given the industry renewed hope of a possible government bail-out, as some news sites have been quick to suggest, yet this is in stark contrast to what press secretary Robert Gibbs told journalists at the start of May, when he categorically said there would be no such assistance on offer. Still, Obama's commitment to the journalism industry, in particular newspapers, will not come as a surprise to most people. Even before Obama became President and long before he was catapulted to the media spotlight, Obama often championed the notion that journalists were an essential component of the democratic process, and his thoughts on this and the power of media can be found in his book The Audacity of Hope.
Obama's presidential campaign also signalled in a new era of digital politics and since his inauguration in January, his administration has continued to embrace new media, exploiting the Internet and the various social networking tools to communicate and engage with a new breed of electorates. Whether Obama and his team decide to step in is by no means certain and there is no reason to believe that the government has suddenly changed its position from the previous week. With that said, it is unlikely that America's newspaper-loving President will stand by and do nothing. In any case, despite Obama's personal preference for print - and some say his administration's preference for unconventional media - Obama and his media-savvy team offer newspapers a well-placed and much-need ally.

source: editorsweblog.org