Recovering Journalist

Still Partying Like It's 1999

If newspaper Web sites are going to successfully bail out their print counterparts, they've got to act like, well, Web sites. Unfortunately, a recent report indicates that most newspaper Web sites are still stuck firmly in the last century in terms of the functionality they offer.

Web users these days are fluent and comfortable with such Web 2.0 tools as social networks, user-generated content, blogs, etc. But many of these features are still slow to be adopted, much less exploited, by newspaper sites. And in many cases, where these features are being used, they're not being used to the full extent that online visitors find on many other sites.

You've heard of Web 2.0? This is Web 1.0. Maybe Web 1.1, at best.

There are some bright spots in the study of the nation's Top 100 newspaper sites by The Bivings Group (PDF copy of the underlying study here). If nothing else, Bivings found general improvement in newspaper use of Web 2.0 features over the past year. But that improvement comes with caveats: While 92 of those papers are offering video in some form, only 31 of them actually produce it themselves, for instance. Ninety-seven percent offer RSS feeds, though Bivings notes that not a single one of them is monetizing those feeds with advertising. Ninety-five percent have blogs of some sort (well, at least one blog), but only 22 percent offer any sort of blogroll list of links to other sites, in keeping with newspapers sites' quaint, prudish, Victorian reluctance to link to anything they can't control. Get over it, for crying out loud. Links are practically the core definition of the Web.

The scorecard on other features is much less encouraging. Lists of most-popular stories? Just 51 of the 100 sites have them. Article comments? A paltry 33 percent. User-generated content? Twenty-five percent. Social networking features? Um, five papers out of 100. Gee, that's smart, since those MySpace and Facebook thingies have proven to be so unsuccessful in the marketplace.

One more piece of Web 1.0, or actually Print 1.0, thinking is on display in the study: The number of newspaper sites requiring registration somehow increased over the past year, to 29 of the top 100 (wow, that number seems low, based on the registration walls I run into all the time), from 23 last year. Unless you're charging for content (gee, there's a concept) or wisely requiring readers to register to post comments or content, registration is just an annoyance that doesn't help anybody.

If newspapers want to know why they're getting left behind in the new, online world of media, they need to take a look in the mirror. As this study sadly illustrates, newspapers are getting swamped by their online competitors because their Web sites are still pretty much print products pasted on a screen. They're clinging to Web technologies (and site designs) that were outdated years ago, and they're apparently afraid to experiment with, much less aggressively adopt, features and technologies that are commonplace in the 2007 Web experience.

There are exceptions, notably WashingtonPost.com, USAToday.com and a few others, that are boldly adopting the latest technologies. But too many newspaper sites seem stuck in the last century. One reason papers are getting hammered is because they're too bland and conservative in print. It appears that attitude has infected the part of the business in which they need to be innovating and leading. Evolve, for crying out loud—or die.

...Drip...Drip...Drip...

Still more bad news, collated by Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur:

After six straight quarters of accelerating declines, newspaper print advertising sales in the first half of this year fell to the lowest level in a decade, according to statistics released today by the Newspaper Association of America.

(Don't you love how they released those stats on the last Friday in August? Looks like the newspaper industry is finally learning some tricks from the newsmakers who've been picking low-readership days to sneak news out for years!)

Even more chillingly for those who care about the future of the newspaper business, Mutter adds:

But let's get one thing straight: Improving online sales, while a good thing, won’t help an industry whose primary revenue base has been eroding at an ever-quickening rate for six straight quarters.

Maybe a reality check is at hand. The quickening decline in print ad revenue should be pushing newspapers ever more aggressively into finding new forms of revenue, online and elsewhere. While the NAA numbers are optimistic about the growth in online ad revenue (19 percent in the second quarter), that's still not nearly enough.

Until newspaper Web sites get truly serious about going after online advertising—coming to grips with advertisers' increasing distaste for print, pursuing new online ad formats, unbundling print and online sales, putting dedicated online sales reps to work, just for starters—there's an increasing danger that the much-hoped-for business transition from print to Web might fall a little bit (but fatally) short.

