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

Europe's newspaper industry must transform itself

Senior newspaper executives from around the world are meeting in Barcelona this week to discuss the future of print media. Experts agree that high quality and multimedia elements will ensure the newspaper's survival.

The Internet age has revolutionized the way people interact with media. But it has also sparked the demise of the printed newspaper.
In the United States, a number of regional papers have folded in the past two years. Others, such as the renowned Christian Science Monitor, have resorted to a weekly print issue and are otherwise "only" available online.
In Europe, however, newspaper publishers are looking for a more integrated approach, said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers' Council.
"We are in the most amazing state of transition from print to online right now," Wade said. "The challenge is to make sure that the interest in the content we're producing, no matter how it's distributed, is sufficient to continue financing that content." She said this could also involve paying for online content.
Wade said she did not believe that newspapers would die off in Europe, as is the case in the US.
"I think the difference between the US and Europe is that there's a more deep-seated cultural tradition in newspapers here and I think it would be harder to brush that away," Wade said.
Hans Joachim Fuhrmann, spokesman for the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers BDZV, agreed.
"The newspaper-reading culture here is completely different than in the US," Fuhrmann said. "We also have a much stronger regional concentration."
Volker Wolff, a professor at the University of Mainz's Journalism Seminar, said he thinks change will come.
"Of course, newspapers are going to die off here in Germany, too," Wolff said.

Change is necessary

Industry experts agree, though, that things have to change in the newspaper sector.
"Here in Germany, but also all over the western world, we are in a transformation process regarding the classical printed newspaper," Fuhrmann said. "Newspapers have to transform themselves into multimedia companies."
According to Wolff, newspapers should not try to compete directly with online content.
"Newspapers can't write the same things you find on the Internet," Wolff said. "They have to concentrate on regional information and also on background stories. The future of newspapers lies in qualitative valuable stories, like those magazines previously covered."
But this will have a corresponding price tag.
"For those which survive, it's going to be expensive," Wolff said. High-quality newspapers will cost more.

Question of the right solutions

Though newspapers are suffering, Wade said one shouldn't underestimate the amount of newspapers read.
According to figures by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), print newspapers attract more than 1.7 billion readers a day worldwide.
"Gavin O'Reilly, WAN's chairman, once said that more adults read a newspaper every day than eat a Big Mac every year," Wade said. "So though there may be a long term decline in percentage terms in newspaper consumption, there are nevertheless a growing number of people who have an appetite for reading news, comment and debate from trusted brands, from fact-based journalism."
WAN is convinced that dailies have a future.
"Print continues to be the main revenue generator for newspapers and it will continue to be for a long time," WAN spokesman Larry Kilman told news agency AFP. He said WAN believed that solutions existed to enable media companies to combine the paper and screen to be profitable.
A WAN conference on the power of print media vis-a-vis the Internet, especially at this time of economic crisis, is currently on in Barcelona until Thursday.

A new generation of newspaper readers

The integration of online elements and interactive features can attract younger readers, in particular, to a newspaper's site.
"The illness of non-reading has hit Germany just as much as other countries," Wolff said. This was particularly the case with the younger generation.
"In India, newspapers are a status symbol: if you can read, you have a newspaper," Wolff said. "Here in old Europe it's the same problem everywhere: an aging population, non-reading youth, a drop in advertising sales, dwindling markets."
But the German government is trying to get more people interested in newspapers and last year launched a national initiative for print media. It aims to increase public awareness of the importance of print media as a key political medium and is particularly geared towards promoting media competency among young readers.
Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Bernd Neumann, said, despite the enormous growth of electronic media, newspapers and magazines are still the key political media in German society.
"Whoever wants to get a reliable and multi-sided picture of fundamental political and societal issues remains dependent on the printed word," Neumann said at the initiative's annual meeting earlier this month.
According to Neumann, the printed word in particular encouraged democratic cohesion.
"As opposed to the Internet, it directs awareness to that which is important to everyone – independent of whether it is of personal interest for an individual or not," Neumann said.
But, he said that print and online media don't have to exclude each other, but rather be complementary.
"Whoever reads newspapers and magazines acquires the possibility to deal critically with Internet offers and profit more consciously from information sources," Neumann said.
Children and teenagers should, therefore, learn to differentiate between media, whether digital or classic, he said.

