Recovering Journalist

Fade to Black

From Defamer, courtesy of Romenesko, news that the Detroit Free-Press has decided to go without a movie critic:

We have since learned that The Freep, which is owned by Gannett, will NOT be replacing Terry Lawson, making it the most highly circulated newspaper in the country (daily readership = 320K) without a full-time, in-house film critic.

And, um, so what? What law says that every paper has to have a film critic? Are movies any different in Detroit than they are in Cleveland, Kansas City, Miami or Altoona? Nope. Same movies. There's nothing local about movie criticism—or TV criticism, or book reviewing, or any number of things that newspapers persist in doing long past the time when they make any sense. (Can somebody explain to me why every newspaper seems to have a couple of reporters in Arizona for the Super Bowl this week? What a colossal waste of money.)

These are tough times for newspapers, yada yada yada, but they're made even tougher when newsroom managements won't make the easy, obvious cost cuts, much less the tough ones. A movie critic in every city? Why? There's virtually nothing unique about it. There are tons of reviews all over the Internet of movies (and books and TV shows and music). Most movie-going readers prefer the opinions of their friends, anyway.

It's very simple: With resources tight, editors should spend money on something readers can't get anywhere else. Restaurants, architecture, live music—these are all unique local arts that deserve dedicated local critics. Movies? Not so much. In fact, in most cases, not at all.

The Defamer story has the perfect punchline about the demise of the Freep's critic: "from what we've gathered, readers don't seem to mind much."

The Future of Facebook

A group of us were talking about Facebook today, and we kicked around a bit the idea of what Facebook could become. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I have a theory that could be significant for news organizations.

It goes like this: Facebook, which already functions as the default home page for a lot of people, could morph into something really powerful: a sort of highly personalized personal portal/home page, bringing together the utility of My Yahoo with the intimate personal power of Facebook's social networking roots.

Imagine being able to alight on Facebook and find out not only what your friends are up to, but what's going on in the world, in sports, in your neighborhood, with your investments, even the local weather. That means adding to Facebook's existing friend-based "news feed" the ability to include broader feeds, perhaps even from traditional news providers. Voila: The public and personal Daily Me, all on the same page.

It would require some rethinking on the part of Facebook's leadership, but that's long overdue anyway: As Facebook's audience has grown from its college-student base to a much broader, more mature group, the platform has really failed to evolve substantially. It still very much reflects its college-age roots, and its much-touted apps and widgets oddly are more visible to other people than they are to the people who add them to their pages. If I add a news widget to my page, it's great that you can see it—but I'd sure like to be able to see it too, on my main news feed page. At the moment, Facebook doesn't always work that way.

Media companies already are circling around Facebook and its 60 million-plus members, trying to figure out how to reach them with their content. So far, that's mostly consisted of fairly feeble attempts at news quizzes or other widgets. But the ability to add local or national or topical feeds to member pages would be powerful stuff (and have some significant advertising potential as well). It will be interesting to see if Facebook can evolve this way.

And by the way, if you're not already on Facebook, get on it and use it. It's not enough to just look around and think you've figured it out. Facebook's power and magic is only apparent if you start using it as intended, to link to friends and keep up with what they're doing on the service (and off it). It's a profound new way of exchanging information, and every journalist or person in the media business should be deeply familiar with it.

Another Play at The Times

Last spring, I posted about the investor unrest at The New York Times Co., and speculated that it wouldn't be long before there was a major ownership upheaval at the nation's flagship newspaper. That drew a virulent comment from somebody who turned out to be a Times columnist, arguing that, basically, I had no facts to back my speculation and had no idea what I was talking about.

As I observed then, my comments and opinion were based on the experience I earned covering corporate mergers and acquisitions for 15 years. One of the truisms of the M&A world is that once a company is a target—"in play," in Wall Street parlance—it stays a target until there's some sort of significant change in ownership, management or it financial structure. That's just the way it is. It's naive to think that any company, even one with the unique stock ownership structure of the New York Times, is immune to Wall Street (and potentially internal) pressures for change.

And while the Times remains in the hands of the Sulzberger family, and last year's major challenger, Morgan Stanley, has fallen by the wayside, another challenger to the company's financial and ownership structure has emerged: a consortium of investors led by Firebrand Partners and Harbinger Capital Partners, who are seeking to elect four new members of the Times' 13-member board.

