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

Why Aren't More Print Publishers Cozying Up With The iPad?

The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010 and was quickly heralded by many in traditional print media as a potential rejuvenator for their troubled businesses. Having used the device daily for the last six weeks or so, I must admit it is the perfect media consumption device, among many other things, for all of my reading (books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, tweets, FB feed, emails, web sites). Given my propensity to multitask, I crave multi-purpose devices and find the Kindle far too limiting a product, especially for the price. The iPad is perfect for email, calendaring, surfing, reading books, digesting RSS feeds, browsing real-time web feeds from Twitter and Facebook, watching movies while traveling, listening to music, checking weather, tuning in to baseball games, and countless other things. It is a far better way to consume magazines and newspapers than any other electronic device I have seen.
Given this, more than five months after it has been announced and the developer tools made available, and more than sixty days after shipping, why is Wired one of the few print publishers to make the leap and offer a version? The WSJ has a decent app (but downloads take forever), the NY Times has an anemic reader which showcases only a handful of stories each day (many duplicated in each section), the NY Post released an app which just offers pictures, and Vanity Fair offers a meager PDF of the print magazine for a whopping $5 per issue. USA Today seemed to step up with a nicely designed app. But it’s telling that so few of the traditional print publishers have taken the last five months to rethink the way a magazine or newspaper ought to be delivered digitally and devote sufficient resources to getting something great out on time. Wired’s editor Chris Andersen made some noise about how his staff did this, but frankly their implementation is also mostly a glorified PDF with some videos thrown in. Amazingly, URLs are not hot-linked in Wired nor Vanity Fair, email addresses are not clickable, text is not selectable nor are articles tweetable.
I think the iPad is actually under-hyped as a device that will transform media consumption. I think, thanks to the forthcoming wave of tablet devices and better netbooks, the consumer PC is basically dead within the next three years (not so for PCs for the enterprise). But with this new opportunity comes the need for content companies to be aggressive in adapting to and adopting new platforms. We have seen countless examples of how native (i.e., purpose-built) applications prosper on new platforms whereas those migrated from a legacy platform never quite work. Doodlejump is the best selling game on iPhone, not Halo. Farmville is the biggest game on Facebook, not Mario Bros. Early adopters of new platforms tend to reap the rewards more quickly than the late entrants. Given the rapid pace of technology adoption (Steve Jobs says iPad is the best selling product Apple has ever released), consumers build loyalty to new brands more easily when they are the only ones available on a new platform. I advise our companies to be aggressive in adopting new platforms. Crunchyroll, a leader in the anime video space online, had a great iPad app available days after the device shipped. It is this level of aggressiveness that the traditional media companies must adopt in order to build consumer mindshare on these platforms.
It is easy to say, “Only 3MM iPads have been sold.” But given there are only 13,000 apps for iPad written so far, there is plenty of room for best-in-class apps to reach audiences much larger than their analog print equivalents. NPR, for example, has a great app that has been downloaded more than 350,000 times (as of mid-June).
Conde Nast had to go the embarrassing route of announcing their intention to deliver iPad versions of their magazines back in March but have only a few examples above to show for it, shortcomings and all. Where is The New Yorker? Cosmo? Glamour? Oprah? Better Homes and Gardens? Architectural Digest? People? The Economist? New York Magazine? National Geographic? Can you imagine what type of experience could be built for the iPad and other tablets with the content of these magazines? Yet none are available. Where are the hip magazines? Paper? Paste? Even Rolling Stone, heralding a rebirth of late, is absent.
Here are the top magazines by circulation (as of end of 2009 by AdAge) and who has at least shipped an iPad app (√). Looks like a whopping six out the top 20:

1. AARP The Magazine
2. Better Homes & Gardens
3. Reader’s Digest √
4. Good Housekeeping
5. National Geographic
6. Woman’s Day √
7. Ladies Home Journal
8. Family Circle
9. Game Informer Magazine
10. People
11. Time √
12. Taste of Home
13. Sports Illustrated √
14. Cosmopolitan
15. Prevention √
16. Southern Living
17. AAA Via
18. Maxim √
19. O, the Oprah Magazine
20. AAA Living

This resistance to adopt early and experiment by incumbents is precisely what provides the opportunities for startups to create value quickly and disrupt markets.

