Recovering Journalist

Local Ad Dollars, Slip Sliding Away

There's a good but depressing article in the Wall Street Journal about how newspapers are continuing to fall behind in the local online advertising derby–even as their print ad revenues are ebbing away. According to Borrell statistics cited in the story, newspaper share of the local online ad market has fallen to 27.4 percent from 35.9 percent two years ago. Things aren't going in the right direction. That's not good–especially when the overall local online advertising market is growing, ahem, at a 57 percent annual clip.

The Journal story lists several reasons for the newspapers' local online advertising problems, unfortunately well-known to anybody who's been around newspaper online ad sales operations:

• It's hard to get sales reps interested in selling less-lucrative local online ads.
• Small local advertisers generally don't buy banner ads favored by larger national advertisers (and still the standard ad on most newspaper Web sites).
• Strategies of bundling print and online advertising may cause more cannibalization than added sales. 
• Local online ad growth is coming from small- and medium-sized business–which traditionally haven't been significant advertising customers of most good-sized dailies.

That last point is particularly interesting. In print and online, most papers, by covering a broad metropolitan area, are more attractive to larger local advertisers like car dealers and banks. Smaller advertisers–the pizza parlors, nail salons, mom-and-pop stores–don't want the broad geographic reach that papers offer, and can't afford the high rates. And they're harder to sell to (and the commissions aren't as large). 

So newspaper sales reps traditionally haven't called on those smaller advertisers. But there are lots of them, and other media are moving in–community papers, local Web sites and blogs, even Google, Yahoo and specialty sites like Yelp. That's what's crowding the newspapers out of their own markets, online.

At Backfence, we saw that there was definite interest by these small merchants and service providers in advertising online on a focused local site. But newspapers, for the most part, still don't have significant offerings of that type. Not only are they not selling the ads, they often don't really have the strong local online products to sell them on. Want to dominate the local online market? Start with a killer local entertainment guide. But most newspaper sites still haven't figured out how to provide readers–and advertisers–with a topnotch local events guide. And hyperlocal coverage, which gives those small local advertisers access to customers nearest to them, is still a pipe dream at most newspaper Web sites.

All of this is quite unfortunate, since newspapers at this point need every ad dollar they can find, and those small local businesses represent a largely untapped pool of potential ad revenue. To get it, newspapers need to really change the way they approach their local market, online. Some suggestions:

• Build a strong local product to attract local advertisers–an entertainment guide, hyperlocal sites, a site targeting a specific local demographic, whatever.
• Push the cost of ad sales down as low as possible. No more high-salary, high-commission sales reps who can only score decent bucks by selling another car dealer ad. Try commission-only telemarketing reps smiling and dialing to blanket small local businesses.
• Self-serve advertising tools. Make it easy–really, really easy–for small advertisers to come online, create, place and pay for an ad. That drives the cost of sales way down. Did I mention it has to be easy? Most newspaper sites haven't mastered that concept for simple things like placing online classifieds, unfortunately.
• Seminars for local businesses on online advertising (see the Bakersfield Californian example in the Journal story). It's still new to many, many small business owners. Educate them on the value of online advertising and how to take advantage of it. 
• Don't sell only your own products. Deploy ad reps with a portfolio of offerings to local businesses that might include ads on Google, Yahoo, or even the Yellow Pages. You've got the feet on the local streets--use them.
• Experiment with new online advertising forms. Banners and tiles aren't the only way to advertise online. In fact, they're quite tired (clicked on a banner ad lately? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?). Try everything from text ads to interactive ads that couch the ad message in a game or quiz. Sell sponsorships of various elements of the site. And don't forget video ads, which are becoming very popular among local advertisers. Real estate walkthroughs, chefs describing their restaurants–these videos seem obvious, but they're still few and far between on newspaper sites. 

Newspaper competitors online already are doing all of these things. Just as on the news side, too many papers are still trapped in a business and operational model that dates to just after the days of Ben Franklin and John Peter Zenger. Local online advertising represents a significant source of badly needed advertising revenue. Newspapers can't afford to let it slip away.

Hang On, Folks. Things Are Getting Worse

The past couple of months have seen a drumbeat of announcements of newspaper layoffs, cutbacks and other bad news. Just today, A.H. Belo announced that it's cutting 14 percent of its workforce. Last week, it was the lenders who put up the money to buy the Minneapolis Star-Tribune running for the exits. And it's raining lousy second-quarter earnings reports.

