Recovering Journalist

The Awful Truth

There's an incredible post on Alan Mutter's blog by an anonymous former publisher who scathingly indicts the newspaper industry for its failure to truly attempt to accept its problems and raise itself out of the deepening hole it's in.

"There is one underlying reason why newspapers will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities so well presented in your paper: They simply lack the intellectual capacity. In the past, they’ve fumbled every opportunity to harness their resources and address the opportunities. There is no empirical evidence that they have changed their ways in the last 15 or 20 years."

Too true. Anybody who doesn't think so is part of the problem.

Life After Journalism

Every couple of months, I get a call from an old friend or former colleague facing a newsroom buyout—or concerned that one is in the offing. Their request is always the same: "Tell me there's life after [insert newspaper name]."

My answer is always an emphatic "YES!"

Leaving the cozy confines of a newsroom and journalism career is traumatic. But change can be highly beneficial and even lucrative. Sure, you can look for another journalism job. But odds are that you won't find one that matches what you gave up. Instead, look at the talents you brought to journalism and think about how they can be used in other endeavors. You'll find a much broader array of options.

It turns out that a lot of the skills that make you a good journalist are highly valued in other fields. Indeed, they may be even more highly valued. Newsrooms tend to take good writers, reporters and editors for granted—they've got an excess of supply, in fact. But other businesses are crying for those same talents, and appreciative when they can find them. For instance:

* Writing, editing and storytelling: A dozen years ago, after I'd left journalism for a Silicon Valley company, a consultant came up to me and said, "I've been reading your memos. They're very well written. You've got a hidden talent there." I thanked her and pointed out that I'd spent nearly 20 years writing for The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and others. "Ohhh," she said. That's how rare and valuable writing talent can be in the business world. The ability to quickly write clear copy has applications in everything from writing business plans to creating PowerPoint presentations (nothing more than a good story outline) to even coming up with the architecure of Web sites (a form of visual storytelling). A friend who recently left newspapers for a (more lucrative) thinktank job says her new colleagues are amazed at how quickly and well she can write—much to her amazement.

* Reporting: When you do a story, you apply prodigious research and analysis skills that have great value in the non-journalism world. Your ability to dive deep for information and ask tough questions is a real asset. When I spent time on the corporate side of The Washington Post, the bosses liked to send ex-journalists in to do due diligence on possible corporate acquisitions. Turned out we were far more fearless about asking hard questions than any MBA. Or you can follow the changed career path of a friend of mine who became a high-end private investigator. Your curiosity, resourcefullness and analytical abilities can have many interesting uses outside journalism.

* Management and organization: If you've successfully run a copy desk or a daily or weekly section, you've probably got organizational skills you don't fully appreciate. Complicated businesses appreciate those skills, however. The same talents that make you a precise and exacting editor and manager probably will hold you in good stead as a corporate product or project manager, pulling together diverse tasks and people to bring a complicated project in on deadline. Oh yeah, deadlines: journalists live by them. That's often a novelty in the business world.

You get the idea. The skills that you use every day to commit journalism have uses you can barely imagine. If you're looking to leave a newsroom and start a new career, you don't have to worry about massive retraining. Just examine what you already know how to do and think about how you can apply it elsewhere.

Alternatively, you don't have to stray too far from journalism; just try a new, modern form. Writing, reporting and editing skills are very valuable in the world of the Web; it's no secret that newspaper Web sites are hiring even as their print counterparts are cutting back. Non-journalism Web sites also need these talents—which is obvious if you merely read some of them. You'd think copy editors would be able to write their own ticket on many sites!

Or you can try to go it alone: Start a blog. Pick a specific topic about which you have a great deal of knowledge and passion, and start blogging about it. Over time, you may be able to create a following that can lead to consulting or job offers. There are successful examples of it all over the blogosphere.

It used to be that if you left journalism, public relations or freelancing were pretty much your only options. But today there are many more possibilities, if you approach a career change with an open mind and confidence in your existing skills and abilities.