Because the non-Sulzberger owners of Times stock vote on those seats, this is a real threat to boardroom harmony. Given last year's shareholder vote—in which a whopping 42 percent of the owners of the non-Sulzberger shares withheld their votes on directors—there's a good chance that the Sulzbergers could wind up with four new unfriendly directors, agitating for more change to unlock the company's value.

Alan Mutter, as usual, has a good analysis of the situation. As Mutter writes, "The investors are pursuing the seats on the NYT board because they believe the company to date has failed to make the business decisions necessary for it to flourish in the Internet era." Among other things, the insurgents want the Times Co. to be even more serious about pursuing its future online, rather than in print. Good thinking.

The bottom line is this: The barbarians are again at the gates of the Sulzberger castle, and once again, there's an excellent chance that they will force the company into some sort of significant restructuring. Last year's prediction still stands: Before long, I'll bet, we're going to see some big changes at the New York Times Co.

Still skeptical? Then consider this: A year ago you wouldn't have believed that a real estate mogul would control Tribune Co., or that Rupert Murdoch would own The Wall Street Journal. When a company is in play, anything is possible.

Losing Local

If this remarkable statistic has been publicized, I somehow missed it, but there's a doozy in the Wall Street Journal today (subscription required; see Question 7 in the quiz):

Last year, for the first time, local advertisers spent more on sites like Google.com or Monster.com than on local newspapers' sites. Internet companies got 44% of the $8.5 billion local advertisers spent online, newspaper companies got 33%, Yellow Pages sites got 10% and local-television sites got 9.3%, according to media research firm Borrell Associates.

Uh-oh. Obviously, the print local advertising business, while declining, still is much larger than that of any upstart competitor--for now. But newspapers are losing ground in the transition to online advertising among the local businesses that traditionally have been their bread and butter--the customers they must own, at all costs. It's not like the online companies have feet on the street going after those local advertisers--most of that business just comes in over the digital transom to Google, Monster, etc.

Lesson: Newspapers need better local online products to offer advertisers (and how), and need to be much smarter and more aggressive about how they sell them, i.e., not doing stupid bundling deals or sending print sales reps out to sell online or failing to understand that there are a lot of small local advertisers now searching for opportunities to spend money online and finding their local newspapers' offerings wanting.

The online ad business, especially locally, is really nothing like the print business, and newspapers need to grasp that, quickly, and adapt to survive. Self-service ads, telemarketing, contextual offerings--all of these are techniques that newspapers' online divisions need to move toward quickly to have a chance to win the local advertising arms race.

Failure to do so? Fatal. Absolutely fatal.

Right and Wrong

Required reading: Three great posts by Howard Owens (who's on fire lately) about what online news organizations should be (or are) doing right. Speaking of "on fire," here's a great read from Rob Curley about how the Las Vegas Sun aced breaking news online last week.

And on the other side of the ledger, a terrific post by Robert Niles about what newspapers are doing wrong.

A Reporter with a Following

Jay Rosen's much-hyped experiment to attach beat reporters to social networks ignores an inconvenient fact: There are already reporters operating this way.

One of the best is Washington Post baseball writer Barry Svrluga, who interacts constantly with his readers via a blog, regular discussions, podcasts—even personal appearances at the regular tailgating gatherings of his devoted fans before Nationals games at RFK stadium. Yes, Svrluga's fans are so devoted that they gather in his honor offline, to celebrate the friendships created in the community that has sprung up around him online. Not too shabby. Know any other beat reporters with that kind of following? That's what an active online presence (and general excellence as a beat writer) will do for you.

That's why last summer, long before Rosen announced his social beat reporting concept, I described Svrluga as the model of the modern major beat reported.

But now Barry's fans are in mourning. That's because Svrluga has decided to transfer within the Post to the Washington Redskins beat. It's probably a promotion, but not to the Nationals fans who had created a community around their favorite baseball beat writer.

Don't believe me? Check out the 100-plus impassioned comments on this post on Svrluga's blog in which he announces his new job. These readers felt a personal connection with Svrluga, even though they probably only knew him online. At a time when readers are deserting newspapers, isn't it refreshing to come across readers who are so devoted to a beat writer?