Source: Business Insider

Pay-per-click is the new online paradigm

As the Times and Sunday Times prepare to go behind a paywall, print publishing must face up to reality – major online adjustments are needed.

One of the major shifts in the consumption of media over the past decade is the transfer of control from publishers and advertisers to the consumer. TV viewers screen commercials using DVR systems; radio listeners customise their programming using internet or satellite radio; and internet users use ad-blocking software or just train their eye to ignore display ads all together. The result is that the old paradigm, where ads are imposed on the audience, is losing its effectiveness.
Instead, a new paradigm is emerging. Since the consumer is no longer passive, advertising models are learning to take into account the interests of all stakeholders: the advertiser, the publisher and the consumer.Search advertising and its adjacent ads model fully incorporate this new thinking. From the advertiser's point of view, this pay-per-click (PPC) model shifts some of the risk to the publisher, who only gets paid if the user took action and clicked on the advertisement.
In an article published in this newspaper a few weeks ago we proposed a new online monetisation model for newspapers. The idea is that papers will learn how to use their unique advantage online – credibility – by presenting relevant advertisers next to the products, services and activities they review. Some of the reactions voiced ethical concerns. "I can see why the shift you argue for would make sense from a publishing perspective," said Jill Drew, a former business editor for the Washington Post, "but for me it crosses a line between commerce and journalism that I'm uncomfortable with."
One possible solution for these concerns is that in this model the newspapers often don't or shouldn't work directly with the vendors but rather with aggregators who represent multiple retailers. The New York Times, for instance, linked the 10 best books of 2009 it recommended on its "Holiday Gift Guide" to three possible buying venues: Amazon, Barnes & Noble and local booksellers. Another solution is using automatically generated contextual ads. Google's Adsense algorithm, for instance, knows how to fit relevant ads to such content and it works as a firewall between the newspaper and the vendors. When consumers click, the ad aggregators share the revenue with the newspaper.
Moreover, newspapers always had to handle commercial pressures that threatened to compromise their integrity. Whether it is a newspaper that publishes a negative story about a bank that is also one of its biggest advertisers, or a television network that exposes a safety issue with a car manufacturer, the ethical threat has always been there.
Other naysayers suggested that such a model will result in consumer sections being all that's left of journalism. But this won't make much sense for newspapers, as a big part of their authority is a result of their non-consumer-oriented coverage. If you search on Google for "British government", no ad appears, yet the search engine chooses to include such data in its index as part of creating its authority. The revenue is generated when searching for "London hotels". That doesn't mean that the first search is less important.
Another reaction wondered whether an article criticising a political party will click through to a page where one could contribute to a choice of rival parties. Well ... why not? The Huffington Post is running a similar concept these days in its Impact section in what can be called "inter-activism": sponsored links enable interested readers to take action. In this model, readers can be presented with a range of sponsored actionable articles, implicating different levels of involvement, such as signing a petition or donating money.
The print publishing industry can no longer afford to make only minor adjustments for the new media. The basic rules of the game are changing, calling for collaboration between advertisers, consumers and publishers. Whether the leveraging trust model is a valid solution or not, any solution to newspapers' financial crisis must consider this new stakeholder paradigm. If the consumer and the advertiser have nothing to gain, the publisher will gain nothing as well.