It all seems pretty bad. But hold on to your press hats: Things are going to get worse in the newspaper industry, perhaps much worse. Three sharp new analyses of the second-quarter newspaper results–by fellow recovering journalists Alan Mutter, Ken Doctor and Wall Street analyst Mike Simonton–suggest that declines in ad revenue were generally accelerating in June, and worst of all, that the existing cuts and layoffs at newspapers are not keeping up with the decline of the business.

"Unless sales improve or the industry is willing to accept lower profitability in the future, the companies evidently would have no choice but to consider even further spending cuts," Mutter warns. Echoes Simonton, "We haven't yet reached the bottom for revenue declines." And Doctor asks, "So you think current cuts are tough?"

They're probably not nearly tough enough, unfortunately. We'll see more layoffs and cutbacks for the rest of the year, and then a fresh round of deep cuts around the first of the year, as companies assess their 2008 results and the new, even-more-shrunken budgets take hold. And don't go looking for an economic miracle to turn things around, because odds are that the structural changes rocking the industry are so profound that there won't be a significant advertising rebound even if the economy improves.

In other words, it's not only going to get worse before it gets better–it may not even get better. The next few months could bring a bloodletting in the industry that will make what's currently happening look like a picnic.

But here's the big, really painful prediction: Before long, we're going to lose a big newspaper (several, actually). And it's going to happen sooner than anybody thinks.

Resistance Isn't Just Futile–It's Fatal

Newspaper Death Watch has a good summary of an interesting PBS MediaShift interview with Vickey Williams, who's written a report about the difficulties in getting newsrooms (and journalists) to change their ways. 

Summary of the summary: Newspapers and journalists change very reluctantly, and there are still a lot of curmudgeons out there actively resisting change. That's something that's obvious to anybody who has spent time in newsrooms or reading hostile comments on blog posts encouraging significant changes and rethinking in the newspaper business. 

Worse, Williams suggests, many newsrooms are eating their young by discouraging younger staffers who agitate to do things differently (no surprise there, either, unfortunately). Look no further than the firestorm over Tampa Tribune intern/blogger Jessica DaSilva's support of newsroom change for evidence of that. The criticism DaSilva got was ridiculous and all too illustrative of many of the problems that are preventing newsrooms from moving into the future.

As Newspaper Death Watch summarizes:

Characterizing many newsrooms as "aggressive-defensive workplaces," [Williams] finds structural impediments to the adoption of digital tools, suspicion of online media and organizational resistance to any ideas that don't come from the top.

The need for fundamental change in how newspapers, newsrooms and journalists work is demonstrable and way overdue. Managements are largely to blame for this. But the defiance and ignorance by many members of the rank and file isn't helping, either. If you want your newspaper and the industry to survive, you need to really learn about new media and the business of journalism, embrace change and do everything you possibly can to help make it happen. It's as simple as that.

Unlucky 13

It turns out The Washington Post's much-ballyhooed 12-part Chandry Levy serial wasn't a 12-part series after all–there's now a 13th chapter promised this weekend. (What, did they realize halfway through that the missing chapter had fallen behind a desk in the newsroom?) One might hope that the bonus chapter will bring the series to a rousing conclusion (Part 12 sure didn't), but it's probably not a good sign that the title of No. 13 is "A Cold Case." (A promised "In-depth preview" of the story is neither a preview nor in-depth.)

The past couple of parts have hinted (spoiler alert!) that Levy was killed by a Salvadoran immigrant named Ingmar Guandique who had a history of assaulting women in the area where Levy's body was found. But the evidence against Guandique is circumstantial or has disappeared—and, according to word around town, so has Guandique, who apparently was deported years ago. (Correction: Guandique, who denies involvement in the case, is in federal prison, scheduled to be deported in 2011.) In any event, Guandique's possible involvement isn't new news–as today's episode of "As Chandra Turns" acknowledges, his name surfaced in connection with the case back in 2002. We had to wade through 12 parts–almost 20,000 words–for that?

Barring some sort of amazing revelation in the upcoming Part 13, it doesn't appear that The Post's mega-series has advanced the story much. So what have we learned from this opus?

• That the Levy family was heartbroken over the disappearance of their daughter. (Natch.)
• That the Washington cops spectacularly bungled the case. (Wait, we already knew that.)
• That Rep. Gary Condit was/is a sleazeball. (We knew that, too.)
• That Condit didn't kill Levy. (Yup, we knew that as well.)