And as I've said before, woe unto the industry if the economy goes into a recession. If that happens, we'll remember these bad numbers as the good times.

...Drip...Drip...Drip...

Still more bad news for the newspaper industry this week:

* Goldman Sachs sees "no encouraging signs" in the newspaper ad revenue figures for July, which it figures fell 7.3 percent (Goldman only tracks selected companies—the big public ones—so these numbers are bit more bleak than some of the others reported lately). Biggest drops: 12.5 percent in classifieds and, yikes, 26% in real estate adverising—and the mortgage credit crisis was just beginning to put the brakes on the real estate market in July.

* Bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings says the newspaper industry is doing even worse than it expected. "Fitch's outlook for the sector remains negative," the company said. Fitch said the industry's ad-revenue problems are "more secular than cyclical," which is Wall Street-speak for "they ain't getting any better."

* Another big bond rater, Moody's Investor Service, cut its rating on The New York Times Co. to "negative" from "stable," citing, you guessed it, drops in ad revenue and concerns about the weakening real estate market and its effect, in turn, on advertising.

The news isn't all, bad, I suppose: the analysts at Wachovia are a little more upbeat than Goldman Sachs about July's ad revenue numbers, saying that July's decline wan't quite as bad as that of the two previous months. That may mean that the long decline in revenue is slowing. (That half-empty glass? It's actually half full! But stuff is still dribbling out of it.) On the other hand, Wachovia is pessimistic about the outlook for the industry's performance in the fourth quarter.

One final warning from Fitch: "An economic downturn would place incremental pressure on newspaper advertising revenue." In other words: Things could very well get even worse. And those problems in the real estate market, and real estate ads, are not a good sign. Still to come: the latest circulation numbers. Be very afraid.

Drip...Drip...Drip...

Henry Blodget--yes, that Henry Blodget--at Silicon Alley Insider has started to collate the monthly revenue reports put out by big newspaper companies. This is a valuable but depressing service, since those monthly reports almost always show decline these days (5% overall in July, according to Blodget's totals).

If you want to keep track of how the industry is withering away, this is the place to start, in handy spreadsheet form, no less. And if you really want to get depressed, think about how the slowing economy and the housing credit crunch are going to hasten these declines.

Show Me The Money!

The just-announced plan to start a local news site in the Twin Cities is an admirable venture. Indeed, I'm surprised we haven't seen more efforts like this to create significant local news sites that tap into the growing pool of highly qualified victims of newsroom buyouts. The best-known of these, perhaps, is Voice of San Diego; there are others, and hopefully there will be additional challenges to sleepy existing local media around the country.

But while the plans for MinnPost, put together by former Minneapolis Star Tribune Editor ad Publisher Joel Kaplan, are being hailed by editorial types, they so far seem to have a gaping hole: Where's the revenue going to come from? What's the business model? How is MinnPost going to sustain itself when the initial $1.1 million in funding runs out? (Which, believe me, will happen very quickly, especially given the size of that staff.)

The list of 25 initial staffers consists entirely of editorial personnel; there's not an advertising, business or marketing pro in the bunch (besides Kaplan). The release says, "MinnPost is currently looking to hire a leader for the business side of the organization and a sponsorship/advertising director," but that almost sounds like an afterthought. The revenue side of this nascent business needs to have much higher priority when you're stacking editorial talent like cordwood. Editorial is a cost center; you've got to pay for it somehow.

As Paul Farhi wrote in American Journalism Review recently, the business model ifor hyperlocal efforts still is unproven, and virtually all journalist-driven startup local sites are labors of love that are far from breaking even (beware grandiose claims). As we learned the hard way at Backfence, it's a long, hard, expensive slog to build successful local news and information sites. I firmly believe that it can be done, but it's not easy, and you need to have sufficient cash reserves available to keep the lights on while you work for years to create enough revenue to break even.

I wish MinnPost well; they're doing important, groundbreaking work. But they need to put away the reporters' notebooks and pull out the spreadsheets to really understand what it's going to cost to make their new venture a self-sustaining financial success. Ken Doctor, in his otherwise excellentpost about MinnPost, says, "What does it take to do journalism going forward? First and easiest answer: It takes journalists." I respectfully disagree. It takes money to pay those journalists to do their jobs. So far, I fear, MinnPost isn't fully embracing that critical side of starting a news organization. MinnPost nobly claims to be "not for profit," but that may be an understatement.

