Recovering Journalist

Up Against the Wall

With all the attention paid to the demise of the New York Times' TimesSelect a few months back, an even more pervasive and odious practice by newspaper Web sites continues: Putting registration walls in front of visiting readers.

I wrote about this a year ago, and the situation hasn't gotten any better: Too many newspaper sites still are requiring registration before allowing visitors to view stories and advertising.

What's the point? I totally understand requiring registration before visitors post content on a site, such as comments—that's just good practice. But the reason for requiring registration to read escapes me. The argument you'll get is that it allows the sites to better target advertising, but that's hogwash—there just aren't that many newspaper sites doing sophisticated ad targeting. And any advantage there is doubtless outweighed by traffic lost when frustrated visitors hit the wall and decide to take their business elsewhere.

Registration-to-read is a relic of bygone days, the result of too much influence by the marketing and circulation departments over the Web site. I've heard the internal discussions: "It allows us to see if our print subscribers are using the Web site—and then we can target the visitors who aren't subscribers, and try to sell them subscriptions!" Spare me. It isn't worth ticking off occasional visitors—and because of Google, Drudge, etc., at least 25 or 30 percent of newspaper site visitors are, at best, occasional—to collect data that, frankly, is never going to be used.

Scott Karp has a great post on this subject, wondering exactly what the ROI (that's return on investment, non-MBAs) is on newspaper site registration. Does it really increase advertising revenue or have other benefits that make it worth chasing away visitors who just want to read one story or sample the site? Karp writes:

The theory goes that personal data collected from registered users enables sites to better target ads and charge premium rates. But I wonder whether the lost traffic from users who choose not to jump through the registration hoop — which I bet is particularly true of NYTimes’ large volume of visitors from search engines — outweighs the gain of higher ads rates.

You have to wonder in the age of behavioral targeting networks ... which derive user data based on user actions, e.g. what types of content they view, whether creating a content access barrier to collect data about users is really necessary.

Those are good questions, and they should be asked constantly inside newspaper Web operations. In recently reviewing registration requirements at Philly.com, we've decided against requiring registration to read the site, because it's a barrier to traffic. We do have—and will improve on—a sort of graduated registration system for content creation by visitors, with different levels of required information based on what they're doing on the site. But we're not going to get in the way of people who want to visit the site and read our content (and see the adjacent ads).

And here's a telling anecdote: There's a major newspaper site that quietly turned off its registration requirement for a few months a year or so ago. Nobody—and I mean nobody—noticed, insiders tell me. The registration eventually got turned back on (not having it drove the marketing and circulation folks nuts, I suspect), but the site's leaders aren't sure how much longer they'll stick with it.

Notably, of course, very, very few non-newspaper (or magazine) sites require registration for visitors. Gee, think they know something?

As I said a year ago: Newspapers, tear down that (registration) wall!

Voices of the People

Steve Yelvington has a good post wondering why so much of the media blogosphere is up in arms about the FCC's decision loosening the rules on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership in media markets. (He doesn't cite any of the media blogs complaining about media concentration, but you know who you are!)

Yelvington says:

It seems to me a case of fighting the last war. Local television franchises are rapidly losing their luster, and today are little more than a "must carry" opening to cable distribution. Audiences are fractured. The sun is setting on both broadcast networks and local affiliates. Newspaper companies that might have gone on a rapacious acquisition binge a decade ago are now just trying to keep the wolf from getting through their own doors. And, of course, the Internet makes anyone and everyone a publisher.

That's exactly right. And while the knee-jerk reaction of many journalism-business pundits and participants is to rail against big chains and media consolidation, that really does represent an outmoded worldview. It's especially ironic for bloggers to complain about media concentration when blogs are precisely the reason that we now have more voices in any given marketplace than ever.

Let's go back in time a bit—a couple of decades is all you need—and remember when most major markets had a newspaper or two, three or four TV stations, a handful of radio stations doing news, some suburban weeklies--and that's about it. Talk about media concentration! Now any given market has hundreds and hundreds of local news and information choices, with thousands (millions) more from distant markets a click away online.