These are scary times in the newspaper business. But there is, indeed, life after journalism.

Truth in Advertising

Adweek reports on a new McKinsey & Co. report, "How Companies Are Marketing Online" that says companies have been slow to move to online advertising because of "an absence of meaningful metrics and adequate capabilities."

Excuse me?

Compared to what, exactly? Compared to running an ad in a newspaper or magazine and hoping that somebody looks at it--and having absolutely zero idea how many people actually do? Compared to placing a commercial on television or radio and hoping that it's on a program seen or heard by one of the few thousand people that Nielsen and Arbitron use to extrapolate the viewing and listening habits of millions? Oh yeah, that's really efficient, measureable advertising. (I'm not even going to begin to guess what they mean by "adequate capabilities.")

Indeed, online advertising allows targeted advertising far more sophisticated than anything in print and online—you can track activity right down to the click. That runs rings around the traditional advertising outlets these advertisers are clinging to. As I wrote a few months ago, online advertising is obliterating the old John Wanamaker paradox that half of ad spending is wasted.

What's really happening here, as Scott Karp brilliantly puts it on his Publishing 2.0 blog, is that advertisers—and particularly advertising agencies—are even more backward about adapting to online media than the stodgy, traditional media in which they advertise. "The reality is that the attitudes expressed in the McKinsey report are all a smoke screen, intended to protect vested interests and organizations adapted to static media models, which went unchanged for decades, and not the dynamic innovation of the web," Karp writes. "Billions of dollars still remain in traditional media because the advertising industry has to go through its own transition. ... It’s not that traditional advertising is more 'accountable,' but rather it’s more 'comfortable,' more 'familiar.'”

Exactly right. And of course, we've seen this story before, in traditional media's failure to quickly and smartly transition to the unfamiliar online world. Let's face it, online advertising is still largely stuck in a banner model that echoes centuries of display advertising, with only a few scattered examples of innovation that break the mold by reaching out and exploiting what's happening in interactivity, social media and other Web advances.

It's been an open secret for years that the ad agencies and corporate ad buyers are far behind in their thinking about how to market online, and this study proves that. Sure, there's still some mumbo-jumbo in how Web performance is tracked and counted. Tougher and broader standards for metrics would be welcome. But the ability to measure Web activity is still light years ahead of how print readership and broadcast ratings are tracked, and getting farther ahead every day. It's the advertisers that are the problem; not the medium. They need to catch up.

Free is Not a Business Model

One of the reasons I chose the sobriquet "Recovering Journalist" is because I long ago got over the idea that journalism is some sort of a mystical, romantic calling, somehow exempt from the laws of nature, physics and economics. Indeed, supporting successful journalism is a business, and those that ignore or fail to understand that eventually will find themselves out of business.

The sheer, delirious, lip-smacking glee that is being exuded by various commentators over the demise of The New York Time's TimesSelect is proof that a lot of people still don't really understand this. They're still living the dream that journalism somehow happens by magic, and that attaching revenue and other business principles to it (ooh, profit!) is somehow dirty. Alternatively, some of these people are just freeloaders, who simply don't want to pay for anything on the Web and still believe that old canard that "content wants to be free." Yeah, right.

Look, there's no question that the "open Web" is a good thing, and that anything that encourages more site traffic is beneficial. That's great. No doubt dropping TimesSelect—which as I said earlier this week was misguided in its focus on columnists—will make Times content more visible in search engines, bring more traffic to Times columnists and involve said columnists more in the ongoing conversations about big events of our time. All good.

But committing good journalism is expensive, and so far, there's no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump—and attendant advertising—can make that up. A blanket statement that "content is now and forever free," as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided—and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying arevenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.