Source: dw-world.de

As the web cripples papers, an internet licence fee could help deliver the news

TWO great anxieties are running Britain's media ragged as Gordon Brown's visions of Digital Britain take shape. One, stretching back over anxious decades, is the BBC's fear of losing its licence fee (or watching it sliced away by competitors short of advertising). The other, transfixing both national and regional press, sees internet websites taking over print's role without providing anything approaching traditional newspaper revenue streams: no cover price, few subscriptions, only fatally cheap ads. These are the ways that worlds end - unless somebody comes up with a bright idea. So tie these two ends together.
The BBC fights to keep its fee by offering something for everybody, even at the peripheries of a broadcasting brief. Thus, this year, it is raising its website spending to £145m, surging on with iPlayer promotion, beginning to stream full-length programmes on demand to your laptop or mobile phone. The television set in the front room and the PC in the office are no longer separate tools; they are merging, becoming the same. Fantastic value for £142.50 a year, perhaps, but gradually, inexorably, turning into a net loss. For there, just beside the 45-inch flat screen in your living room, is an elephant that can't be ignored.
The further Auntie strays from a traditional brief, the more vulnerable its licensing policies become. Are students sitting in an internet cafe supposed to fork out £140-plus to watch the Six O'Clock News on their Mac? Where's the synergy between detector vans, absurdly threatening letters, and a population on the move, poised to watch anything anytime as easily as they reach for a netbook?
It's a future that doesn't work. It needs fixing. And so, of course, does any sort of future for the printed press and the trained reporters it is still able to employ: the folk who publish pictures of baton-wielding cops, dig out stories of politicians on the take, and push and push again for a cleaner democracy. You might not like or respect journalists; yet try imagining a free country without them and their damned questions - a land where Jacqui Smith rules OK and Damian McBride sets whatever agenda he pleases.
That one two-edged word, indeed, sums up the whole dilemma - "free", as in a country where nobody seems ready to pay for news. Some of that is the press's own fault: it invented free newspapers. But the intractable bit of the problem comes right back to Broadcasting House. If newspapers made a mistake by giving most of their content away for nothing on the web and hoping that advertising would pay them back, the natural next step is a correction: start charging. But how do you do that if your stock-in trade is comprehensive general news coverage and the BBC, spending £145m, intends to deliver it on the web without extra charge?
Then putting a price on what you offer merely diminishes your audience, your ad prospects and your hopes for survival. Then - see it happening all around - the shedding of staff, the sacking of journalists, the hacking-back of reporting resources are just ratchets on a long roll to extinction. It is a particular British bind because the BBC's overarching influence makes it so. But maybe, too, there is a particular British answer. Maybe we shouldn't be thinking about abolishing the licence fee, but changing it.
Put aside American notions of micro-payments for surfing the news or big dollops of cash from rich foundations to keep investigative reporters in business. We're used to paying a flat annual fee for our entertainment. Plonk the money down up front and everything else comes without charge (unless we volunteer to help Rupert Murdoch's pension plan). The difficulty isn't that the system doesn't work, just that what we pay for is morphing so fast and so bewilderingly,
Use a little logic to shape events, then. Split the licence in two. Lump conventional TV and radio into one package that, until a few years ago, would have been the only package around. Then create a second fee package for cyberspace.
Here's an essentially simple equation. If you have a broadband link - the fundamental enabler - you pay for it with a licence fee. Your internet provider already debits directly away: add a modest extra sum - perhaps £1 a week - to that deduction as the cost of public service information on the net. Much of the BBC's own £145m web budget would then come from this pot. The providers take a share for collection and for investing in super-fast broadband. Then the £500m or more that's left goes to help pay for the most threatened public service: the news.
Because we're used to BBC licences, we'd recognise the broad guidelines that broadband could use, too. Internet cafes, for instance, would operate just like TV in pubs or hotels. Visitors would only need to pay once they bought a broadband subscription in the UK. Payments into the pot would go through automatically, at the press of a button. Such mechanics aren't difficult.
What would be more contentious, of course, are the arguments over sharing and dividing. But compare and contrast current rules about the division of BBC licence cash between independent production companies - or the continuing ruckus about top-slicing to Channels 4 and 5. These debates may never end, in one sense: they are also debates that governments must, and can, decide. Indeed, government has already decided who would rule such a roost in the beginning of such a scheme: it's exactly what Ofcom was put there for.
We can all have our notions of where the cash of first instance would go. I'd target it to established print-plus-digital organisations employing trained reporters to cover defined areas (say parliament, local councils, education, courts and health). No boosts, at this stage, for columnists, bloggers or celebrity chat: just serious, factual stuff. And I'd allow the flow of money to change as the move to the net gathered pace. Five hundred million would not stifle change or freeze attitudes, but it would underpin a properly measured process. I'd see the fee as transitional funding on a road to something more stable.
Would a move on these lines be universally loved? Of course not. Nobody likes paying anything extra for something that's "free". But when Murdoch says (as he did the other day): "Nobody is making money with free content on the web except search, and people are used to reading everything on the net for free - and that's going to have to change", there's no point not facing brute fact. Free may be lovely, but it's also increasingly tatty and second-rate. Free - from the net to TV to print - is a concept that doesn't work.
Internet use across the whole of Europe is soaring: up to 14.2 hours a week against 11.5 hours a week of TV-watching by 2010, according to a major Microsoft survey. For many 18- to-24-year-olds, the survey shows, their PC or laptop is the only TV screen they see, and one in seven from that group already take only video-on-demand, watching no live television at all.
Let's be clear about what this means: that old licence-fee models have finite lifespans nearing their end; that some vital public service jobs will get minced in the maw; that the sheer incoherence of change is kicking away too many of the props of democracy; and that Britain, using solutions it has long since devised and understood, can find a way of restoring a little order. One year into any new system along these lines, web use would be booming away as usual, the search for new revenue streams in full spate, the lust for innovation undiminished.
But there would still be the services we take for granted, the tools we need to benchmark our days: the information sources we can't do without when the best things in life can't be free.

Source: guardian.co.uk

It’s time to reinvent the newspaper industry

The Internet didn’t bring the newspaper industry down.
Debt didn’t bring the newspaper industry down.
Declining advertising rates didn’t bring the newspaper industry down.
Complacency did.
When an industry goes from so high to so slow, so fast, it’s ultimately because its leaders became complacent.
They never thought that the monster profit margins would end. They never thought that diversification was important. Instead, they gleefully doubled down on print in recent years with ill-advised acquisitions.
After all, why diversify away from newspapers when they make so much money?
When you look at industries that ultimately fail, it’s because their leaders never thought a new technology or a new way of producing a product could come along. They thought they would be able to do the same thing forever. That short-sighted thinking is ultimately doomed to fail.
After both radio and TV tried to supplant newspapers for news delivery, you would have thought news industry leaders would have been on notice. Radio news was always destined to be a supplement, not the main event, but it still changed how some people consumed news. TV news has permanently stolen eyeballs and advertisers from newspapers, and yet newspapers were caught flat-footed when the Web hit.
The irony is that the Internet and Web should have helped newspapers make even more money. They are both vastly superior information content dissemination vehicles than newspaper trucks. The cost of making a good Web site is a fraction of that of a newspaper and is falling over time, while the cost of printing and distributing a newspaper is rising.
Even when America was enthralled by America Online, it didn’t become apparent to enough in the newspaper industry that this was the future. Nimble, non-complacent industries would have loved that millions of homes were getting Internet. Here was a much cheaper and easier to scale venue for content distribution.
Right off the bat, executives should have seen that the Internet and Web could do a few things exponentially better. Classifieds are one of the first thing that comes to mind. Rather than make a searchable, easy-to-use classified system online, newspapers shoveled non-Web friendly newspaper classifieds onto the Web. These weren’t searchable, didn’t contain links and photos were an afterthought.
In fact, they were such shovelware that they even carried the same space restrictions over from print onto the Web. Space in print is limited. The whole print model was built around scarcity.
There is no scarcity on the Internet. There never will be.
So, when people started seeing ads on the Web advertising homes with a frpl, instead of fireplace, it’s not hard to see why when Craigslist hit, the gig was up. Craigslist is not a technological wonder, its UI isn’t very good and it feels quite dated.
But it at least didn’t have ridiculous print abbreviations. And it was searchable, it allowed for links, it had photos and it was easy to use. Years later, it still looks and feels much the same as it did back in the 1990s, and yet Craigslist is better than virtually any newspaper classified system on the Web.
Complacency gave away to defeatism. After Craigslist caught on, newspapers began to give up on classifieds, thinking that we’ll never get them back. But we can get them back.
Nothing is lost forever. That’s the whole point of technological change. The newspaper industry has to reinvent itself.
Apple went from the brink of bankruptcy to current darling. The Internet, and products that utilize the Internet, are a big part of what has allowed Apple to turn things around. Apple recognized that it had to change from a computer company into much more.
Even Apple’s name went from Apple Computers to just Apple. Executives at Apple realized that they were no longer just a computer company; they are so much more. They had to be so much more — it was the only way to survive.
Newspaper companies have to become so much more than newspaper companies. This means completely reinventing corporate culture, mission, products, etc. Yes, this means making products that don’t have anything to do with the paper part of newspapers.
Most newspaper products on the Web were an awful lot like newspaper products in print (classifieds anyone?). That’s the problem. If newspapers want to reinvent, it means a lot more than just finding new ways to disseminate old content. Reinvention means thinking of completely new products that tap into separate markets.
That’s why a computer maker gets into the portable music space. That’s why a computer maker starts selling movies. That’s how a computer maker becomes a dominant player in the cell phone space.
If Apple executives insisted on only being a computer company, Apple would have gone bankrupt. Instead, when the chips were down, they decided to start taking major risks and those risk paid off. Newspaper companies have to start taking real risks, and they have to be captained by those willing to take risks.
Gazette Communications has decided to take real risksonline casino. They are separating content from products. That’s crazy right?
Sometimes crazy is what the doctor ordered. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online only. What’s an online-only newspaper anyway? It’s a newspaper that is reinventing itself. It’s a newspaper that wants to at least have a chance of being around in 10 years.
Defeatism must stop. The newspaper industry’s obituary has not be written. We can change the course of the future if we cast aside defeatism and complacency.
Even small steps — in the grand scheme of things — can make a big difference. Newspapers don’t have to concede the classified space. They can carve out their own niche and bring in revenue.
It just won’t be easy. To get classifieds back, we have to be non-complacent. We have to work hard — harder than Craigslist for sure. We have to build a system that is categorically superior to Craigslist.
Within a decade or two, I would be shocked if Craigslist was still the dominant online classified site. At this rate, I would also be shocked if a newspaper company overtook Craigslist. Rather, I’m sure, some non-complacent, nimble Web start-up will come along and reinvent classifieds, just as Craigslist had done decades before. Again, however, the future has not yet been written.
We cannot change the complacency of the past, but we can change the course of the future. We must make a pact never to be complacent again. New technologies will be rapidly forming and changing lives in the coming years.
If the remnants of the newspaper industry want to survive and ultimately thrive, we have embrace new technology and get out of front of trends, not behind them. We have to embrace change. And, yes, that means we have to employ people in all ranks who are not married to the past and are willing to be a part of a revolution.
And so, the newspaper industry eventually won’t have that much to do with paper. Like Apple with computers, newspapers will still have print products (and they should, after all there is a market for them), but newspapers will be so much more than papers. They’ll produce products that are wildly different from newspapers.