Oh, and one more thing: MinnPost needs to more fully embrace the Web, and get truly serious about user-generated content, video and other key online advantages. Doctor's post is excellent on this point. And when I read that MinnPost "will publish Monday through Friday," my eyebrows go up. That's print thinking. Um, "publish"? What century are we in? Just like everywhere else, news and readers in the Twin Cities function 24/7. MinnPost will have to, as well.

Thinking Horizontally

One of the things you always hear as a rap on reading news online is that it's missing the serendipity that makes a print newspaper such a good experience—turning the pages and stumbling upon a great story on a topic you knew nothing about. I don't buy that argument for a lot of reasons—links, blogs and RSS feeds give me more serendipity and choices online than I ever see in print—but I think one good reason for that complaint is that most news Web sites are completely clueless about how people use the Web.

The problem: Most news sites are a collection of vertical cul de sacs. You click on a headline, read the story...and you're left with virtually nowhere to go when you're done reading. At that point, you've got to hit the Back button and return to the home page or section page or whatever to choose something else to read. More likely, you're just going to leave for another site. You're not given a lot of choice to stay.

This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that most traffic to news Web sites comes in through a side door, as it were, not from the home page. Readers find news articles via search or links from elsewhere, get to those pages...and are stranded. It's a pretty terrible experience, and it's amazing how many news sites are designed that way. If there are links at all, they usually are to related items, inserted by editors/producers, which is labor-intensive and thus fairly rare, especially on routine stories.

The alternative to these dead ends is what's called horizontal navigation. Give the reader a variety of choices of places to go at the end of a story. Indeed, treat every story like it's a proxy for the home page, with as many inducements for a reader to stay on the site as possible. The recent appearance of lists of most-viewed and most-e-mailed stories on many sites is a step in the right direction. But it's still not enough.

Washingtonpost.com has done a good job for a couple of years now of providing a variety of (mostly) editor-chosen links on most of its stories to keep readers moving horizontally through the site, and its section-relevant lists of most-viewed stories has been a big success. But Post.com has stepped it up a big notch recently by adding a box at the bottom of each story that lists related stories and "People who read this also read..." links. On a political story, for instance, the box looks like this:

This is a terrific example of horizontal navigation. Best of all, this box apparently is automatically generated (it's powered by Inform.com and Aggregate Knowledge). That's a brilliant use of computing resources: compiling a list of what other people are reading after visiting a particular story. Let's face it: a given reader's interests are likely to be similar to those of other readers of the same story. Why not take advantage of the site's internal knowledge of how people are using the site? (Amazon has been selling books and other products by the boatload to customers for years using a variation on the same trick.)

This is a really sharp improvement in reader experience and an excellent way to produce additional page views. The logical—and easy—extension to make each page more like a home page is to add a list a of top stories from the home page and section front to each story page. ChicagoTribune.com had something vaguely similar a few years ago, though for some reason it appeared only on sports stories. The Tribune site listed top news stories, weather forecasts, etc., even the latest Dow Jones numbers, at the bottom of each sports story. Alas, it seems to have disappeared in the site's latest redesign.

Washingtonpost.com is really pointing the way here in thinking about horizontal navigation on news sites. If you want to keep readers around, you've got to give them multiple reasons to stay—not lead them into a frustrating dead end.

Learning the Wrong Lessons

Editor & Publisher has a well-meaning but depressing article about "Online Flops or Failures" committed by newspaper sites. It's a real collection of horror stories.

The true horror, however, is that E&P seems to be presenting these (frankly minor) failures as discouraging "lessons" in what not to do. In fact, in almost every case, these were good ideas that should not have been abandoned just because they were bungled in execution. Every newspaper should be trying all of these things (and many more), over and over, until they get them right.