Analysts with more thoughtful takes on the subject believe, as do I, that publishers, offline and online, need to continue to look at non-advertising alternatives—including subscriptions. Far from the Times decision signifying that the debate over paid content is dead, I think we're only at the beginning of this argument, as we are with so many issues in online media. Over the next few years, I think we'll see the emergence of many new business models. This is hardly a mature medium.

Meantime, the restless villagers, feeling their oats over the death of TimesSelect, have taken their pitchforks and torches and "free, free, free" chants over to the Dow Jones castle. It will be interesting to see how that plays out, given that there already are obvious divisions between DJ execs and new boss Rupert Murdoch over charging for WSJ.com. Again, it's not clear why, in an era when newspapers are chasing every dollar, Dow Jones would willfully walk away from $50 million-plus in annual revenue. Oh, and note that subscribers spend considerably more time with WSJ.com—and its ads—than random one-time visitors from search engines. And that WSJ.com can charge higher rates because it knows the demographics of its subscriber base. These are the kinds of subtleties that you need to understand in evaluating business strategies rather than making knee-jerk decisions because you somehow think journalism is different than other businesses.

At an online media conference a couple years ago, I heard Jarvis, no less, wonder aloud, "Does everything have to have a business model?" Well, yes, it does—otherwise, it's just a hobby. Creating good journalism requires a sophisticated business model, with revenue from multple sources—including, in some cases, paid subscriptions.

Let's Get Social

I was remiss in not mentioning this last week: Good friend Steve Outing has published an excellent white paper on Social Networks that's a nice primer to this ever-more-varied topic.

Steve's white paper (unfortunately available only via PDF, which is not very sociable!) is intended for all sorts of companies, not just media outfits, and at it's heart it's an advertisement for the tools produced by his company, The Enthusiast Group. But it's still a valuable overview of this burgeoning field, and a great answer for the next person who asks, "What is Social Networking/Web 2.0, anyway?"

PS--If you're a Facebook member (and if you're interested in social networks, that's essentially an entrance requirement), Steve has started an interesting discussion thread about the paper and its topics over here. If you're not a Facebook member, get with the program—that's where all the cool kids are!

Seven Wonders

People love making and arguning about lists, and the Poynter Institute has come up with a dandy: It wants to compile a list of the Seven Wonders of the Journalism World. Silly and trivial, yes, but great fun.

They propose nominations in six categories as follows:

• Documents (such as the First Amendment)
• People (such as Walter Cronkite)
• Institutions (such as the BBC)
• Events (such as the publication of the Pentagon Papers)
• Technology (such as the invention of the telegraph)
• Works (such as the front page of the New York Times on Sept. 11)

OK, given that, here are my seven, off the top of my head, in no particular order except for the first two:

• The First Amendment
• The New York Times
• Woodward and Bernstein
• USA Today
• CNN
• The Pentagon Papers
• The Web and online journalism

I wonder if they should have split the list, as Seven Wonders lists often are, into Seven Wonders of the Ancient Journalism World and Seven Wonders of the Modern Journalism World. But no, they just want seven, from all eras (and around the world).

As the comments on the story correctly complain, it's not totally clear where you should be submitting your nominations—that still seems to be a wonder all by itself. You might try to start here, which has a giant Seven Wonders link, at least at the moment, that, um, goes back to the story. Oh well. It's still a fun little mental exercise and a great argument for the next time you're hanging around your local newspaper bar (wait--are there still local newspaper bars?).

TimesSelect, R.I.P.

There's already a fresh round of glee over the death of TimesSelect, which The New York Times announced tonight weeks after the latest round of rumors of its demise triggered the last round of "I told you so" excitement in the media blogosphere. (It's amazing how many otherwise responsible people leapt upon those rumors as fact, even though for weeks they were just speculation. Ah, the blogosphere.)