Source: patthorntonfiles.com
That’s the only path forward.

The future of journalism depends on the future of the Internet

Drop what you’re doing and take 30 minutes to listen to Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Lee Rainie for the latest edition of On the Media. The two discuss the results of the Pew Center’s latest survey on the future of the Internet.
No, not even 600 “experts” can predict the future. But the discussion of the trends, implications and opportunities that will evolve in the digital age is insightful and, at least to an optimist like me, inspiring.

Among the highlights:
* The Internet will become completely ubiquitous. Half the survey respondents think that’s a good thing, half think it’s a bad thing.
* No matter which side of the fence you’re on, Gladstone and Rainie end up agreeing that human nature is what will be revealed. We can’t blame technology.
* Digital connectivity among people is an additive function. It does not replace offline networking. In other words, people are not more lonely or spend less time socially in the real world because of the digital connectivity.
* We’ll become ridiculously mobile.

If you’re thinking about the future of journalism, here’s the place to start. How do you add value in this world of tomorrow? What can you provide that no one else can?
The answers to these questions are based largely on your experience, expertise and the opportunity around you (geographically or topically). Take a look around you, then take a look ahead of you (into the future) and see what opportunity presents itself.

Source: Journalism2.0

ST.com hits record highs

THE Straits Times online website broke new records in March, hitting an all-time high in both page views and unique visitors.
Latest numbers from Nielsen's Site Census confirm that Singapore Press Holding's Internet strategy of investing in and occupying new-media spaces is on the right track.
StraitsTimes.com, which was relaunched last August with a free breaking news section, saw its month-on-month page views grow 24.4 per cent, while unique visitors jumped 48 per cent. On average, readers are spending 20 per cent more time on ST.com.
ST.com's Editor Joanne Lee said the numbers have more than doubled since the August relaunch as the website strives to address the concerns of its readers.
"By mid-next week, we will have a special microsite called 'Overcoming the storm with confidence' which is specially tailored to address SME's concerns and help them learn survival strategies from companies who have ridden previous economic crises out successfully," said Ms Lee.
Most of SPH's other websites also logged record numbers. AsiaOne, SPH's news portal that aggregates the entire suite of the company's websites, saw a 20 per cent rise in page views and 13.5 per cent climb in unique visitors. Stomp, a citizen journalism website, saw an 11 per cent jump in both page views and unique visitors.
Said Felix Soh, Digital Media Editor: "The robust growth of our websites, and StraitsTimes.com in particular, establishes our pole position as the media group with the best Singaporean and Asian online products. The growth figures speak volumes about the resonance that our websites have with the online community in Singapore and the rest of the world. We are the only media company with the full gamut of online services to engage our audiences -- from breaking news to citizen journalism to social networking."
SPH, however, does not intend to just ride the Internet growth trend. Plans are in place to bring the news to the reader, rather than wait for the reader to visit the sites.
In January, ST.com launched an application for the iPhone which allows users to access breaking news stories onto their Apple phones free. In the three months since its launch, iPhone application page views have risen 130 per cent, while users have grown by 44 per cent. Over the next few months, SPH will also be rolling out Razor TV and Stomp iPhone applications.
But that's not all. SPH's Digital Media Unit is currently working on similar applications for all mobile operating systems, so non-Apple users can also enjoy SPH news on-the-go.
Said Raymond Teoh, Assistant Vice President of SPH's Internet Business Unit: "We are constantly working on introducing the new media platforms to advertisers to position their message to their target demographic."

Source: The Straits Times

IHT Joins Forces with the NYT on the Web and Reveals New-Look Newspaper

The two high-quality news organizations combine to launch a new global news, business, sports and style Web site
Iconic world newspaper gets a bold redesign to enhance its international personality and broaden its contemporary appeal

PARIS: The International Herald Tribune (IHT), the global edition of The New York Times, today launched two major product innovations for its worldwide audience of digital and newspaper readers.
A new online Global Edition at global.nytimes.com combines the international voice of the IHT with the worldwide breadth of reporting of The Times and the digital expertise of NYTimes.com. It is edited in New York, Paris and Hong Kong to provide users with a 24/7 flow of geopolitical, business (with Reuters), sports and style, news and commentary from a distinctly global perspective.
Starting today, IHT.com users are automatically redirected to global.nytimes.com and users of NYTimes.com can choose to set the Global Edition as their home page. They can also sign up for a new email service: Today’s Headlines Global Edition, published twice daily for European and Asian morning delivery.
Simultaneously, the IHT unveiled a fresh new look for its newspaper. The result of a year-long collaboration with the award-winning newspaper design team at The New York Times, the front-to-back redesign gives more definition to the 122-year-old paper’s journalistic strengths and emphasizes its international personality.
Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of the IHT, said: “Together with The Times, we are creating a powerhouse for high quality global news – it is thanks to closer integration with New York that has made the dynamic new Global Edition online a round-the-clock reality, and it is thanks to this that we have such a clear and sparkling new design for our newspaper. Today the IHT is demonstrating its steadfast commitment to steering its international readers through the momentous events of a fast-changing world, serving readers and advertisers with creativity and vision.”
Clearer headings, improved page navigation, more anchored positions, better designed briefs columns and pointers to Web articles, as well as greater emphasis on photography all serve to make the new-look IHT newspaper easier to navigate, more visually arresting and helpful in directing readers to additional content at global.nytimes.com. Typographically, the IHT has also introduced a cleaner nameplate that gives “international” more prominence and a new Cheltenham typeface to lend contrast and openness throughout.
Martin Gottlieb, editor, global edition said ”Redesigning the newspaper and reconfiguring our global online presence at the same time created significant opportunities for us journalistically: Working together with The New York Times, we have been able to look at the overall balance and direction of our coverage afresh. By consolidating Web operations and improving design processes, we are freeing up editorial energies to focus on delivering the accurate reporting, thought-provoking writing and sharp analysis that our international readers need now more than ever.”
In the new design, the IHT’s Business section which is produced in collaboration with Reuters, is given added prominence by being anchored at the back of the newspaper Monday through Friday, creating a new business-oriented environment that showcases the popular Breaking Views feature and columns by authoritative, analytical writers like Andrew Ross Sorkin and Floyd Norris. For the weekend edition, in response to reader feedback, a new section called Weekend Arts full of interviews, reviews and lifestyle reporting draws together the prized arts coverage of The Times with distinguished IHT voices, such as art critic Souren Melikian, to create a stimulating weekend read.
Jean Christophe Demarta, international advertising director for The New York Times Media Group, said: “The new online Global Edition and the new-look newspaper have generated a wealth of new opportunities for advertisers looking to reach our influential, international audience. From a range of advanced user targeting options on global.nytimes.com to new larger premium advertising positions on the superbly designed front and back pages of the IHT – this double launch really is fantastic news for The New York Times Media Group’s international advertisers.”