My fear is that by presenting these mostly self-inflicted failures as "lessons," E&P is going to scare newspaper Web sites away from being more innovative and experimental. Unfortunately, the message of the story is that it's really easy to screw up this newfangled Internet thing—as if the same sort of mistakes don't happen on the print side. That's counterproductive at a time when newspapers and their Web sites need to be taking all sorts of chances to change the rules of the game they're losing to more nimble and fearless and risk-loving competitors.

Newspaper Web sites (and print newspapers, for that matter) should be throwing every single idea they have up against the wall to see what sticks, and iterating like crazy. You don't throw up your hands because you picked the wrong people to blog (don't miss the anecdote about the hand-written blog posts) or forgot to put profanity filters on reader comments, or gave up on a valid, but underpromoted, experiment after just a few months.

In fact, the most valuable lesson in the E&P article comes from the smartest newspaper Web editor in the business, WashingtonPost.com's Jim Brady, who says: "Failure isn't to be feared on the Web, it is to be embraced. ... If you are not failing, you are not stretching as much."

Exactly. Stretch. Take chances. Don't fear failure. Don't be discouraged. Keep trying until you get it right. The future of the industry—and your job—depends on it.

The Cut and Paste Web

OK, so newspaper readers, advertisers and classifieds are jumping ship, it's not clear when Web sites will make up for the revenue gap, and Romenesko has essentially become a daily roll of bad news in the media industry.

Now it's time to really get scared.

Steve Rubel, who's always a bit ahead of the curve, has a fantastic post today arguing that the way in which media is consumed on the Web is about to change radically.

Entitled "In the Cut and Paste Era, Traffic Happens Elsewhere," Rubel's post suggests that the rise of widgets, RSS, embeds, aggregation sites and other new formats already has begun to significantly redistribute content to the places where it's most convenient for readers to find it. In the process, that leaves little reason for readers to come to the originating sites. And that, of course, has some rather frightening implications for traffic and advertising revenue for those originators.

Rubel calls this phenomenon the Cut and Paste Web, and writes:

For all of its benefits, the Cut and Paste Web is potentially more disruptive to big traffic sites than Web 2.0 was. If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide. It will impact anyone that wants to attract eyeballs - media companies, brand marketers and community/social networking sites.

Of course, linking and redistributing content have always been fundamental to the Web, but what's happening with widgets, RSS and other embedded content is changing the rules of the game significantly. With a do-it-yourself-homepage (or Facebook page, or whatever) made up of these cut-and-paste elements, readers are creating personalized portals that don't necessarily lead back to the original sites—or their advertising. It's the customizable Daily Me we've always talked about—except that we never really talked about how to monetize the Daily Me.

Anybody who uses an RSS reader heavily already knows what this is like—conveniently aggregating content that's been largely disassociated from its original site. You can read headlines and entire stories without ever going to their source. It's shocking how many major news sites haven't even figured out how to include advertising with their RSS feeds to at least recapture some of this lost traffic and revenue. As Rubel argues, such practices are going to be essential in the decentralized cut-and-paste future.

This is fundamental, important stuff, changing a game that a lot of news organizations already have been struggling to keep up with. I'll be writing more about the implications of distributed content in the weeks to come. But in the meantime, read Rubel's post and get a taste of the future. And start thinking about how to adapt to it.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

You always have to take Web traffic statistics with a very large grain of salt. Online traffic measurement is still a bit of a black art, even if you're analyzing your own server logs, and third-party traffic counts are even more flaky. Third-party traffic stats are estimates, at best, based on surveys whose sample size and metholdology are more than a little dodgy. In particular, if somebody quotes Alexa.com traffic statistics to you, run the other way—they're essentially voodoo.

With that caveat, there are some interesting traffic figures floating about today for newspaper Web sites that seem to indicate that—horrors—traffic to most newspaper sites has stopped growing.

According to a report by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, newspaper site readership isn't growing at the rate that's been trumpeted by the industry. In fact, the study—ominously titled "Creative Destruction"—suggests that if you throw out the traffic numbers from NewYorkTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com, the rest of newspaper Web site traffic, as measured by unique visitors, has been flat over the past year.

