Recovering Journalist

If You Don't Get It...

The Washington Post used to have a great advertising slogan: "If you don't get it, you don't get it." Over time, for many of us at The Post and in the Washington area, "If you don't get it..." (said with a weary tone) became shorthand to describe folks that, well, just don't get it. And in the technology industry, you either "get it"--or you're toast.

Which brings me to several tidbits this week that make me wonder if how many people in the newspaper business really "get it."

* My friends Alan Jacobson and (echoing Alan) Alan Mutter have done marvelous jobs demolishing the newspaper industry's latest study of how people allegedly read newspapers and Web sites, EyeTrack07. This, um, groundbreaking work reveals--are you sitting down?--that readers pretty much select what they want to read based on what they're interested in, and then, well, read it. This sort of pseudoscience really can't be doing anybody any good, except maybe the people getting paid to conduct it. What's next? Phrenology? Actually, the most interesting tidbit in the study, which seems counterintuitive to a lot of print people: people seem to read more text in online stories than they do print stories. Hmmm.

* Speaking of demolishing, Robert Niles does a number on the oft-repeated criticism that blogs don't break news (following up on his equally good debunking of the notion that blogs are parasitic). The dead-tree types may not want to believe that blogs are doing original reporting, but I see plenty of examples every day of news being broken by blogs in such areas as business, sports and technology (PaidContent.org, anyone?), and Niles lists even more mainstream examples. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We'll see the blogging equivalent of I.F. Stone, probably in multiple iterations, before too long. As Niles says to the denizens of mainstream media, "quit whining."

* And finally, the great Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal got off a glib but unfortunate one-liner today, likening citizen journalism to "citizen surgery." That's a funny line, but I worry that his humor went over the heads of his audience, the old-school editors at the ASNE convention. No doubt most of them were nodding their heads in agreement and relief, when they really should be thinking hard about how they can be empowering their readers to contribute to the conversation. Once again: If you don't get it, you don't get it.

And you know what? Even if people in the industry get it, the bigger question is, do they know what to do about it?

Whistling Past the Graveyard

There's a new survey of newspaper editors that claims that an overwhelming number of editors are optimistic or even very optimistic about the future of newspapers.

So much for the idea that journalists are skeptical by nature!

But I am a skeptic, and when I read past the rosy headlines on this survey, I found that there's plenty to be skeptical about. Turns out the survey, conducted by the World Editors' Forum and Reuters, actually was an international survey—in fact, only 5 percent of the respondents come from North America (more than 40 percent were from Europe).

That makes a difference. While the problems afflicting newspapers (competition from the Web and other media, deserting readers and advertisers) seem to be pretty much universal, they're particularly acute in the United States. In fact, very few of the U.S. editors I speak to have anything like an optimistic view of the industry's future. Far from it.

So beware of headlines that make it sound as if editors are upbeat about the industry's future. The outlook is hardly that sunny.

Online, Down Under

I'm surprised we haven't seen a serious effort like this in the U.S.: Fairfax Group, one of Australia's big media companies, has launched a major online news site in Brisbane, the Brisbane Times. There's no print version; it's an online-only competitor to the Brisbane Courier-Mail, professionally staffed but minus the presses and trucks.

It's probably not surprising to see this level of innovation: Australian publishers are much more aggressive and imaginative than their U.S. counterparts, and Australia in general is far more online savvy than the U.S.—it's perhaps the most wired (and wireless) place I've ever been.

While the U.S. has seen countless citizens' media efforts, a handful of independent local online newspaper startups (usually one-person shows) and an even smaller handful of online-only small community papers, the Brisbane Times involves a major publisher deciding to skip print and go into a major city (and attacking an existing paper) with an online product. Reportedly, it's already attracting significant advertising.

American publishers still seem to be stuck thinking print-first. What passes for innovation here generally consists of launching free print dailies—with all the incumbent costs of production and distribution. And let's not forget that online is a much better place to woo younger readers than in print. When will a major U.S. media company follow the example being set online Down Under?

Mind the Gap

The latest numbers from the Newspaper Association of America show print newspaper advertising revenue continuing to drop: down 1.7 percent in 2006 to $46.6 billion. No news there--the usual doom and gloom.

But there's another interesting number in the NAA report: Advertising revenue for online newspaper sites jumped 31.5 percent in 2006, to $2.7 billion. It would appear that increase accelerated in the fourth quarter, when online revenue was up 35 percent year over year (the third-quarter increase was just 23 percent). The decline in print advertising accelerated in the fourth quarter, too, with classifieds particularly hard hit. Also no news there.

It's a little hard to see what's really going on here from the percentage changes, but if you look at the hard numbers, something very interesting emerges: The decline in print advertising is beginning to be made up by the increase in online revenue. Print advertising fell roughly $800 million in 2006; online advertising grew roughly $650 million. That's still a $150 million gap, which isn't chickenfeed—but it's not hard to imagine that gap closing in 2007.

Or, to look at it another way, the combined newspaper print-online revenue for 2006, $49.3 billion, was only slightly below the $49.5 billion in combined ad revenue in 2005. Back to percentages: combined ad revenue fell by less than half of 1 percent in 2006. That's practically a rounding error. Online accounts for 5.4 percent of all newspaper ad revenue, incidentally, a share that continues to increase.

The NAA release describes the decrease in print advertising as "outweighing" the increase in online ad revenue in 2006. Well, yes--slightly. But I think this is a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full situation. The replacement of print advertising revenue with online revenue is starting to happen in a significant way, as some of us have predicted for some time. And online revenue continues to accelerate. Next year, the Newspaper Association may have to find another description of the difference between the two numbers.