About the International Herald Tribune (global.nytimes.com)
The International Herald Tribune (IHT) is the premier international newspaper for opinion leaders and decision-makers around the globe. It combines the extensive resources of its own correspondents with those of The New York Times, is printed at 35 sites throughout the world and is for sale in more than 180 countries. Based in Paris since 1887, the IHT is owned by The New York Times Company. For more information about the IHT visit ihtinfo.com

About The New York Times Media Group
The New York Times Media Group includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, NYTimes.com and global.nytimes.com and WQXR-FM. The group’s global advertising sales network is headquartered in New York with regional offices in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo.

About The New York Times Company
The New York Times Company, a leading media company with 2008 revenues of $2.9 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other daily newspapers, WQXR-FM and more than 50 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com. The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

Source: IHT

European Newspapers Find Creative Ways to Thrive in the Internet Age

PARIS: As the death toll in the American newspaper industry mounted this month, the German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest profit in its 62-year history.
At Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, there has been no desperate talk of how to survive the recession and the digital revolution. Instead, Mathias Döpfner, Springer’s chief executive, said he was looking for opportunities to expand, scouting around for acquisitions in Germany, Eastern Europe and maybe — in what would be a first for the company — the United States.
“I don’t believe in the end of journalism,” Mr. Döpfner said. “On the contrary, I think the crisis can have a positive impact. The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”
In much of the world, American newspapers are seen as journalism’s gold standard. But the American newspaper’s business model appears to be broken. While much of Europe faces many of the same problems, a few newspaper publishers have found innovative ways not only to survive, but thrive in the face of the recession and the Internet.
Few European publishers performed as well as Axel Springer last year, and even it has warned that 2009 will be much harder as recession takes its toll. In some European countries, newspapers are in worse shape than in the United States. In France, several papers are kept alive by public subsidies. In the ultracompetitive British market, national papers struggle to make money and local newspapers are disappearing at an accelerating rate.
But there are signs of journalistic life in Europe. Circulation is falling more slowly than in the United States. Most papers have been less affected by the recession than their American counterparts because they rely on readers more than on advertisers, who tend to be more fickle.
Though no one has found a magic bullet, some European publishers have found ways to meet the challenges. At Schibsted, an Oslo-based publisher, online activities — including newspapers, classified advertising sites and other pursuits — deliver about a quarter of the company’s revenue and the vast majority of its profit.
The star performer online is VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper. VG Nett has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.
VG Nett, like most newspaper Web sites, generates most of its revenue from advertising, but is starting to raise money from users. About 150,000 people pay up to 599 crowns, or nearly $90, a year for a weight-loss club. VG Nett recently started charging up to 780 crowns a year for live streams of soccer matches. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users to upgrade their profiles. Access to news, however, remains free.
A business that has lost more than a quarter of its global sales over the last decade might not seem like the best example to follow. But alongside the wreckage left by digital piracy, new business models are emerging in the music industry — with Europe in the vanguard.
Few Europeans willing to pay for music directly, through services like iTunes, so the industry is instead bundling music costs into a broadband subscription, like basic cable channels do in the United States.
The Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, skeptical of applying micropayments to newspapers, has suggested providing access to newspaper Web sites for a fee paid at the Internet service provider level. For such models to succeed, newspapers would have to work together.
A group of newspapers in the French-speaking part of Belgium have shown the possibilities and the limitations of cooperating when faced with Google, which some see as a common enemy.
Two years ago, under the banner of their trade organization, Copiepresse, the papers won a ruling in a Belgian court requiring Google to remove their content from its Google News service, which summarizes newspaper articles and provides links to their Web sites. The Belgian papers argued that Google News had violated their copyrights; an appeal is pending.
When Google wanted to expand Google News to Denmark about two years ago, lawyers for Danish publishers wrote to the company, telling them they could not do so without permission.
This has not helped newspapers earn money online, but Margaret Boribon, secretary general of Copiepresse, said, “the main issue for us is not having giants killing us.”
Axel Springer generates 14 percent of its revenue online, more than most American newspapers, even though the markets in which it operates — primarily Germany and Eastern Europe — are less digitally developed than the United States.
One reason, Mr. Döpfner said, is that Axel Springer has dared to compete with itself. Instead of trying to protect existing publications, it acquired or created new ones, some of which distribute the same content to different audiences.
At one newsroom in Berlin, for example, journalists produce content for six publications: the national newspaper Die Welt, its Sunday edition and a tabloid version aimed at younger readers; a local paper called Berliner Morgenpost, and two Web sites.
Though advertising has slumped in Germany, Axel Springer has been able to offset the shortfall by raising the price of publications like Bild, which sells more than three million copies. Now Axel Springer is looking for “undervalued assets” to buy.
Mr. Döpfner said the company would even have a look in the United States “if a meaningful position arises in a significant market.”

Source: nytimes.com

10 Newspapers That Will Survive The Apocalypse

BELIEVE it or not, there are investors who still want to buy local newspapers.
Our favorite person of this stripe is an investor who has already plunked millions into the industry and is in the process of spending much more.
"I might be running head first into the buggy-whip business, but I'm not sold on the death of print quite yet," he tells us. (He's asked us to keep him anonymous because many of those deals remain under non-disclosure agreements.)
So what does this investor see in the newspaper industry that the rest of us don't? Lots of room for improvement, for one thing.

His view:
* For most of their existence, newspapers were steady sources of revenue that required little management -- "cash cows that you put your brother in charge of."
This led to bloat at the large, public congolmerates that now own many of our best local newspapers.
* Then came the Internet. It brought some competition yes, but more devastatingly it brought the preception of a paradigm shift. Suddenly, the bloat-tolerant managers at the top of the newspaper chains couldn't turn left without hearing from an equity analyst threatening to slap their company with a "sell" rating if it didn't invest enough in the Internet.
* After a decade of investing in the Internet -- but doing little to fight the bloat -- the conglomerates are collapsing under a weight of debt.
* This debt remains and online ad revenues aren't helping reduce it. The LA Times claims its online ad revenues pay for its newsroom, but our source doesn't buy it. "You had to pull out the duct tape and rubber hoses to make [their formula] work," he says.
Our guy is convinced that underneath the mess, there are plenty of local newspapers that, after cutting newsroom bloat and R&D costs, would be plenty profitable. He says these local newspapers just need to stop "spending on trying to find their way out" and "instead run their current good business."
What does our source think of newspapers on the Web? Not much. He says local papers should have a Web site run by two people that links to international and national news and keeps all local content behind a pay wall or off the Internet entirely.
He named ten newspapers worth acquiring.