There's a "bigness is evil" mentality at work here that I think is simply outdated. Big may be bad (I'd question that, but never mind), but the media landscape has become so incredibly fragmented that we've got more diversity of thought and voices than ever. Those voices are increasingly grabbing pieces of the local ad pie, as well.

This is why, when we inevitably see the death of a big-city newspaper within a few years, the hole left in the local media will be much easier to fill than anyone can imagine. Blogs, local sites, community papers, Yahoo Groups, services like Yelp and Craigslist—all of these will pick up the slack and provide as much local coverage, if not more, than the deceased paper did.

This is a golden age of media, with a flourishing of multiple voices. Fretting about whether the struggling local newspaper also owns the fourth-rated local TV station is just missing the point.

Here Come the Death Eaters

2008 is not going to be pretty in the newspaper business.

As bad as the past couple of years have been, the coming year is very likely to be worse (and 2009 could be worse than that). The structural rot that has been afflicting circulation and revenue is worsening, online revenue is stagnating, and to top it all off, the economy is heading into the tank. That subprime mortgage crisis? Hell on real estate advertising, and indirectly on most every other kind of advertising. Not pretty.

Put that all together, and 2008 may be the year that the Death Eaters start coming for some of the biggest names in the business: Big chains or papers that are overextended financially and find themselves undermined by the gathering storm of problems. Wall Street and bankers aren't going to put up with that, and executive heads—not to mention those of a lot of unfortunate rank and file employees—will roll. Watch for still more consolidation and, um, innovative financing that will further roil the industry.

Just look at the tumult that accompanied Sam Zell's closing of his deal to buy Tribune Co. this week. The bankers were squeezing the deal right up to the last minute. Even Zell called it "the transaction from hell." And Zell's going to have to pedal—and peddle—as fast as he can to keep the company afloat financially. It's not just the Chicago Cubs that are going to be sold by Tribune. Look for a fire sale of real estate and newspapers (Los Angeles Times, anyone? Anyone?) as Zell strips the company for cash. And at this holiday time, say a prayer for the poor Tribune employees, who could be left holding the bag—through their retirement plan, which now owns the company through Zell's creative accounting—if things turn sour. Memo to Tribune employees: Get. The. Hell. Out.

And then there's McClatchy, long one of the best companies in the business, which is now suffering severe indigestion from last year's acquisition of Knight Ridder (what were they thinking?). Of all the big newspaper chains, McClatchy may have been the best—it's run by good people, and it has a commitment to top-notch journalism. But in the wake of devouring Knight Ridder, it's struggling. Its November ad revenue was down 9.2 percent, quickening a pace of decline that was already running at 8.5 percent for the year.

Even worse, McClatchy's stock market value has cratered. Consider this (courtesy of Forbes): Nearly 10 years ago, the company paid $1 billion for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. (Remember that number for a moment.) It paid $6.5 billion for Knight-Ridder, and then began selling properties to pay the tab—including unloading the Star Tribune for just over $500 million.

With revenue falling like a stone, Wall Street is not pleased: McClatchy's total stock value has plunged 80 percent in less than three years and is now just a hair over, you guessed it, $1 billion. Ten years ago, that amount of money would have bought you a pretty decent Midwestern newspaper. Now it will get you an entire chain.

"No, I don't think the sky is falling," McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt sunnily tells Forbes. "Certainly newspaper stocks are out of favor on Wall Street. That's happened before, and that will happen again. But we're not going to go away."

Uh-huh. Try telling that the to Death Eaters. Because they're coming.

A Sporting Chance

Good news: According to PaidContent and the International Herald Tribune, journalism organizations are finally banding together to fight back against the idiotic restrictions being placed on coverage by sports teams and leagues. Not sure why it took this long. But it's ludicrous that sports organizations—whose very existence owes so much to free publicity from the media—are trying to restrict journalists from doing their jobs and informing their readers and viewers about the games and their players.