Source: Guardian

Print media model is broken

THE business model for print media is broken and publishers should be looking to create their own equivalent of the iPod instead of misguidedly waiting for advertising spend to return, according to Maurice Levy, chief executive and chairman of Publicis Groupe.
Speaking to more than 600 delegates at the FIPP 2009 World Magazine Congress today, the head of one of the world's largest advertising and communications groups shared some sobering observations for both newspapers and magazines, which he labelled "analogue" media.
The chief executive did see a future for print media, but said it required "innovative thinking" and warned it would be necessary to "shatter common views, traditional sentiment and cliché" along the way.
"The end of the economic crisis will not be the end of the crisis for analogue media," he warned. "You are facing a deep, profound structural revolution and have to be prepared for a new world."
He urged publishers not to fall into the waiting-for-a-better-day-trap, in which the automotive sector finds itself, and realise they must adapt to survive.
"Circulation has been decreasing for years now and no stimulus package can stop this long-term trend," he said. "Moreover, who can believe, honestly, that young people, who we call the digital natives, are going to ditch their computers, their iPods, their mobile phones, and go back to print?"
Conference-goers, who had assembled from more than 50 publishing markets, were then told that, in the long term, magazines will not attract as much advertising.
Using forecasts from ZenithOptimedia, a Publicis Groupe agency, Levy said magazines' share of global ad spend is set to continue to contract right through to 2011, regardless of any financial recovery.
Publishers were also told not to expect a sudden "spurt of philanthropy" from advertisers, who are increasingly focused on digital opportunities, but to seize digital as an opportunity.
"Magazines own what is the most important thing to succeed in the world of media and particularly on the net: content," he said.
Citing Bill Gates' well-used mantra, the chief executive said content is still king, which means magazines are well-positioned to find new revenue streams online.
He noted that, although display advertising has proved disappointing for publishers and CPMs remain low, the internet is a very young media and its rules and framework are still being stabilised and finalised.
Using the music industry by way of example, he said it was possible to change free-content models into paid ones, but publishers will "need to think out of the box".
He confessed to being surprised by how little publishers take advantage of their brands and their already well-defined communities (readership).
Why, asked Levy, had magazine publishers not paved the way in user-generated content, performance-based advertising or social networking? And why could publishers not have invented the likes of Twitter and micro-blogging and the use of mobile applications?
Concluding, Levy warned there will not be one business model, no Holy Grail, no one-size fits all solution.
"Each company, each title, each media will have to find its own model," he said. "Do not stand still. Run and don't stop running, at least then your competitors will have to strive to catch you."

Source: MediaWeek.co.uk

Print is a powerful tool for mobilizing an audience

THE Dallas Morning News launched a print-only community newspaper called Neighbors in 2005 and, two years later, turned it into neighborsgo and launched a corresponding Web site under the direction of managing editor Oscar Martinez.
The idea behind the project: offer readers a place to publish their news on a separate area of the Morning News Web site with the lure of print publication for the best stuff. In addition to the Web site, 18 different print editions were launched, each targeting a separate geographic area.
The readers responded. Editors were inundated with submissions and emails. And, the way Martinez views it, print provided the motivation for most people.
“The innovation of neighborsgo isn’t the social-media aspect of neighborsgo.com or the amount of content generated by users,” Martinez says. “It’s the resulting print product, which is a mash-up of user- and staff-generated content. Print still has an incredible power to validate shared experiences and strengthen community connections. In 2009, this is a great story for newspapers to tell.”
Another great story for newspapers is how the editors at neighborsgo have gone about getting to know their audience. As Martinez says, “Before you can mobilize an audience, you need to know who they are. More important, they need to know who you are.
“Neighborsgo editors display their personalities online and interact daily with readers across multiple platforms – including prompt e-mail and phone replies, and outreach via external social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Once a month, editors meet with readers face-to-face, informally, over coffee. (A recent event featured nine editors ‘hosting’ more than 120 readers at nine area Starbucks.)”
For the Dallas news company, they have turned the concept of “citizen journalists” on its head. “In our world, editors are ‘journalist citizens,’” Martinez says.
MyCommunityNOW is a similar project launched by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 25 neighborhood areas. The basic premise is the same: leverage an inexpensive and efficient digital publishing to allow an audience to self-publish, then use the best submissions for localized print editions. The lure of print motivates the audience while the Journal Sentinel recognizes that its reporters and editors can’t be everywhere, nor can it always cover the news and events that readers want. So MyCommunityNOW provides expanded coverage in each community.
“Let’s face it, if there is a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new grocery store in town, the odds are slim that the newspaper will send out a staff photographer or reporter to cover it,” said Mark Maley, the site’s editor. “But if the chamber of commerce president has a digital camera, we strongly encourage him to take a few shots and post it on the local NOW site. It’s providing a facet of coverage that newspapers — especially in this era of downsizing and staff cuts — often can’t provide.
“But beyond that, we are giving people a chance to actively participate in how their community is being covered and to interact with others in their community through our sites. Just as people like posting videos to YouTube and photos to Flickr, they like to similar tools to interact with other residents in their hometown.”
The lure of print helps motivate NOW contributors, but so does a little friendly competition. So NOW editors frequently send traffic reports to the 130-plus bloggers who voluntarily contribute, with the page views their posts receive and how they rank compared to other NOW bloggers.
“My favorite type of submissions are the kind that surprise the heck out of me in terms of popularity,” Maley said. “Sometimes a small, two- or three-paragraph user-submitted story about a new business in town can get four or five times as many page views as a staff-written story about the city’s budget crunch or a more ‘serious’ issue.
“I’ve found that we can learn something about how we cover a community if we pay attention to what kind of news people are submitting to us – and what people are reading online.”