Source: The Business Insider

Local news media needs dual business models, not dueling business models

I own and run a hyperlocal site www.sunvalleyonline.com. While we've managed to be one of the few pure-play local Internet media ventures to eke out a profit, the financial returns aren't anything to write home about. This resulted in a minor epiphany when it comes to thinking about the viability of local media.
If you think about what made newspapers viable for so long it was the fact that they had two products/businesses that were largely unrelated but delivered by the same organization. Newspapers have had a news-and-information business monetized by display ads and a classifieds business monetized by classified ads. The classified business was enabled by the distribution and audience of the news franchise. However, it's been clear that that second revenue stream doesn't translate on a sustainable basis online.
To date, most local Internet plays have struggled to make it work relying solely on display ad revenue. I've come to the belief that it's going to take a similar dual business model to support local media (we're working on doing that ourselves). Unfortunately for many local news organizations, it has been more about dueling business models (i.e., worries of cannibalization) than recognizing that what they need is a dual business model to make their online business much more successful.
So the question is what will be the accompaniment to the display ad business? We're seeing a few different approaches explored. For example, micropayments and non-profit/foundation support are oft-discussed. I don't believe those have much opportunity to scale beyond some exceptional situations which are terrific but hold little promise for most media organizations.
Then there’s the problem of transitioning from a for-profit to not-for-profit model which typically begins by laying off the entire staff and getting the investors to agree to donate all of the assets of the enterprise into the new nonprofit entity. My friend Jonathan Weber expanded on this in his Endowed and Out piece. There are a number of other potential second business models but I think the Search-related model is a viable "other" business model.
The interesting and loose parallel with the classifieds being enabled by the news distribution historically is with those sites selling online directory solutions bolted on to a news site. Since most local news sites have the highest PageRank in their area, the PageRank is a form of "distribution" advantage that the news sites have and usually don't recognize. One could argue when we see the demise of newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News that one of their most valuable assets in a liquidation is their high PageRank. When you have a high PageRank site with a leading directory solution, the businesses in that directory should show up very high in SEO and thus the news site has some unique value they are adding to those local businesses competing to be found.
The challenge remains setting up a winning sales model to capitalize on this. I wrote a couple of pieces for David Cohn's and Jeff Jarvis' NewsInnovation.com site expanding on this.

* Five Fatal Flaws that are killing local Internet plays
* Ten Point Plan to (Re)Building a Successful Local Media Salesforce | Networked Journalism Summit

The approach I'd espouse is much closer to Dell than it is a traditional local media sales force, which is generally ill-equipped to sell these new products. When I was at Microsoft and focused on the local space (I was part of the founding team at Sidewalk), we often thought that the biggest asset that the incumbent newspaper and yellow page companies had was their local sales force and relationships. Having gotten closer to "the last mile" of the Internet, I've come to observe that in most situations the local sales organizations of the incumbent media is more encumbrance than asset.
Consequently, the smart incumbent media should setup a parallel tele-sales based model that are filled with "hunters" and leave the existing "farmer" sales force to harvest the longtime advertisers as long as they can. It is important to note that this outbound tele-sales organization is dramatically different than the typical "call center" that newspapers have for classifieds. Thus, thinking that that group will have success is a long shot. The sort of tel-esales organization that exists at a place like Dell is able to prospect and close business into the low six figures. In other words, it's not taking a $150 classified order over the phone.
The sooner local media businesses recognize it's critical to have dual business models rather than dueling business models, the sooner we'll see hiring rather than firing being the storyline of local media.

Source: knightdigitalmedia

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

BACK in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

* * *

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

* * *

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

* * *

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

* * *

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Source: www.shirky.com

Newspaper Publishers Are Idiots

For too long newspapers have taken on the role of cultural arbiter and distribution channel for popular culture ideas. That is all over and can never return.

SO now we hear that The New York Times is contemplating the notion of becoming a subscription-based Web site, where you only get to read it if you pay real money. What a quaint idea.
Let me put it bluntly: This won't work. It will completely sink the publication faster than it's already sinking.
The problem with the subscription model for today's big newspapers is the fact that there is very little exclusive information of any real value. The New York Times syndicates much of its content to other papers, so there are alternative sources—not subscription-based—with the same information. Why buy a cow when milk is free?
Starting back in the early seventies, most of the big newspapers around the country were lulled into a sense of security and easy money by eschewing in-house reporting in exchange for syndicated news from the likes of the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters.
Over time syndicated stories began to dominate the newspapers in major cities all over the country. This got so bad that you'd find a local story, for example, in a San Francisco paper covered by The New York Times. It was just cheaper to do that, so they did.
This began to undermine the local papers; readers kept seeing all these New York Times stories and soon traded their local paper subscription for their regional edition of the Times. This marked a decline of interest in the local products. Then came the Internet.
The Internet added comparison shopping to the mix. Want a story about the baby stuck down in the well? How about 3,000 stories about the baby in the well?
Pretty soon the public began to notice that 2,975 of those 3,000 stories about the baby in the well were the exact same story, with the other 25 being rewrites of the exact same story. Then came the revelation. "Hey, these newspapers are all doing the exact same thing! Why do we need so many of them?"
In hindsight, USA Today had the right idea. National newspapers do seem like the best idea, but that trend and the Internet cannot seem to line up correctly, and the Internet is becoming the national paper.
Like most writers who have worked at newspapers, I have mixed feelings regarding their future as instruments of communication for something vaguely referred to as "news." I'd advise people to take a good look at newspapers before 1850 and compare them with what we have today.
Early newspapers consisted of local stories, summaries of events, and listings of items such as ship departures and other notices. There were no recipes, feature stories about dogs, or full-page advertisements for movies.
Then somewhere along the way, newspapers became more entertaining than informative. The writing was often flowery and dramatic. Columns written by personalities joked around about the events of the day. There were cartoons and horoscopes. If I wanted to know what ships were coming in and out of port carrying a shipment of Honda cars, where would I find it? Some papers carry notices like this in the financial pages, but most do not.
And, as an aside, what is dumber than the stock quote listings in the newspaper? You can type a ticker symbol into Google and get a real-time quote with all sorts of other information. How do you compete with that? Individual sites and technologies simply do certain things better than old-fashioned newspapers can.
So should the newspaper go the way of the buggy whip? No, it just needs to return to its roots, and focus on providing densely edited and directed information of importance as decided by a trustworthy source. And it should leave the fluff to the Internet.
For too long newspapers have taken on the role of cultural arbiter and distribution channel for popular culture ideas. That is all over and can never return.
That said, nobody has nailed the new model for the old newspaper. These publishers are out-and-out idiots. They see something online and immediately try to do the same thing in print. "We want color ink and more stories about celebrities!"
I was doing research at the University of California Newspaper Library, which has a tremendous collection of microfilmed old newspapers from every era. If you want to see the heyday of the newspaper business and quickly see what would work today, look at a 1954 edition of The San Francisco Examiner. It's so dense with news stories that today's papers look as if there's nothing in them. It is extremely compelling.
The point is that there are good ideas already out there, and they just need to be rediscovered. But for now the panic-stricken bosses seem to be heading down the same abyss in the same direction. It's the direction that created the abyss in the first place.