Now, just to show you how unreliable Web traffic numbers can be, the increases in USAToday.com's traffic cited by the Shorenstein report—which relies on stats from, uh-oh, Alexa, Nielsen/Net Ratings, Web Stat and Compete.com—seem to be contradicted by another report today, in TechCrunch. That one suggests that USAToday.com's traffic has been dropping steadily over the past few months, in the wake of the site's controversial redesign (which, in fairness, occurred just as the Shorenstein report was winding up). According to TechCrunch, Compete.com's data shows a 29 percent dropoff in USAToday.com's unique visitors since March, with NewYorkTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com flat in that period.

But wait, there's more, and this illustrates the fallacy of Web statistics: TechCrunch also reports that Comscore's stats show USAToday.co's unique visitors falling 14 percent since March—half of what Compete.com shows. So USAToday.com traffic is either up, down, or down a lot over the past few months. Take your pick.

Got a headache yet? There's a spirited discussion in TechCrunch's comments section about the relative values of the Compete.com and Comscore methodologies, which is worth reading for a taste of just how crazy the Web traffic-counting game can be. Truth be told, the only people who really know how USAToday.com and other sites are performing are insiders with access to the actual internal traffic numbers from their servers—and even that can vary depending on which statistics tool is doing the counting. (Update, and get the HeadOn ready to apply directly to your forehead: USAToday.com, apparently coincidentally, put out a press release today saying unique visitors were up 20 percent in July, year-over-year—though, adding to the confusion, this official unique visitor number, 10.6 million, was similar to what Compete.com said uniques had fallen to in previous months from a pre-redesign mark of 14 million.)

In any case, with a nod toward the Shorenstein study, which at least tried to look at several counting methods, however flawed, and apply some methodology to them, let's assume the basic contention is true: that aside from the mega-sites, newspaper Web site traffic seems to have plateaued.

Is anyone really surprised? Most newspaper Web sites are pretty uninspired creations: hard to navigate, home pages crammed with content, not updated as often as they should be, lacking truly unique content and bereft of the Web technologies that are driving traffic these days: video, social networking, etc. There are some pretty ugly—or worse, bland and uninteresting—newspaper Web sites out there, including some of the biggest names in the business.

Indeed, most newspaper sites still seem trapped in the 1990s, when "pasting the newspaper on a screen" was the best idea anybody had. Meanwhile, blogs, wikis, search engines, YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, iTunes and others—all with huge audiences, by the way—are redefining content presentation on the Web, leaving newspaper sites stuck in the past, much like their print counterparts. Web readers visiting those cutting-edge sites reasonably expect similar sophistication from newspaper sites, and too often, they don't get it.

Moreover, too many newspaper sites still insist on presenting lots of national and international news that's available all over the Web—nobody's coming to DailyBugle.com to read that stuff. This is yet another reason why newspapers need to significantly increase their focus on local coverage and understand that that local is a competitive advantage that readers, online and off, can't get anywhere else.

In the end, uninspired Web sites face the same fate as uninspired print products: irrelevancy and disappearing readership and advertising. If newspaper Web sites are to be the future of the industry, they need to get truly serious about their local focus and step up and take advantage of the latest technologies to deliver what readers expect from a Web site in 2007. That's how they'll grow traffic. If they don't...oy, I don't even want to think about it. But the Shorenstein people have:

The Web particularly threatens daily newspapers. They were among the first to post news on the Internet but their initial advantage has all but disappeared in the face of increased competition from electronic media and non-traditional providers. ... The Internet is redistributing the news audience in ways that is threatening some traditional news organizations. Local newspapers have been the outlets that are most at risk, and they are likely to remain so. If our trend analysis is borne out, many newspapers are going to have difficulty even holding onto their online readers.

More Hyperlocal Lessons

The Knight Citizen News Network has a list of "Twelve Tips for Growing Positive Communities Online," and it's absolutely excellent. We practiced every single one of these pieces of good advice at Backfence (and many were mentioned in my post on lessons learned there).

Running a user-generated hyperlocal site is complicated and requires a great deal of subtle behind-the-scenes smarts and management. This list is an excellent place for anyone to start learning how to do it.