Source: journalism20.com

Newspapers look to digital as print faces challenges

AFTER struggling with a loss of ad dollars in print, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) ran its final print edition last week. The 146-year old paper will remain alive as a Web-only publication, making advertising for the publication exclusively digital.
The P-I is not alone. Newspapers and magazines across the country are looking to build digital revenue sources as less money is being spent in print advertising.
“I think digital publishing's absolutely the trend,” said Robert Grimshaw, publisher and managing director of FT.com, the Web site for the Financial Times. “Everything ultimately follows the consumer, and everybody is going online, so publishers have to be comfortable with operating in a different environment.”
“Yes, there are closures and bankruptcies, but newspapers are not going away. Like all industries, the product life cycle changes and right now things are changing and going more digital,” added Mike Petrak, VP of sales for MediaNews Group, a group that publishes 54 newspapers nationwide, including The Oakland Tribune and The Denver Post.
In fact, digital news audiences are growing. According to the Magazine Publishers of America, the number of unique visitors to consumer magazine Web sites for the first quarter of 2008 averaged around 70.7 million unique users per month, a new record. In fact, online readership is rising at twice the rate of the general Internet audience.
Larger markets, in particular, are seeing digital publishing take off, but the challenge is converting that digital audience to revenue, notes Jerry Lyles, SVP of publisher relations for Publishing Group of America (PGA).
Currently, online ads are valued far below print ads, and publishers are struggling to make their old, ad-supported revenue models work online.
“Advertisers understand that that is the direction that everything is headed,” Lyles said. “The challenge comes more from the newspaper side, and trying to monetize the online version in a way that's similar to how they are able to monetize print. The papers have to get the correct pricing for those ads and the proper staffs to actually go out and sell them, and the last thing they want is to have their current print sales team selling digital.”
As the digital format continues to grow and gain audience, Lyles expects advertisers to become more accepting of paying similar rates for digital as for print ads.
“Online offers an enormous number of options not available in print and allows advertisers to pick out a very fine segment of the audience and target them precisely,” Grimshaw added. “It's an amazing benefit, and of course there's an awful lot of tracking technology that allows you to get great insight into the value of the money you've spent. As advertisers start to understand what it can do for them, online advertising is an attractive proposition.”
Until online ad revenues catch up with online publishing, there are plenty of other ways to make money on a digital platform — without having to relearn the entire business.
“Conceptually, digital is not that dramatically different than print,” explained Sean O'Neal, chief revenue officer, Datran Media. “A publisher's Web site functions like a newsstand, and an e-mail newsletter functions like a subscription, where the content is being pushed by the publisher. There is a lot of opportunity to monetize this e-mail content, which is highly targeted.”
For MediaNews Group, which works with Datran Media's e-mail and inbox ad inventory services, it is about focusing on the content and knowing who its target audience is in each marketplace. After doing this, the company can push targeted content to a specific audience via e-mail and mobile.
“We are a content distribution company, and e-mail helps us to provide great service and maximize the relationship [while helping us] monetize the content,” added Petrak.
MediaNews Group has been using digital to focus on its niche audiences such as lifestyle groups and specific communities. It is segmenting e-mails to reach special interests groups and, by adding more niche newsletters, it adds more ad inventory targeted to a specific audience. For example, Denver has many pet owners and dog lovers, so it has created a newsletter that targets this audience.
“In print, inserts drove a lot of subscriptions. In digital, people can get the same benefits from insert media by signing up for these lifestyle oriented newsletters that give them offers,” said Petrak.
New York magazine also is working with Datran and using e-mail to help monetize its publication online. It also has found success in e-mail newsletters with editorial content and advertising e-mails that send consumers offers from their advertisers. In fact, 10% of NY Magazine's digital revenue comes from e-mail. For the lifestyle magazine, it is all about building out its offerings in various channels.
“Like every media business, 2009 has been a tough year, but it doesn't change our belief that print is still a viable medium,” said Michael Silberman, general manager, NYMag.com. “And at the same time, digital is important. We have built a real digital media business, as opposed to just having a Web presence.”
The Financial Times, too, has built a robust digital media business. Some of this business comes from online offerings, but, unlike many of its peers, the paper also charges a substantial fee for online subscriptions.
“I think papers need to look at subscriptions,” said Grimshaw. “It's very tough to make money just from advertising, not least because it's highly cyclical but also because the Internet is so intensely competitive. There's not much to differentiate one publisher's ad proposition from another, and that's part of the reason why ad networks have been so successful.”
The publishing world is not broken into print v. online, but, rather, into a multiplatform world. Publishers should be prepared to serve content on mobile phones and e-readers as well. The Financial Times, for example, has signed an agreement to provide content for the Kindle and for Plastic Logic's forthcoming e-reader, set for release in early 2010. The paper has also revamped its mobile site and is working on an iPhone app.
New York Magazine is also experimenting in mobile and plans to expand that over the next year. Mobile has become a hot topic for newspapers and magazines. Cox Newspapers, CBS News, The Street.com, Boston.com, The Onion and Gawker Media all recently have created mobile WAP sites. Mobile ad network Quattro Wireless is helping to sell inventory for these media properties.
“As many papers focus their efforts on online publishing, mobile is a great way to extend that content and generate more traffic and ad revenue,” said Lars Albright, VP of business development at Quattro Wireless. “We see solid interest from advertisers in the news space as the demographic is often highly attractive to a brand advertiser.”
Albright said that both national papers and smaller more regional papers have been using mobile to help grow their audience.