Source: pcmag.com

Stop the press! The future of US journalism

American newspapers are reeling under the recession, with advertising and circulations slumping. Now the industry is looking for new sources of revenue. Stephen Foley reports

II is 4 July 2009, Independence Day in the US, and there are fireworks online. A nation of internet users log on, click for their favourite newspaper sites to catch up on the weekend news, only to be stopped in their tracks. On website after website, the following message: "Dear reader. In order to save the newspaper industry and promote quality journalism, it has become necessary to begin charging a subscription for online access. Click here to enter your credit card details."
Will it happen? Surely not in such a dramatic fashion, but the issue of charging for online content is suddenly at the top of the industry's agenda, a decade after newspapers began building websites that allowed their readers to look at the day's news for free without buying the paper.
The Independence Day "big bang" is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion from John Morton, whose Morton Research Inc in Maryland has analysed the newspaper industry for decades. "I think it would be a fitting day in a nation founded on the principle that a free press is essential to the functioning of government," he said.
An all-at-once move would most likely attract the attentions of the competition authorities, suspicious of collusion. But the point is that the long, slow decline in print edition circulations is now being disastrously compounded by a slump in advertising revenues. Several prominent US papers have already stopped the presses for ever, dozens more are threatened with closure or bankruptcy, and almost all the rest are cutting staff and scaling back their coverage. Something has to give, and soon.
An increasing number of desperate industry executives have concluded that squeezing dollars directly from online readers is the only way to make up the shortfall. Sceptics call it suicidal. Mr Morton says it will be a "wrench", but that newspapers now are being "nibbled to death" anyway.
"Most newspapers decided early on that they had to offer everything for free on the internet, but that only opened the door to aggregator websites which profit from other people's journalism.
"Although it brought in some advertising, online revenues accounted for only about 8 per cent last year and they haven't grown very robustly. One reason is that online advertising is priced cheaply, because there is so much competition. The way the online model is now, it will never be able to support the journalism that is the lifeblood of what newspapers do."
Of course, the newspaper industry did not just get a bump on the head during the dot.com frenzy of the Nineties and start misreading the meaning of "free" in the phrase "free press". There have been repeated attempts to charge for access to parts of newspaper's sites, typically a ring-fenced area of premium content such as pieces by columnists and historic articles.
The trouble is they have never generated the numbers of subscribers needed. Even The New York Times abandoned its two-year experiment in subscription services in 2007, having stalled at just 227,000 paid-up users.
The industry's trade body in the US has been trumpeting to advertisers the growth of online readership of newspapers, which was up 7.9 million in January to 74.8 million visitors, an increase of 11.9 per cent over the same period a year ago. Much was made of a report that the Los Angeles Times now gets enough money from ads on its website to cover the newsroom budget, although there are many other overheads that it does not yet cover.
But now, after years of exponential growth, online ad revenues are flatlining, so executives are again debating whether and how they might make online fees stick this time around. Most are still at the hope, not the expectation, stage of their deliberations. It is a delicate balancing act and much damage could be done if the introduction of fees is not handled delicately. We do know the identity of the first to break from the pack. The Long Island-based daily Newsday, one of the two paid-for tabloids in the New York metropolitan area, used to be part of the Tribune Group, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, but it was sold last year after Tribune's owner, Sam Zell, struggled (and ultimately failed) to prevent that group from falling into bankruptcy. Newsday's new proprietor is the television giant Cablevision, which has signalled it will be introducing fees for online journalism.
"When we purchased Newsday, we were aware of the long-term issues facing the traditional newspaper industry," Tom Rutledge, the chief operating officer, said on a conference call after Cablevision's results a fortnight ago. "We plan to end the distribution of free web content and make our newsgathering capabilities a service to our customers." The company later described the future Newsday site as "an enhanced, locally focused cable service", but quite what that means will only be fleshed out in the coming months.
"You can't just charge because you want to charge. You can't just flip the switch and start asking people to pay for things that are free now," says Alan Mutter, the Silicon Valley executive and former newspaper boss, whose blog Reflections of a Newsosaur chronicles the travails of the industry.
"However, if a new product is sufficiently valuable that customers will pay, or unique so that they must buy it from you, then it is possible."
The Wall Street Journal, purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 2007, is the only newspaper to keep most of its online content exclusive to subscribers. The wily old mogul talked about scrapping fees and making up the difference by charging advertisers more for access to an increased numbers of readers, but was talked out of it, concluding that the maths did not work.
The Financial Times has launched a special, paid-for service amalgamating news and data on China for interested readers. Other specialist experiments are sure to follow.
Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for journalists, says there could be mileage in charging for downloads of the paper to mobile devices, particularly Amazon's Kindle and similar electronic books. He worries, however, that newspapers that introduce wholesale fees online will haemorrhage readers and lose more money in advertising than they raise from readers. Executives should concentrate instead on raising advertising prices by better targeting ads, he says, or perhaps suing Google News to get it to pay for aggregating news-papers' content.
Something must be done. Every week brings news of new disasters. Across the US, advertising revenues are falling at a faster pace than at any point in 37 years. Last month, two regional newspaper groups – Philadelphia News-papers, the owner of the famous Inquirer, and the Journal Register Co – went bust on the same weekend. On 27 February, the Rocky Mountain News reverted to the layout of its first edition from 1859 to publish its final edition under the headline "Goodbye, Colorado".
This week, McClatchy, which owns 30 daily papers, said it would shed a further 1,600 jobs, reducing its workforce to two-thirds of what it was a year ago as it struggles to manage a mountain of debt.
Tomorrow, workers at the 144-year-old San Francisco Chronicle will vote to accept hundreds of lay-offs and other concessions after Hearst, its owner, threatened to shut it down if it could not stem losses of more than $50m (£36m) a year.
Seattle's second-biggest paper, the Post-Intelligencer, is expected to go internet-only in the coming days after failing to find a buyer.
Even the biggest papers in the land are suffering. The New York Times Co, owner of the august Manhattan daily nicknamed the Old Gray Lady, was forced on the mercies of Mexico's richest man, Carlos Slim, who lent it money at a 14 per cent interest rate in order to replace loans coming due this year. The company had already axed the dividend it pays its owners, including the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty, and mortgaged its headquarters for $225m this week.
"This is a true crisis, and one of the most toxic economic environments in our lifetime," Mr Mutter says. "There is serious retrenchment going on everywhere, and the next phase of this is that many of the weaker papers in two-newspaper markets will succumb, or at least will metamorphose into something quite different. Many will become digital-only, or fully digital except for Sundays and maybe Thursdays, but they will stop trying to be seven-day publications."
In a widely read online discussion with readers, Bill Keller, the New York Times editor, declared himself "an incurable optimist about the future of good journalism". He said: "The law of supply and demand suggests that the market will find a way to make the demand pay for the supply... In the next year or two news organisations will have to make some major decisions about the role of print versus online, the balance of advertising revenue and subscription revenue, the extent to which they will chase a premium audience versus a mass audience, and so on."
In the interim, the bloodletting continues. Across the country's 1,400 titles, 15,000 jobs were lost last year, according to Paper Cuts, a website monitoring lay-offs, and the pace has accelerated since the New Year. Supporters worry that newspapers may be gutting the very thing they need to survive – an ability to produce must-read journalism. And another concern is developing, one about articles like this. They put advertisers off.
"Newspaper coverage of lay-offs in their industry tends to be disproportionate, and having newspapers talking down their own business is not helping," Mr Mutter says. "The people who tend to buy advertising are local businessmen. These people see each other at the golf club, they've read the stories, they say that the local paper is not what it used to be – and it becomes self-fulfilling."