Already, the new News Media Coalition has arranged boycotts of coverage of a couple of restriction-laden sporting events. I hope they continue to fight that way for coverage that benefits everyone.

The New York Times Corrections Game

OK, I give up.

Can anybody tell the difference between The New York Times' Corrections section and its corrective sibling, For The Record?

When the Times bifurcated its Corrections department in 2004, it was with the noble intent of, essentially, creating two classes of corrections. One, For The Record, was to handle those minor flubs and typos that appear in newspapers all the time. The other, Corrections, was to deal with "substantive errors—those that have materially affected the reader's understanding of a news development," according to the Times' announcement of the policy. (A third, even more serious category, Editor's Note, deals with really royal screwups. Not coincidentally, those generally provide some of the most entertaining reading in the paper. But I digress.)

Three years on, reading the Times' all-too-voluminous For The Record/Corrections combo, I'm now fairly mystified at the difference between the two characterizations of error. Methinks the Times is splitting hairs too finely for anybody but internal editors and vigilant Timesologists to understand.

Indeed, trying to figure out the logic behind the two correctives classes has become an entertaining little game, sort of the Times' version of Sudoku. It's kind of like the hidden puzzle that used to be built into the Times' wedding announcements (before they became more egalitarian a few years ago), challenging readers to guess how the bride or groom's connection to the Times—or to a large advertiser—led to their vows being featured on the wedding page. Ah, those were the days. Good times.

To play this new game, let's look at the two corrections areas from Saturday, Dec. 8's paper/site.
The first Correction covers a misquotation, caused by an editor's error (and good on the Times for 'fessing up to that detail), that appears to twist the meaning of part of the previous day's A1 story on the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes. It's actually a pretty fine point, but OK, that seems to fit the stated definition of a Correction.

The second Correction, however, fixes a misstated address for a church festival from an events calendar. Does that qualify as having "materially affected the reader's understanding"? Somehow, I don't think so, even if it caused the reader to get lost on the way to the festival. The question of whether this rises to the level of a Correction is especially interesting when you compare it to the entries in the same day's For The Record section, which includes such similar-seeming gaffes as flipped identities of two people in a caption, a garbled Foo Fighters album title, a misidentified actor in a review and a mistaken citation of the number of weeks a book has been on the best-seller list. These are all fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, the kind of mistakes that should be fixed "for the record"—but so is the wrong address for a church's winter festival.

On the other hand, one of the Dec. 8 For The Records recounts a murky series of errors in an Advertising column that apparently bollixed up details about who inspired two different designers' lines of shoes at a fashion show and also misplaced the location of the fashion show and a corporate headquarters, each by several thousand miles. (Nice going!) That, to me, materially affects my understanding of the story (although I'm even more confused having read the all-but-impenetrable For The Record entry). So why isn't this a Correction?

When I play the Corrections/For The Record game, much like the wedding announcements game of yore, I find myself wondering whether a For The Record item sometimes ascends to the level of Correction because it merited special internal treatment—i.e., the complaints about it were louder. For instance, on Friday, Dec. 7, the lone Correction involved the question of whether a piece of masking tape on a Fox TV camera covered the letters "NY" or "My." It's hard to see how this was a "substantive" or "material" issue in the story—especially since the version of the story the correction links to doesn't even include that detail! But one can imagine Rupert Murdoch or some other Fox executive calling the Times newsroom, furious about this obscure slight, and thus getting what should have been a For The Record promoted into a Correction. Yes, the distinction between the two can be that fuzzy. And most of the other For The Records on that day seem to deal with much more serious transgressions.

It's great that the Times is so vigilant about its corrections—though you do have to wonder why the best paper in the business continues to make so bloody many mistakes. But if the object of corrections are to clarify the reader's understanding, it might be helpful if the Times' Corrections/For The Record column itself was a little clearer about which is which. Better yet, admit that the two-tiered system has failed, and go back to a simple Corrections section. And we Times junkies will have to find another little game to play when reading the paper or site.