And that's about it, over 12–oops, 13–parts, each taking up a half page or so of newsprint and countless pixels online.

Amazingly, the Levy series apparently has done boffo traffic on washingtonpost.com, even in comparison to Pulitzer-quality work like the paper's Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Vice President Cheney investigations. But those were big, deep, important stories that required--and deserved--a commitment of the reader's time. The 1,500-word Levy storybites were like eating potato chips. 

Unfortunately, I'll bet a lot of those Web visitors left disappointed by the shallowness of the Levy stories. There certainly are a lot of angry readers in the stories' comments and on Post discussion boards. I thought the goal these days was to attract and keep readers, not piss them off.

As I've said, The Post deserves credit for experimenting with a new (well, not really) storytelling trick. But they picked the wrong story to tell it with. Some high-ranking editor should have spiked the Post's Levy investigation–which took three good reporters, plus support staff, almost a year, mind you, to report and write–when it was apparent that it wasn't breaking major new ground and before it spun as badly out of control as it did. Or The Post should have drastically reconsidered the presentation and play.

For a textbook example of how editors should deal with stories that aren't ready for primetime, let's go to the videotape, er, DVD:

Ben Bradlee: Okay, let's have it.

Harry Rosenfeld: Here you are, Ben. A good, solid piece of American journalism that The New York Times doesn't have.

(long pause as Bradlee reads the story)

Bradlee: You haven't got it. A librarian and a secretary say Hunt looked at a book. That's not good enough.

Bob Woodward: A White House aide told me that Hunt was investigating Kennedy.

Bradlee: Who was it?

Woodward: Who was it? You want the name, you mean?

Bradlee: No, how senior? How high up?

Woodward: I don't know titles.

(Bradlee crosses out large chunks of the story and rewrites the lede a bit, then hands it to Carl Bernstein.)

Bernstein: "Showed a special interest in?" No, we said the White House was investigating Kennedy.

Bradlee: Showed a special interest in.

Bernstein: Jesus, the story's stronger than that. We've got a White House librarian that says Hunt checked out a whole lot of books, we've got a secretary in Colson's office that...

Rosenfeld: All right, Carl. Ben, that's a Page One story!

Bradlee: Stick it inside someplace.

Bernstein (angrily): This is a goddam important story.

Bradlee (with a withering glance): Get some harder information next time.

Just a Bit Over-Zell-ous

There may be no more interesting--or polarizing--figure in American journalism today than Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell. (Yes, he seems to have outstripped Rupert Murdoch for that title.) 

Zell seems hellbent on shaking up his media conglomerate in every way possible, from profanity-laden tirades at staff meetings to excited, excessively CAPITALIZED!!! idea memos from his lieutenants to suggesting that newsroom productivity be measured and increased to proposals to fairly radically redesign his newspapers. Say what you want about him, he's trying to do things differently. In the hidebound, fossilized newspaper industry, that's radical thinking–and very welcome.

Unfortunately, Zell made the mistake of buying Tribune Co. in much better economic times, using a pile of debt, and failing to see the cliff the business was headed over. Now he's financially overextended, furiously selling assets and taking out risky loans to raise cash, and forced to make some fairly serious cuts in his workforce to stay afloat (and gain greater efficiencies). The recent layoffs and buyouts at Zell/Tribune papers in Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Hartford, Orlando and elsewhere are most unfortunate, but also necessary to keep the company breathing. 

That's the reality of the business he's running, alas, because of the financial pressures being put on him by his mountain of debt, the industry's decline and the worsening economy. I'll bet Zell wishes he'd been able to wait a year to buy Tribune; he would have gotten it much more cheaply and might be able to make his innovative changes with much less worry about the hungry wolf showing up at the door clad in bankers' clothing. 

But the full import of this state of affairs is apparently lost on some of Zell's employees. Many of them are reacting unbelievably childishly to their new owner. The TellZell blog chronicles Zell's moves in acute and disapproving detail, even offering "Zell Hell" t-shirts and mugs that say "Take Back The Los Angeles Times." In Baltimore, employees held an anti-Zell protest outside the paper's offices. In Hartford, a going-away cake for laid-off staffers featured a picture of Zell that was joyously defaced–word is that particular glee was taken in gouging out the owner's eyes. (Update: More wishful-thinking nonsense, in LA.)