Source: The Independent

New Zealand: Newspaper Ad Revenue Down, Internet Up, In 2008

WELLINGTON: Advertising revenue across all main media in New Zealand was down slightly in 2008 to $2.317 billion , according to figures from the Advertising Standards Authority today.
This compares with the 2007 total of $2.335 billion.
The turnover includes data from newspapers, television, radio, magazines, outdoor, cinema, addressed mail, unaddressed mail and interactive media.
Hardest hit were newspaper revenues, down 8 percent to $760m, from $826m in 2007. Their share of the market dropped from 35.4 percent to 32.8 percent.
Internet advertising revenue rose nearly 43 percent to $193m from $135m in 2007. Its market share of advertising revenue rose from 5.8 percent to 8.3 percent.
Television ($647m), radio ($268m) and magazines ($249m) revenues remained similar to previous years.
The figures reflected what people already knew and the significant growth in the online market, said Derek Lindsay, media representative for the Communications Agencies Association.
Clients were getting used to online advertising, which was more accountable and measurable.
The drop in newspaper revenue reflected a drop in classified and display advertising and also a drop in property, car and job advertising.
Retailers were also using print less and major advertisers were taking out smaller advertising spaces, he said.
Since 1999 total advertising revenue has risen from $1.42 billion in 1999 to $2.317b in 2008, but newspapers' share of revenue had slipped from 39.8 percent to 32.8 percent and television slipped from 34.3 percent to 27.9 percent.
Interactive figures started in 2003 and have risen from 0.4 percent to 8.3 percent in 2008.

Source: guide2.co.nz

Mobile Internet will grow dramatically despite economic downturn, consumers say

THE first major survey of European and U.S. mobile users conducted during the economic slump gives the telecom industry reasons to be optimistic. Consumers intend to dramatically increase use of mobile data services over the next two years ― with a significant ramp-up in the next 12 months.
The Tellabs-commissioned survey shows that up to 71% of consumers anticipate daily use of services such as mobile Internet. Yet mobile users continue to raise concerns about cost, speed and quality of service.
The research1, conducted in the five larger Western European countries and the United States by The Nielsen Company for Tellabs, analysed 10 mobile data services. It reveals that more than half of the approximately 200 million mobile data users in those countries expect to increase use in the next two years.
“More significantly, according to the research more than a quarter of the millions of consumers who do not use mobile data services today intend to start using them shortly,” said Jesse Goranson, senior vice president of Mobile Media, The Nielsen Company.
”By delving deeper into consumer intent, the Tellabs survey comes just in time as the industry debates demand for services and capital requirements at MWC.”

Current users – For the surveyed ata services, average intended usage increase over the next 24 months was: 58% (US) 55% (Europe)
Non-users – For the surveyed data services, average intended usage over the next 24 months was: 27% (US) 28% (Europe)

In the surveyed countries alone, operators can expect more network traffic from around 175 million consumers for services such as mobile Internet, E-mail, photo uploading and Multimedia Messaging (MMS). Mobile data is clearly here to stay, offering operators a multi-million dollar opportunity.

Mobile data has become a consumer necessity
“Mobile data services are not a luxury, but a necessity that consumers plan to purchase despite economic conditions,” said Pat Dolan, vice president, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Tellabs. “By planning urgent and strategic network upgrades, operators can quickly and cost-efficiently address users’ issues and meet increasing demands on networks.”
The detailed breakdown of the top five services that non-users intend to start using shows that anticipated demand is not evenly split. U.S. consumers will drive more new mobile Internet use than Europeans: Around half of U.S. non-users of the mobile Internet intend to use it in the next two years, compared with a third of non-users in Europe.

Top Five Services U.S Europe
Mobile Internet 49% 34%
MMS 38% 39%
Uploading photos 34% 27%
Software/app download 30% 30%
E-mail 28% 32%

Breakdown of intended use in the next two years amongst non-users
In the European countries close to 40% of non-users also expect to start using MMS. Italy tends to be the leading adopter across all services, while Germany shows comparatively low adoption rates.

Survey points to issues to be addressed
Consumers also highlighted the greatest issues operators need to address: cost (too expensive or unclear), speed, quality and reliability.
Pressure on networks will be compounded as 41% of European and 71% U.S. respondents anticipate daily use of mobile Internet services. Mobile e-mail is on a similar growth trajectory, as it is increasingly available through a range of mobile devices.
The sustained increase in high-bandwidth applications and corresponding data traffic will create significant challenges for mobile operators looking to maintain profitability. Since most of the growth is expected within the next 12 months, this issue demands immediate attention.
“In Tellabs’ experience, timely, strategic changes to mobile operators’ networks will enable them to reduce costs, increase speed of services and improve quality and reliability,” said Dolan.
Operators that address these challenges early will take advantage of the increasing demand, while enhancing margins.

Source: Tellabs

Newspapers not dead yet, says Murdoch

RUPERT MURDOCH has delivered a sobering assessment about the internet as a growth engine, revealing search and advertising revenues at News Corp's Fox Interactive Media division - which houses the popular MySpace networking site - have stalled.
The new-media unit, which has invested heavily to expand MySpace, contributed just $US7 million ($10.4 million) to News Corp's $US818 million second-quarter operating income, the company said on Friday.
There was a "slight downturn" in revenue at the social networking site, Mr Murdoch said. That compares to $US179 million News Corp made from newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and information services such as the Dow Jones news wire.
Asked about his views on the long-term viability of the internet, Mr Murdoch said generating a return on investment for assets such as MySpace, which News Corp bought for $US580 million in 2005, was still a challenge.
"I think we have to find new ways to monetise our huge audiences," he told analysts. Websites reaching very specific target groups showed solid revenue increases, with the Journal's site on track to book $US120 million in advertising this year. Search sites were also doing well.
"But overall, you have a problem in that there is an almost infinite increase in inventory for websites and for display [advertising]," he said. "There is constant downward pressure on the rates you could get."
Providing more data and collecting information about web users to more effectively sell them to advertisers would be "increasingly important", Mr Murdoch said.
MySpace already uses information that members put in their profiles to target them with specific ads, which he said was showing "very promising returns".
With profits from the internet in single digits, Mr Murdoch hinted reports of the demise of newspapers were premature. That is despite hefty write-downs in the value of his papers and TV licences which resulted in News Corp's $US6.4 billion quarterly loss. "I am extremely happy with all of our newspapers," the media mogul said. "There has never been a greater appetite for news in the community. And we will be able to capitalise on that pretty well."
Newspapers have come under pressure as the global downturn has accelerated a move of high-yielding advertising to the internet. Like many of its peers, News Corp has started cutting jobs at its newspapers in Australia and offshore.
But Mr Murdoch, who copped heavy criticism for buying the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, for $US5.6 billion in 2007, said he remained a firm believer in newspapers, television and film as mass media.
"Quite simply, as long as advertisers need to move product and sell brands, these industries will remain strong" he said. "I have got great faith and if we continue the way we are going, we may even get lucky by not having so much competition at the end of it all."
But he ruled out further print acquisitions for now. Asked about reports he was eyeing The New York Times, Mr Murdoch said that he wasn't interested.
"Apart from the German pay TV business Premiere, "I have looked around and I really haven't seen any businesses that I really want to buy", he said.