Source: DMNews

The best and worst time for journalism

IT is the worst of times for the businesses that traditionally have funded professional journalism but the best of times to be a journalist, so long as you aren’t counting on a job at a media company to pay your bills, raise a family or fund your retirement.
As laid out in painful detail today at Journalism.Org, the state of the news business in the United States is the “bleakest” in the six years it has been tracked by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center.
Every indication for the immediate future is that things will get worse for the legacy media companies. But you knew that. What you may not realize is that journalism is thriving as never before, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the implosion of the businesses that traditionally have supported the press.
The challenge for those who are, or who aim to be, journalists is to find a way to afford to do what you ought to do, what you want to do and what society desperately needs you to do.
It won’t be easy, as underscored over the weekend in the searching questions about the economics of journalism raised repeatedly at a conference on the future of the profession at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Across the Bay at the very same time, staffers of the San Francisco Chronicle painfully voted 1o to 1 to allow management to summarily eliminate a third of the 445 newsroom and ad-sales positions covered by the Media Workers Guild of Northern California.
For all the fear and frustration among journalists today, however, the vision of next-generation journalism is beginning to materialize beyond the smoking ruins of the once-invincible business models that supported a vigorous and independent press in the decades since World War II.
With everything falling apart all at once, we’ll take a moment to sum up the damage. Then, we’ll get on to a more constructive discussion about where to go from here.
Audiences for most print and broadcast media are shriveling. Confidence in the press is collapsing. Newspaper revenues have plunged by 25% to 33% since 2005, thrusting many publications from comfortable profitability to bankruptcy in places like Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Haven and Philadelphia. Newspapers have closed or likely will shut soon in Albuquerque, Cincinnati, Denver, Madison, Seattle and Tucson.
News staffs, newshole and even publication frequency are shrinking, shrinking, shrinking at newspapers and news magazines. Coverage has been truncated to such levels that none of the Big Three networks has a full-time correspondent in Iraq and 27 states in the union don’t have a single, full-time newspaper correspondent stationed in Washington, D.C.
The forces that led the traditional media companies to this state of accelerating – and potentially irreversible – decline were unleashed for the most part before the economy toppled into the worst meltdown since the last Depression. (For another view of the devolution of newspapers, see this must-read from Clay Shirky.)
The forces of decline include, but are not limited to, the rapid adoption of disruptive interactive and mobile technologies; seismic changes in consumer preferences and advertiser behavior, and roughly equal amounts of arrogance, avarice and absence of imagination on the part of the Pooh-Bahs occupying the executive suites of the nation’s media companies. Amazingly, a great many of the shortsighted “leaders” who occupied the executive suites in 2005 remain on the job today.
If you define journalism as something produced by a traditional newspaper, magazine or broadcaster, then, yes, journalism is in trouble. But that’s a limited, if not to say anachronistic, definition of journalism in an age when cheap, easy-to-use and widely available interactive technology has democratized the creation, discovery and acquisition of information.
If you define journalism as the activity that allows people to learn from each other what is happening in their world, then journalism is alive and well at Facebook, Twitter, Slashdot, Moms Like Me, Last.FM and thousands of other online communities.
As but one example of the ferocious growth of participatory sites, the 1.5 million hours of video contributed to YouTube in the first six months of 2008 was greater than all the programming produced by the Big Three broadcast networks since their inception 60 years ago, according to Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University whose landmark study of the phenomenon is here.