How ridiculous. It may not be much fun to work at Tribune Co. these days–is it fun at any newspaper company anymore?–but these angry journalists seem oblivious to the true roots of their problems, which are shared by all newspapers and can also be traced back to the management team that ran the company before Zell bought it. Tribune's former bosses are the ones who didn't innovate, the ones who missed the boat on the Internet. Not Zell, who's trying to innovate as fast as he can. Nor did Zell cause the enormous changes that are rocking the industry, or the economic downturn that's making all the problems even worse. 

In fact, Zell is almost as much a victim as his employees are. And the misbegotten notion by Tribune staffers that they're somehow going to drive him away with idiotic slogans, protests or cake-defacement is just nuts. Believe me, I'm sure that if Zell could sell the company right now, he would.

Tribune's employees would be a lot better off trying to understand what's really happening to their industry and papers and redirecting their energy toward improving their newspapers and Web sites to make them more interesting and attractive to readers and advertisers. That's how to save jobs. Whining–and worse–about Sam Zell isn't going to change a damn thing. It's just childish behavior.

The Twelve Days of Chandra

The Washington Post's 12-part series on the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy is the talk of the town, with a lot of people scratching their heads over why The Post would devote 12 stories to a years-old case that was covered ad nauseum at the time.

I blogged last week that I thought the series was a failed experiment, and it seems like a lot of people agree with me. It's been a hot topic on WashingtonPost.com discussion boards and today Post reporter Robert Pierre came out and blasted his own paper for, essentially, wasting space on the case of a pretty white woman while ignoring the city's black murder victims. He's got a point. And there's another tough critique of the series–and the choices behind it–here.

On the other hand, I hear the series is doing great traffic on the Web–it turns out that Chandra Levy conspiracy theorists are a hardy bunch–and I got into a conversation today with somebody who was defending the project and made me rethink my view of it a bit.

The trick is to separate the subject matter from the format, which resembles an old-time newspaper serial, with short stories and daily cliffhangers. The fundamental problem with the Levy series is that the subject is overdone and, unfortunately, The Post's reporters don't seem to have come up with much new information (although there are hints that they'll point the finger at a possible suspect by the series' end). Given the 12-part format, with each story only about 1,500 words, this makes for very thin daily reading. There just isn't enough meat in any of the bite-sized stories to make them really interesting, and in the end the serial format smacks of a marketing ploy ("Buy tomorrow's paper to find out more!").

But I now wonder if the serial format would work better with a more weighty topic. Typical Post series tend to be well-reported and meaty–but ponderous, requiring a significant commitment of time to read the 4,000-5,000 words of each installment. The Post's excellent, Pulitzer-winning series on Vice President Cheney, for instance, was full of rich detail, but quite a big meal to sit down to each day. It might have worked much better in the 12-part serial format, or something similar.

The Post gets some points for experimenting with the form, though I continue to think they picked the wrong topic for this particular experiment. Hopefully they'll keep trying until they find a way to present series in a manner that works optimally, online and off. It would be fascinating to hear what incoming Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli thinks of the Levy series. Next time, the call about how to present something like this will be up to him.

Update: Turns out the 12-part Chandra series is now a 13-part series! Oy.

Paper Money

It's a little bit apples and oranges, but a reader named Ed makes an interesting comment on one of my earlier posts:

It just occurred to me that this coming Sunday, I have the choice of spending $1 to buy a paper, or $1 to buy one share of a giant and powerful newspaper company. For about $4, in the neighborhood of the price of the Sunday New York Times or the tabloid Barron's, I can buy a share of the McClatchy company that owns newspapers monopolizing the markets of Miami, Fort Worth, Sacramento, Anchorage, Lexington and one that covers the entire state of Idaho.

Alternatively, for the price of about three copies of The Sunday New York Times, you could join the Sulzbergers as owners of The New York Times Co., or buy a share of Media General; for the price of Sunday Times' you could own a share of Gannett; for the price of one Sunday Times you could own a share of Lee Enterprises or Journal Communications—or you could buy a basket of the cheaper newspaper stocks like Journal Register and Sun-Times Media.

That gives you come idea of how far newspaper stocks have fallen–they're not worth much more than the newspapers they represent. But the question is, will those stock certificates wind up as fishwrap?

The Vultures Are Circling

Let's think the unthinkable. Some of the biggest names in the newspaper industry are on the verge of becoming financial casualties. The results may be something that none of us recognize as newspaper companies.

Caught in the perfect storm of technology-driven industry structural upheaval, chronic mismanagement and the economic downturn, the values of publicly owned newspaper companies are reaching historic and dangerous lows. 