Source: smh.com.au

US: Internet overtakes print as primary news source

ACCORDING to a report published by the Pew Research Center, the Internet overtook print newspapers as a news source this year in the United States.
The report found that Internet usage surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers, the Guardian reports.
The New York Times reports that the change "does not represent a decline in the popularity of newspapers," but rather a "near-doubling" of the number of people that name the Internet as their primary news source. Newspapers actually gained a percentage point in popularity over the last year.
Michael Dimock, the Pew Center's associate director believes that the US presidential election has a lot to do with the shift because most people prefer to follow their candidate in a way that mainstream media does not allow.
The shift to the Internet has been hard on newspapers because they have been unable to generate the same kind of advertising revenue as they used to. The most recent example was in December when the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy. Columbia Journalism professor, Sree Sreenivasan believes that "the problem is that advertising dollars from newspapers are being replaced by digital pennies."
The Guardian's Roy Greenslade believes that 2009 will be a rough year for newspapers and he predicts that more freesheets will vanish, more journalists will lose their jobs and more publishers will shut down. Greenslade believes that "rising newsprint prices and the flight to the Internet is transforming an already grim situation into a perilous one."
Greenslade feels that "there is a lack of genuine inventiveness about how to forge a new form of journalism, because companies are too focused on dealing with commerce." Which is the ultimate problem for newspapers - how to retain and gain audiences because as they are trimming costs, they are also cutting content and their ability to innovate.

Source: New York Times, The Guardian, Roy Greenslade, Poynter

Indonesia: In "emerging nations," more cell phones used to access Internet than computers

MOBILE phones are the primary way of accessing the Internet for people in "emerging markets," or those with poor fixed-line telecommunications, mobile technology companies are reporting.
It could be inferred from the information that in emerging nations, focus on the mobile market would produce higher revenues for advertisers or even news organizations trying to increase readership.
Countries such as Indonesia have many areas "lacking high-speed cable broadband connections, DSL lines or even regular phone lines for dial-up service," the Wall Street Journal is reporting.
Improvements in mobile technology have made it easier and quicker to go online via cell phones. The cost can also be cheaper than buying a computer or paying for home Internet service.
Wireless network operators and companies have seen emerging nations as "crucial" for growth, WSJ reports. They've developed their software to work with the technology available in poorer countries, compressing software to be quicker to access via mobile technology.
In developed markets, WSJ reports, the focus is on "smart-phones," which have similar functions to PC's with video and graphics. Cell phones in poorer nations are required more for checking email or social networking sites, and are hundreds of dollars cheaper.
Desktop browsers are still the larger global market than mobile versions, however, the mobile-browser market is "surging," WSJ reports.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The Fundamental Problem of Newspapers on the Internet

I introduce you to the fundamental problem of newspapers on the internet: The Krugman Paradox - named by me after watching PetMeds.com (PETS) ads appear next to Paul Krugman for three days after it was announced he won a Nobel Prize.
I couldn't believe there wasn't a better way to monetize his presence on NYTimes.com (NYT). Further investigation revealed that the Krugman problem was not unique.

Here goes.

Definition:
The Krugman Paradox is a phenomenon referring to newspapers' websites and the sites' inability to produce economically sustainable advertising revenue, despite their highest audience reach in the history of their industry. The paradox indicates that newspapers must increase the effectiveness of their online advertising if this is to be their main revenue stream.

Prior Art:
On April 7, 2008, Nicholas Carr put forth a theory he referred to as "unbundling". Boiled down to its core, the theory states that advertisements (bundled with content) in a printed newspaper produce a product worth more than the sum of their parts. The opposite is true online where ad performance must stand alone on a single web page. As he writes,
As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation.
On September 10, 2007, Doc Searls wrote about the utility of traditional advertising and how better ways of connecting customers to products and services have been created on the internet. He cautions newspapers who assume advertising will always be around at the levels prior to the existence of the internet. As he writes,
While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
…The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all, because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers.
On April 22, 2008, Jay Rosen responds to Searls' comments to highlight the idea that whether ad spending grows, shrinks, or stays the same:
Advertisers aren't in business to advertise; they do it to reach customers making a buying decision. If there were some other way of reaching that person, some other way for buyers and sellers to communicate, advertising would become more and more superfluous.

Example:
Despite the highest readership of any newspaper in the United States, the New York Times only generated $330 million in online advertising in 2007. Total operating costs for that same year totaled $2.928 billion.

Assumptions:
It is widely reported that total newspaper operating costs would be reduced by 35% if newspapers eliminated their print product. Using the NYT example again, costs could be reduced to $1.903 billion.
Online advertising in general is growing approximately 12% year over year.
The New York Times is following this trend.
NYT online advertising revenue is projected to be ~$350 million or $29.17 million per month.

Audience:
The NYTimes.com reaches an average 15.6 million people per month (quantcast) and newspaper websites in aggregate reached 69.8 million people (naa).
65.4% of NYTimes.com readers come from the USA.
NYTimes.com is reaching approx. 3.3% of the US population (15.6 million x65.4%) =10.2024 million/(305 million).

Revenue per person:
$29.17 million month / 15.6 million unique monthly visitors = $1.87 per unique per month.
Each unique reader is worth $22.40 annually in online advertising revenue (a far cry from the 1 subscriber = $1000 which is what it was before the arrival of the internet).

Problem:
The gap to break-even is still a whopping $1.553 billion.
If advertising rates stay the same, The New York Times needs to raise its unique audience 5.437 times in order to break even. Here is how it breaks down:
5.437 X 15.6 million uniques per month =
84.82 million uniques per month X $1.86 per unique =
$158.6 million per month X 12 months =
$1.903 billion annual online advertising revenues =Break Even NOT YET PROFITABLE
Questions for further examination or the "Stalin Problem" (reality):
Is it unrealistic for NYTimes.com to grow their national audience reach much more than 3.3% considering their print audience reach is ~1million or roughly .3%?
Generating 84.82 million uniques per month would make NYTimes.com the number 5 website in the entire world, ahead of Wikipedia.org
Preliminary conclusions:
Assuming the Krugman Paradox is real:

Analysis of the Krugman Paradox suggests that pursuing online audience growth strategies to grow revenue may not be the best way to grow revenue
Analysis of the Krugman Paradox suggests that absent online advertising innovations, newspapers must seek alternative revenue streams to achieve economic sustainability.
Notes about my data:
NYTimes internet revenue figures include NYTimes.com, about.com, Boston.com and other company websites. I'm not too concerned though, because parsing out this data would only make their revenue numbers WORSE.
"Correlation does not imply causation", further investigation needs to be done to find out if the Krugman Paradox is real.
Of course, further research needs to be done in order to see if this situation is representative of the industry as a whole.

Source: Seekingalpha.com