Real Newsroom Heroes

Tim Porter, who's been away from his blog too long writing a book, has a terrific post about the real heroes of today's newsrooms: Not the editors who walk away whining about maintaining principles in the face of cutbacks (aka reality), but those who stay on and try to chart a course to the future—providing some real leadership and vision to their newsrooms.

Money quotes:

Quitting is not heroic. Leaving colleagues during a time of change is not heroic. Declaring that the future of journalism can not be as good as its past is not heroic. ... Only one certainty exists: That future will belong to those who build it. Walking away isn't the answer. Staying, working the problem, finding solutions, making hard choices, learning to think differently - those are the answers. And the people who do that are the real heroes of journalism.

Damn straight.

Putting the Web First, 24/7

Jeff Jarvis reports that the Guardian, which has taken the lead in so many other online innovations, has now proclaimed itself a 24/7, Web-first news organization. This is how all news organizations—especially in print—should be thinking.

A few weeks ago, Los Angeles Times Editor Jim O'Shea made a similar internal announcement, declaring that henceforth LATimes.com--not the print paper--will be the company's primary vehicle for delivering news.

These are steps in the right direction, though the reality is that dragging notoriously change-resistant newsrooms into this new model will be a significant challenge. Still, the sentiment is correct. The once-a-day print newspaper is a legacy of a bygone era. Readers now expect to get the latest news 24 hours a day online, and any news organization that isn't operating in that mode does so at its peril. This seems obvious--but precious few traditional news organizations seem to get it, or are willing to make announcements as bold as those that have come from the Guardian and L.A. Times. What are they waiting for?

Not One For the Books

Keyed to a report that the Los Angeles Times is about to downsize its book section, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about the dwindling state of newspaper book sections. Not counting book review sections that are folded into other sections of Sunday papers, it turns out that with the demise of the Times' section, there will only be five standalone newspaper book sections left in the U.S.

My question is: Why are there that many?

Bibliophiles will throw the book at me, but really, the book section is the classic example of the ways that newspapers cling to a bygone era. I guess the theory is that it's a good thing for newspapers to support literary efforts, being in roughly the same business and all. Or it's the same high-falutin' attitude that keeps classical music news and reviews roughly equal in weight to pop reviews in many papers—even though the audiences aren't even remotely the same size.

But beyond that, why do books get this special treatment? Why not a separate weekly section devoted to movies, or music? Or, to be really radical, a separate section to review video games? You laugh—but video games are a bigger business than movies or music, much less books, and probably would attract far more readers (young ones, no less) and advertisers.

As the Journal story points out, most book sections are starved for advertising—another sign that they're an anachronism. I suspect they're starved for readers, too. One might suggest that they're high-value readers—but clearly advertisers don't see it that way. The Journal says that publishers much prefer to spend their marketing dollars to get their books prominent placement in the big chain bookstores.

The only standalone book section that seems to be a success is the one published by The New York Times, which acts as sort of a trade magazine for the New York-based publishing industry, has plenty of ads—and often has more good writing and reading in it than most Sunday newspapers have in an entire edition. But that's the exception. Newspaper book review sections are yet another thing that newspaper managers should take a cold-blooded look at when they're looking to shift resources into higher-impact products. And while they're at it, take a look at the book section's equally anemic, anachronistic cousin, the Sunday magazine. At most papers, both have long outlived their usefulness.

USAToday.com 2.0

USAToday.com's new look is getting a lot of attention. It's certainly an ambitious attempt to rethink a major news site and to blend in blogs, social networking, user-generated content, tags and other Web 2.0 features. Kudos to that—these are features every news site should be adding.

But it would have been nice if the USAToday.com folks had spent more time thinking about the site's design and how best to display all of these new features. The home page is a mess: It looks like it was laid out with a shotgun. There's very little differentiation among the various sections and stories—they all mostly carry the same, confusing weight. The reader's eye isn't really sure where to go. The little thumbnail photos on the left side that apparently are color-coded to interior sections are lost on the average reader, who has no idea what the color codes mean. Interesting features such as the On Deadline blog are loudly displayed (the logo overwhelms the adjacent content, in fact) but never really explained or properly promoted. Overall, the home page looks more like a collection of disconnected items than a well-thought-out whole.

Conversely, the interior pages are too Spartan—most of the ones I clicked into have almost none of the Web 2.0 goodness that's blaring from the home page. If stories can have comments and ratings (which the headlines on the home page seem to indicate with little icons and numbers), shouldn't there be a prominent way to add comments and ratings on an actual story page? Yeah, "Comment" and "Recommend" are there, in light gray type under the story page headline, but you have to look hard to find them—and they don't seem to be clickable. And there's no display on the story page of the actual comments or ratings.

The thinness of the story pages is especially odd since so much traffic to any news or information site originates on those pages (because of linking and search) rather than the home page. Any good news site story page template should function as a mini-home page to engage visitors to use more of the site. Except for rudimentary section navigation, USAToday.com's story pages are pretty much dead ends.

Gannett deserves credit for trying to innovate on USAToday.com, much as it has taken the lead in thinking about new ways to gather and manage news at its other papers. But this new design doesn't seem fully baked (and the number of technical errors I came across moving around the site was quite disturbing). As with virtually all redesigns, it will probably need a few weeks to shake down, with appropriate tweaks along the way. Right now, however, USAToday.com's new look is a noble, but frustratingly failed, experiment.