As documented by Alan Mutter, the market value of the nation's big newspaper companies has slumped $3.9 billion in just the past couple of weeks and $27.7 billion since the first of the year. By Mutter's reckoning, 10 of the companies combined–including industry household names like The New York Times Co., A.H. Belo, Lee, McClatchy and GateHouse–are now worth a total, yep, all together, of $3.6 billion. Stunning.

It gets worse. As GateHouse shares nicked the $1 level yesterday (total market value: about $59 million), one Wall Street analyst yesterday opined that the company's stock may now be worthless–yes, worthless–"because of the company's exposure to a challenging advertising environment, a debt-heavy balance sheet and declining cash flows." At the same time, an investor in Journal Register (market value $6 million), indicated that he was pulling back from an offer to put a fresh $25 million into the company because management has been, ahem, uncommunicative with him. And shares of Gannett–not one of the Mutter 10 but now worth just $3.7 billion itself–are trading at a 17-year low.

This is a financial crisis for the industry of mammoth proportions. It's worsening by the day. And the vultures are circling. 

Who are the vultures? Investors who will swoop in and try to grab the assets of a distressed company at rock-bottom bargain-basement prices–and let's face it, these are some bargains. Some of these companies can be had for a billionaire's pocket change. Forget the fantasy about Google buying the New York Times; the Silicon Valley behemoth could pick up the entire industry for what amounts to petty cash. (Caveat: Some two-tier corporate stock arrangements will fend off takeovers, at least for a while.)

But professional bottom feeders aren't stupid. They're not going to buy these troubled companies as going concerns. The fundamental businesses are too damaged. Instead, they may look at purchasing newspaper companies on the cheap and doing surgery on them that will make the current run of layoffs and cutbacks look like benevolent ownership. Journalism be damned: To survive, these companies may have to be essentially strip-mined, broken up for parts, transformed to run as cheaply as possible. And you thought newspaper managements already were cheap.

Another alternative: A string of bankruptcy filings. That will buy some time, but again, would be accompanied by deep, deep cuts in operations. Not pretty.

Or maybe somebody will buy a newspaper company and take a fresh look at it–and I don't mean that in a positive, "let's invest in good journalism" sort of way. Rather, an investor might look at a newspaper company and see not newspapers but local advertising sales forces, or local delivery services, or local printing plants–and reconstitute the companies to focus on those assets and operations. Bye-bye newspaper, hello local ad reps pushing Yellow Pages, Google AdSense and Yelp ads to their erstwhile newspaper advertising customers.

Don't think it's possible? Look at the numbers assembled by Mutter again. These once-great companies are bottoming out. The sharks are circling. The horrors of the next few months may make the last few months look like a golden age–except to savvy investors who try to wring the last few pieces of gold out of those downtrodden newspaper companies.

Dropping Like Flies

It's an axiom of sports that baseball team managers are hired to be fired. Turn in a couple bad seasons, or go on a losing streak, or run afoul of your owner, and you're outta there.

Lately, the job security for newspaper publishers and editors seems to be almost as bad. Today's victims are Chicago Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski, who wasn't fired, but clearly decided she'd had enough of owner Sam Zell and his Zellots running roughshod and making changes to her paper faster than she wanted to; and David Hiller, publisher at Zell's  Los Angeles Times, who "resigned" this afternoon, no doubt after clashing with Zell over issues of change. 

Their departures follow the recent early retirement of Tribune Publisher Scott C. Smith; the resignation of Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli, who's now replacing retired Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie; and the firing a few months ago of Los Angeles Times Editor Jim O'Shea–who, like Hiller, followed various other editors and publishers out the door in L.A. over the past couple of years. Plus the firings, resignations and retirements of so many other editors and publishers lately that it's hard to keep track of them all. It's been a real bloodbath.

Newspaper romantics, traditionalists and Luddites are no doubt wailing and gnashing their teeth over the turnover of so much top management from newspapers. But why? Fact is, it was time for most of these folks to leave—every bit as much as it is when a baseball manager is fired after blowing a nine-game roadtrip. 

Whether these outgoing publishers and editors depart voluntarily or not, they're leaving with a losing record: Circulation at most papers has been declining for years, and ad revenues are in the tank, too. Some of that can be blamed on circumstances–the economy, the Internet–but most of it can be blamed on ossified managements that have failed to truly understand how dramatically the media world is changing, have failed to aggressively take advantage of the Internet, have failed to innovate online or off, have failed to listen to what readers want and have failed to make their publications more relevant, interesting and valuable to readers and advertisers. That's a litany of failure, and when you fail that badly, you should lose your job.