To be sure, not everything on Facebook or YouTube would be construed as journalism by even the most generous observer. But the value of the content is in the eye of the beholder. And those are the places, not mainstream media websites, that are being beheld ever more frequently by modern consumers.
If you define journalism as an activity where an intermediary tells people what is happening in their world, then journalism’s vital signs are somewhere between stable and strong at Muncie Free Press, Westport Now, Minnpost, and Crosscut – to name a few of dozens of alternative local news sites that have sprung up as staff cuts and shrinking news holes have compromised the coverage of news organizations across the land.
Not one, but two, online entities are moving into the void created by the relentless hollowing out of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Voice of San Diego, which debuted as a non-profit alterative to the U-T in 2005, will get head-on, online competition this week from the newly launched San Diego News Network. SDNN, a for-profit venture, will combine original reporting with content aggregated from several print and broadcast partners.
If you define journalism as something produced by citizens who step in where big-time journalists seldom tread, then journalism is registering at least a discernable pulse at places like Chi-Town Daily News, Patch, Bakersfield Voice and the new The Local section of the New York Times.
Spot.Us, an intriguing experiment that represents a variation on the citizen-journalism theme, encourages visitors to its site to fund stories they would like to see covered. When the funding target is met, journalists produce the articles for as little as $200 per story. That’s not enough, of course, for the downpayment on even a foreclosed condo in most places. But it is getting a bit of journalism done.
As diverse as all of the above new journalistic genres may be, they share a common problem: None to date has come close to generating the sort of monopoly-like revenues and profits that historically paid for the ample professional staffs fielded by the ailing legacy media.
In the cases where the new journalistic genres are merely an avocation for the tweeters and soccer moms, this is perhaps of little concern. But the comparatively thin revenues generated by most of these enterprises are not at the moment providing anything close to the compensation that professional journalists receive at even the stingiest traditional news organization.
With the toxic economy and sweeping secular changes in advertising grinding away at the economics of the legacy media, the need to discover new business models to support journalism grows more urgent by the day.
In that vein, it is with high hopes and best wishes that we are watching the launch of Global Post, one of the most ambitious endeavors to date in the service of seeking to properly compensate journalists in the future.
Global Post has developed a holistic, thoroughly modern business model that includes selling banner advertising, syndicating its content to other news organizations and offering a $199 premium membership that will entitle subscribers to suggest stories, hear special briefings from correspondents, listen to exclusive podcasts from world leaders, receive a host of email newsletters and get expedited mobile text alerts on breaking stories.
Global Post says it has assembled more than 70 correspondents in more than 40 countries to replace the international coverage that is being increasingly neglected by the avidly downsizing traditional press. The questions are whether the public’s appetite for foreign news will be large enough – and the quality of the execution will be good enough – to make the project a success.
Global Post’s correspondents are not staff reporters but individual contributors being paid “modest” stipends “comparable to freelancer rates paid by traditional American media,” according to the company’s website. While the correspondents don’t have the sort of salaries, benefits and retirement programs enjoyed by staffers at mainstream organizations, they are being granted “considerable shares of common stock in the company.”
This is the sort of bargain that made Google’s original in-house masseuse a millionaire. Can it do the same for foreign correspondents?

Source: Newsosaur

Rescuing print journalism: Does Cable TV have the right idea?