Thinking Strategically

Howard Owens has an excellent post about how journalists need to learn to think strategically. It's an excellent example of what I mean by the phrase "recovering journalist"—there's now a lot more to being a journalist than ink-stained wretchery. Howard's money quote:

In the olden days, when newspapers were essentially monopolies, competition was scarce and the profits were rolling in unabated, publishers could afford to employ journalists who pontificated in smokey, after-work barrooms about the purity of their craft. No strategic business discussions allowed.

Those days are buried under a pile of rusting manual typewriters.

Nowadays, especially when you’re working online, you must think about more than the journalistic value of the story, but also ask questions like — where does this fit into our overall online strategy (do we even have a strategy)?, and how will this help grow and retain audience?

At Philly.com this week, I shared the digital division's 2008 high-level strategy document with all our producers, so they could understand where our leadership is trying to take the business. That may have been a first. In the next few days, we'll be discussing a detailed 2008 editorial strategy for the Web site. It's important for everyone in the operation to understand the big picture and where they fit into it. I'm afraid that in today's fear-and-loathing-filled newsroom environment, with so many closed-door meetings at newspapers about budget cuts and the future, there's less and less transparency about what's going on and what's being planned. That's not good. (Notable exception: The San Jose Mercury News' very public internal conversation about change. Bravo.) Worse, too often the newsroom staff isn't involved in the thinking about the future.

It's an axiom of good business management that the people on the front lines understand more about how to improve the business than the people in the executive offices. Far too often, however, none of the bosses think to ask the rank-and-file for suggestions, or what they think, or even to share the operation's overall vision—even after the strategy is set.

Everybody, at all levels, needs to be thinking strategically and fully understanding where things are headed. You know the cliches: We're all in this together. Divided we fall. In unity there is strength. There are reasons those are cliches: They're true! So news managements: Involve your staff and share your vision. And news staffers: Learn to think strategically and understand how what you're doing can drive the product and business forward into the future.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself having almost-identical conversations with several journalists. The gist: Wikipedia has become an essential reference work for them.

Yeah, yeah, it's user-generated, and just about anybody can make changes in it, and there are a variety of Wikipedia-abuse horror stories. Of course. But what these excellent journalists were saying is that those issues are trivial compared to the benefits of having such a comprehensive source of information on just about everything imaginable.

Wikipedia's hardly a new phenomenon—it's been around (and terrific) for years. But the journalists I've talked to are catching up to what millions already know: It has clearly matured into a valuable tool for people (journalists and otherwise) looking for a fast overview of information on subjects large and small, obvious and obscure. Would any of these journalists go to print (or web) with something they found on Wikipedia? Of course not, not without independent confirmation. But as a fast, easy, omnibus knowledge-lookup tool, there's simply nothing like it. If the accuracy rate is 95% (and it's probably a lot better than that), that's fine, for the purposes it's being used for. For more definitive information, you'll look elsewhere--or do some reporting.

Wikipedia's also become a very good news-reporting service. Check it on a breaking story. The ability Wikipedia members to assemble a complete and thorough report on something current is rather amazing. To pick something from today's headlines, look at the Wikipedia entry on murdered Washington Redskins player Sean Taylor. You really couldn't ask for a better digest of this complicated story.

And yes, Virginia, Wikipedia is created and curated entirely by its users. That blows a lot of journalists' minds. You mean there are no professional editors? Nope--it's other users who are checking and changing and fine-tuning (often constantly) the contents. There are even well-organized systems in place to prevent the abuse that's become folklore. That's a tribute to the wisdom of the crowds that Wikipedia is based in—and another reason why so many of us are jazzed about the potential of user-generated content.

If you're a journalist who automatically poo-poos Wikipedia because of stereotypes that it's out-of-control amateur hour, look (and think) again. As the smart journalists I've been talking to lately realize, it long ago became a very powerful and useful basic research tool—and another example of how the Internet is demolishing our preconceived notions about how information is created.