Every editor should be pondering this phenomenon, and thinking about how to create interactive stars with surrounding communities similar to Svrluga. At Philly.com, we're lucky enough to have one of our own, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Todd Zolecki, who coincidentally also covers baseball—and blogs, answers reader questions and podcasts.

Part of the Philly.com strategy for 2008 is to create many more such communities around popular beat reporters, columnists and reviewers. These sorts of followings beget deeply devoted readers--and in this day and age, devoted readers couldn't be more valuable.

Death Comes in Threes

The old newsroom saw has been proven again: Death comes in threes.

No, I'm not talking about Brad Renfro, Suzanne Pleshette and Heath Ledger. I'm talking about the rapid-fire departures of editors Carole Leigh Hutton, Jim O'Shea and Phil Bronstein from, respectively, the San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

That's some trifecta: The editors of California's three largest newspapers replaced in the space of less than three weeks. Hutton quit under pressure, O'Shea was fired, but the circumstances of Bronstein's departure are a bit more murky—it seems odd that Hearst would announce such a move without an immediate replacement.

Bronstein, who at least stays with the company as "editor at large," indicated to Editor & Publisher that he was burned out by the stresses of stories like the Balco investigation, but I suspect that the stresses of constantly having to prune the newsroom budget are what really got to him—either voluntarily or involuntarily.

As with the O'Shea transition, the choice of Bronstein's replacement will be interesting. Will Hearst Co. go the traditional route? Or will it try something bold and daring, picking an original thinker to lead the Chronicle into the next phase, one in which print is increasingly taking a backseat to the Web and big, bold, imaginative thinking is critical.

Bronstein hints to SFGate.com that his replacement will be named soon and have "deep roots in the Bay Area." One could hope that means somebody with an entrepreneurial, creative, Silicon Valley background. But more likely—especially knowing firsthand the quality of journalism in the Bay Area and Hearst's conservatism—it's probably going to be yet another old-school print-editor retread. What a pity. (Update: Yup, exactly what I suspected.)

And riddle me this: Given the turnover in recent years at the Mercury News and L.A. Times, will we be talking about death coming in threes in the front offices of these papers again in a year or two? More than likely.

Another One Bites the Dust

You hate to see anyone fired, especially an editor, especially a good one, especially an old friend and former colleague.

But Jim O'Shea's ouster from the top job at the Los Angeles Times seems to reflect a lot of what's wrong with the newspaper business and the way that old-school editors and publishers—even the smart ones—look at the world and the ways the industry is changing.

I don't know what really happened in L.A.—I haven't talked to Jim in ages, and the voluminous coverage today (do the firings of mid-level managers at other, non-news companies get the same level of coverage and dissection? Just asking.) is murky. But it seems to be boiling down to Who Shot John (or Jim) levels of disagreement: O'Shea complains about "voodoo economics" at the parent Tribune Co.; Publisher David Hiller says O'Shea was fired for resisting a 1 percent budget cut and for not backing off a request for a $3 million budget increase. Ugly.

I was concerned when O'Shea got the job 14 months ago that he was too traditional for the gig; he later made the right noises about putting the Web first, and apparently did other positive things at the paper. But in the end, maybe he was just too old-school. Reality bites, and the reality is that in a declining advertising and circulation market, you just can't practice journalism the old way.

The coverage of his firing says O'Shea wanted more money because he was concerned about tight resources in a Presidential/Olympics year, but it's not too hard to challenge that assumption. Does the Los Angeles Times need a full cadre of reporters covering the Presidential primaries? Does it need to send a boatload of people to the two conventions? Does it need to send its own Olympic team to the Beijing Olympics? No, no, and no. (That may save $3 million right there.) What the Times does need to do is provide better coverage of its local area for its readers, who can damn well read about the primaries, the conventions and the Olympics in thousands of other places.

I have no idea if these were the choices O'Shea was unwilling to make, but I'll bet I'm not far off the mark. (And, I'd add, editors at smaller papers would KILL to be able to make these sorts of decisions!) Sorry, that kind of redundant coverage of national and international news is old-think, and it's very expensive old-think. You've simply got to be smarter and more creative about where you're spending resources these days, and concentrate your resources where it will make the most difference: on coverage that your readers simply can't get anywhere else.