TOWARD the end of the three-hour Chicago Journalism Town Hall meeting Sunday afternoon at the Hotel Allegro, the battle lines became clear.
On one side were those who believe journalists will do just fine in the future if they continue to give away their work product on the Internet. All they need to do is be more creative when it comes to content, advertising and funding.
These tended to be the younger, more entrepreneurial members of the overflow crowd of nearly 400 and the 14-person panel of current and former reporters.
On the other side were those who believe the free ride has got to end. All the innovation in the world isn't going to keep news organizations—particularly print-based outlets such as the Tribune—in the black as more and more customers migrate to the Web.
These tended to be the older, more established folks—the ones either stuck in the past or blessed with the wisdom of experience, depending on how you see the argument.
Normally, despite my age, I'd be with the young—the visionaries who embrace change, even with its attendant turmoil. They're the ones who refuse to cling to tradition for its own sake. They're the ones who are most comfortable with the inevitability that progress must destroy even as it rebuilds.
And, in fact, I was on the side of the young until a few months ago. Until then, I believed that large news organizations could thrive online by using the TV/radio broadcast model—by making it difficult to enjoy content without being confronted with advertising messages.
But for a variety of reasons, this model doesn't seem to work for online news, particularly in this economy. Newspapers can and do make money with Web advertising, just not enough to make up for the declines in print advertising.
I'm now a believer in the cable TV model. News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives and other offerings.
For, say, $10 a month, a subscriber would have a choice of, say, 50 participating local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Another $5 might buy an additional 50 outlets, and so on.
Why the bundling? Because the online subscription model doesn't work for most individual media companies. Readers just browse over to similar, free sites to avoid the hassle and the expense, however minor.
Why not try a pay-per-click model instead? Same reason.
I floated an even more vague version of the cable-TV idea from my seat on the panel Sunday, and while no one shouted me down, no one seconded my motion and the chippy conversation continued.
You can join me (free!) online to point out all the likely drawbacks and pitfalls of this model for distribution of online journalism, including the potentially knotty hurdle of antitrust laws.
I've probably thought of all of the objections already. I've certainly read a lot of naysaying about paid content via the links posted at the event's Web site.
There's no going back, skeptics say. News and commentary want to be free.
Maybe so. But unless someone's bold and unlikely experiment works, those on both sides of the battle lines will be losers.

Source: Chicagotribune.com

Is online-only inevitable?

ARE there any newspapers willing to move completely online, foregoing the current struggle for a print edition? This is the question journalist Gary Andrews asks, analyzed by Media Guardian's Roy Greenslade.
Local papers, feeling the squeeze in recent months, could find a way to save their product in venturing completely online, but who will be the first to take the plunge? The Independent is considering it, but is facing criticism for abandoning the roots of newspapers.
Andrews asks another important question: what does a paper have to lose by going digital?
There is the matter of paying for it. Monetizing an all-online venture has yet to prove completely successful for newspapers, especially if their content is free. But the newspaper industry is hemorrhaging money trying to save its print edition and provide multi-platform services for its audience, and soon may not be able to produce the physical format.
An online edition, Greenslade says, is surely better than no edition at all. Even though going online would mean the death of newsprint, Greenslade says, "what counts is the journalism, not the platform." As providers of a service, news organizations (no longer just newspapers) have an obligation to the community they serve to keep producing news, no matter the outlet.
The transition to an online-only product is not to be a paroxysm of desperation. It very well may be that newspapers have nowhere else to go but online, but if the move is to be made it must be done with appropriate consideration for the business model and the community it serves.

Source: Guardian

Journalist switches from online-only to print after "missing out" on the news

An Editor and Publisher column by Ted Knutson detailed his voyage as a consumer of news from print, to online, to print again after realizing how much he was missing in the online news world.
To save money after losing a staff position, Knutson stopped buying newspapers and went for all his news online. A trend, he noted, that follows the "rest of the world," who are trading in print services for online. He received his news only online for months.
He put the kibosh on that plan after taking a writing test for a job and finding his result as being too "news poor."
Knutson said he was "satisfied" with the news he received online, but once he returned to print editions, he realized that he was reading more stories and longer stories each day.
The print newspaper, he said, had several advantages to the online version, and the main advantage is something that online publications also prize: time.
Online editions pride themselves on how quick and easy it is to stay up-to-date. Knutson ran across "news he didn't realize was there" leafing through the print edition, rather than "just looking at a handful of headlines on the home page of a newspaper's Web site."
Print advertising is more engaging and enjoyable than in the online version, Knutson said, another plus for print. Print ads don't detract from stories, unlike "drop-down" ads online, which can even steer readers away from the newspaper's webpage.
The sentimentalist in him appreciated the news in his hands every day. Knutson's action during a crisis period for print newspapers is no doubt appreciated by publishers, but it remains uncertain if he's starting his own trend.

Source: Editor and Publisher