We're also seeing, I hope, a significant generational shift here. Editors who came up through the business thinking that the newspaper was the primary source of news and information are dinosaurs. Publishers used to dominating local ad markets with virtually no competition are fossils. But many of them are still in place, unfortunately, and moving as slowly and stupidly as ever, even as the environment they're operating in is changing rapidly and radically. The traditional newspaper formula has been patently unworkable for years, but too many newspaper leaders don't understand that. It's time for them to go.

This older, Baby Boom generation of newspaper managers must give way to a more savvy generation of leadership that's facile with the Internet and technology, not tied to old myths and legends of the business and willing to be downright entrepreneurial about change—managing and fomenting change as if their jobs depended on it, because they do. It's notable that some commentators pointed out the generational shift in last week's appointment of Marcus Brauchli to run The Washington Post–he's 47, and publisher Katharine Weymouth is 42. They're both smart and hip and Internet-savvy. And while Brauchli's departure from The Wall Street Journal is one of the more prominent recent editor casualties, that seemed to stem from a culture clash with new owner Rupert Murdoch. In many ways, Brauchli's Journal embodied more of what newspapers need to become than just about anything else out there. One of the more interesting comments on Weymouth's appointment of Brauchli came from no less than Ben Bradlee, still sharp at 86: "I don't think it's a case of her wanting to shake the place up as much as her having to," Bradlee told The New York Times. "She feels the urgency to change and adapt, and thank heaven."

If newspapers are to be saved–and that's very much an open question–they will need that sort of urgency for radical rethinking and surgery, and a willingness by editors and publishers to try new things and to make daring experiments (not merely stretching a three-part series to 12 parts!). That requires a new generation of leadership–and a passing of the old generation that's still clinging to the top jobs.

So don't mourn the departure of Lipinski, Hiller and others. It's part of the shift to the future. Before we can really change newspapers, we need to change the people who run them.

To Be Continued, Online and Off

The Washington Post is running a 12-part series about murdered Washington intern Chandra Levy. Yes, you read that right: 12 parts, about a story that was numbingly over-covered when it was current, seven years ago.

The Post has put three of its best reporters to work rehashing the Levy case in an effort to demonstrate why the case was bungled by the cops, why Rep. Gary Condit, her lover, was falsely accused, and why "the killer may never be brought to justice." 

Did I mention it's 12 parts?

The Post's approach to this series is both unusual and fairly standard in this era of combined online and offline journalism. Like all good large-scale projects these days, the series has an online component, as well, including bits of audio, video, documentary information, reporter's notebooks and other supplemental content. All good. In all, according to the package's credits, more than two dozen people from the print and online staffs worked on the series.

But what's different is that in print, the story is being told as a 12-part serial, in bites of about 1,500 words each, rather than in three or four 5,000-word chunks. And based on the first couple of "chapters," it's not really working. 

The first two episodes have seemed very thin, there doesn't seem to be that much new information, and one is left with the overwhelming impression that the story is being dragged out over 12 days solely in an effort to sell 12 papers (or 12 Web visits). While the thin-but-extended format may help readers who don't want to make a significant daily reading commitment, it doesn't seem to add much if anything to the story itself. And the Web supplemental information is OK--but it's just that, supplemental. It feels sort of tacked-on and doesn't really have the depth one might expect.

It might have been interesting if the Post had tried a somewhat more daring strategy of packaging the story: Three rock-'em, sock-'em print episodes that summarized the reporters' findings for readers who want the basics, promoting a much deeper, more comprehensive Web version for readers who really wanted to dive in for more. Read the synopsis in print; get the book-length version online (plus the supplemental information for the real junkies).

Newspaper Web editions, alas, still are slaves to their print counterparts, and the Post's series demonstrates this—the online version doesn't really use the medium well or improve on what people got in print. But if print space is precious—and online space basically unlimited—why not provide two very different versions of a series like this and let readers choose which one they prefer?

But 12 parts? That's a bit much for anything.

Update: Post Executive Editor Len Downie on the thinking behind the 12-part format. And sheesh, if stretching a perfectly good three-part series over 12 parts is such a radical breakthrough that it's worthy of coverage in the industry's trade magazine as an innovation, maybe newspapers are in even bigger trouble--is that possible?--than anybody thought!