Rumor has it that O'Shea's replacement will be Innovation Editor Russ Stanton. Right title, I guess—you can't have too much innovation these days—but is Stanton the right guy? He's still a newspaper guy (formerly the business editor); how innovative can he truly be? I'll readily admit to blind blogger innocence about Stanton's credentials—maybe he truly is a breakthrough innovator—but has he ever run a business (as opposed to a Business section)? Worked in a startup? Spent time truly immersed in new media? If he hasn't, his experience just isn't broad enough to really bring new thinking to the L.A. Times.

I'll go back to what I said when O'Shea was appointed: Publishers need to look outside the traditional lists of editor candidates to find true innovators who can lead the industry out of its precipitous slide. The ranks of newspaper editors (and sub-editors) these days is too full of people who came up through the old system, played by the old rules, and succeeded, frankly, because they didn't take chances. Those days are over. Forget the Innovation Editor—if the L.A. Times really wants to revolutionize itself and break loose of the pack, Hiller should be looking inside dot.coms and other non-traditional sources for editor candidates who aren't encumbered by history and have fresh thinking about how to present information and interact with the audience. That's the only way things are truly going to change—and the only way newspapers will have a chance to survive.

WSJ.com Wants to Be Free? Maybe Not!

Memo to everybody who blithely jumped to the conclusion that Rupert Murdoch was going to make the Wall Street Journal's Web site free: Looks like you were wrong.

Turns out that Murdoch, upon further review, apparently has figured out what some of us knew all along: It's not that easy (or smart) to walk away from $70 million in guaranteed annual revenue—and the high CPMs that subscription-based audience underwrites.

According to the New York Observer (which really buried the lede, btw), Murdoch told Journal bureau chiefs last week that he was rethinking his speculative statements—made before he actually owned the paper—that he'd tear down WSJ.com's subscription wall and make the site free:

According to three people present at the bureau chiefs’ meeting last week, Mr. Murdoch has scaled back his ambition to make WSJ.com entirely free. “He said he originally thought making it free would bring in the biggest audience, but that after studying it it’s not as simple as he thought,” said one person present.

Mr. Murdoch said that they would continue to study it, and there’s a strong possibility that a hybrid model would be created perhaps similar to what’s being used now (The Journal’s news content is currently behind a firewall; its opinion page was opened for free last week).

That's a more reasoned approach, and it shows that smart business analysis trumps uninformed Web speculation and wishful thinking every time. Opening the opinion pages to free access makes sense—opinion drives traffic in the blogosphere and on the Web. But it was hard to truly make a business case for making the rest of the site free.

Murdoch is making the right choice, and I'll continue to happily pay my $99 a year to read WSJ.com. Nice to see that somebody puts value on high-quality content!

What's the Seven-Letter Word Score for "Scooped"?

Don't think blogs can break news? Witness the developing story around the attempts to shut down Scrabulous, the fabulously popular Facebook version of Scrabble.

Mainstream media is all over this story right now, one of those classic tales of big business going after Web entrepreneurs (OK, Web entrepreneurs who seem to have stolen the big business's intellectual capital). Toymakers Mattel and Hasbro, who own the international and U.S. rights to Scrabble, respectively, want the proprietors of Scrabulous to shut down, citing trademark and copyright infringement.

It's a terrific story, with nothing but readers (as we used to say), not the least of whom are the highly literate millions of devoted Scrabulous players. But what took traditional media so long to come across this great story? It was all over the blogosphere last week, and Mattel and Hasbro's actions against Scrabulous actually began two weeks ago. The Scrabulous community has been buzzing about it in all sorts of venues online—where was the press?

This is just the latest of several stories that have emerged from the blogosphere, YouTube and elsewhere lately yet taken days or weeks to surface in mainstream media. You'd think that traditional journalists would learn to keep an eye on leading blogs in technology and other industries, and pay attention to the chatter on sites like Facebook. Otherwise they risk being way behind on stories like this one. Like everything else, the news cycle is moving far faster these days. Traditional media just has to learn to keep up—or risk looking even further behind the curve.