But the delight about the end of TimesSelect is misplaced. While the "content needs to be free" crowd hails it as a victory, the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed. Simply put, the Times put the wrong content behind its $49.95 pay wall. Columnists and opinion? At a time when the blogosphere is all about debating the very issues those columnists wrote about? Cutting Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd et al out of the conversation just wasn't very smart. And the syndication of those columnists made the Times' decision to restrict access even more ridiculous—the only place you couldn't get them for free was the Times site itself. Oops!

TimesSelect could have been so much more. It could have been a high-end subscription service for in-depth coverage that wasn't otherwise available, for supplemental reporting and blogs and Web-only content in specific vertical topics that would have been valuable to the Times' core audience, and worth 50 bucks a year. As it was, the Times' decision to include almost unlimited access to its archives in TimesSelect was a smart move all by itself. Surely a broader, deeper for-pay product could have been built around that core. Alas, we may never know.

I hear internal politics had as much to do with the decision to kill TimesSelect as business factors; as it was, the program was bringing in $10 million or so a year in revenue. Indeed, 227,000 people had signed up to pay $49.95 a year for this deeply flawed product. That's not too shabby, actually. The Times hopes to make up that $10 million through advertising on the unfettered content. It will be interesting to see if that's more profitable.

The Wall Street Journal continues with an online subscription product, as do Consumer Reports, ESPN.com and Zagat.com, to name three major consumer publications that nobody ever seems to count when looking at paid models. Given the Times' influence on the rest of journalism, the demise of TimesSelect will probably be discouraging to others that might try to make a business of charging online readers for premium products. But that model is still out there waiting for somebody to perfect. Someday, somebody will.

Outdated Magazines

As ossified as newspapers can be about adopting the latest Web technologies, magazines are even worse. When I started doing work for magazine Web sites a few years ago, I was shocked at how digitally backwards they were—even compared to newspapers. They just couldn't see past the print model. And it hasn't gotten much better since—can you think of more than a couple of magazine Web sites worth looking at regularly?

Now Bivings Group is reporting on the same phenomenon. Bottom line: "Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007," Bivings says (and newspapers didn't do so hot). "In general, we have found that magazines are slower at adopting Web 2.0 trends than newspapers." Blogs? Magazines trail newspapers. Video? Newspaper sites lead. Comments on stories? Magazines are behind the Times.com. And so on. The only thing magazines seem to do better, Bivings reports, is allowing tags on stories—and those numbers, in both cases, are so small that they look like rounding errors.

The world of magazine publishing is even more rarified than newspapers. It's much less geographically diverse, and there's a level of elitism that would shock most newspaper newsrooms. There's also little culture in the magazine industry of sharing resources and know-how, unlike newspapers, which have the AP and news syndicates and active staff-level industry organizations that foster the exchange of ideas. Magazines are just a little above it all, and therefore it's been easy for them to pooh-pooh the Web and cling to the old ways (among publishers, the book industry is even more moribund, but that's a tale for another time).

What's most frustrating about this is that magazines are natural homes for the best Web 2.0 features. Because most magazines cover specific, vertical subjects, they speak to audiences that share interests in a given magazine's topic. Those audiences are perfect spawning grounds for online communities, bringing together magazine readers who want to talk to each other about gardening, or cooking, or model railroads, or crafts, or sports, or cars, or whatever the magazine is about. It seems like a slam dunk, but very few magazines are taking advantage of this opportunity to really connect with their audience—and to help the audience members connect with each other.

Jeff Jarvis touches on this potential today in his post about the demise of Business 2.0, which could have been a great online community-cum-publication, but instead is dying a miserable death as a print publication whose primary audience, ahem, lives its life online.

In many ways, the magazine industry is facing the same challenges as newspapers: fragmenting audiences, rising costs, declining advertising. Over the years, magazine publishers have proven a willingness to experiment and take chances—in print—that far outstrips the print innovation practiced by newspapers. But the action is moving online, and magazines have always lagged there, as the Bivings report confirms. There's a huge opportunity for magazines to convert their special-interest audiences into thriving online communities, and it looks like they're blowing it.