Recovering Journalist

Representing Readers

Editor & Publisher picks up on a trend that's an outgrowth of the overall cutbacks in newspapers: newsroom ombudsmen (and women) are a vanishing breed. At least 10 ombudsmen have lost their jobs in the past year to buyouts or layoffs at U.S. newspapers, leaving just 27 of the readers' representatives in place, according to the Organization of News Ombudsmen (which also has international members, but at this rate may have trouble reaching a quorum at its next convention).

As Gina Lubrano, executive secretary of the organization, points out to E&P, the readers' representative position has been an easy target for cost-cutters for years. So it's probably not surprising that we're seeing a bunch of ombudsmen cuts amid the current avalanche of newspaper cutbacks.

But I'd argue that these days, the ombudsman–like many things in the newspaper business–is something of an anachronism, anyway. It's another thing that technology has rendered essentially irrelevant. There are just so many other ways for readers to talk back to newspapers these days.

The first newspaper ombudsman position was created more than 40 years ago, at the Louisville Courier-Journal and Louisville Times. It made sense: Newspapers were basically one-way communications media, with very little opportunity for readers to reply or be heard. Aside from letters to the editor (generally published only a handful at a time) or angry calls to editors and news desks (and anybody who's ever worked in a newsroom knows how those usually were dealt with), there weren't a lot of ways for readers to talk back to the press. 

So the ombudsman–or public editor, or readers' representative–position was created to give readers more of a voice. The idea was that the ombudsman would act as a readers' advocate, do some internal critiquing, and generally hold newspapers more accountable to their readers for what they published. Ultimately, there were dozens at papers around the country (and around the world). 

Again, that was how it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, when newspapers primarily lectured their audiences. Now, things are very different. There are many ways to talk back to newspapers these days: Most newspapers allow comments on stories (well, except those that set them up badly, get scared and foolishly turn them off); many good editors and reporters have blogs and or chats and interact regularly with their audiences; and there are many forums for press coverage and criticism that hold journalists responsible for what they write.

The result is that the newspaper ombudsman looks a bit like a relic from an earlier time. In many ways, we're all ombudsmen now: savvier readers, with multiple ways to talk back to the press. Newspapers are being held far more accountable, and that's a good thing. 

The notion of a newspaper ombudsman to provide a voice for readers was a necessary but transitional device. Rest in peace, but as many have pointed out, good journalism is now a conversation rather than a lecture.

No Sale

FOR SALE: Newspaper. Runs good. Driven daily and Sunday for decades. Leans slightly to the left. Fully loaded: includes presses, delivery trucks, journalists, newsprint reels, many working news boxes. Has fresh coat of layoffs. Needs some work: cost-cutting, redesign, updated Web strategy. Offers buyer a unique chance to be a local big cheese. Seller is highly motivated–will take best offer.

There are quite a few newspapers for sale these days. But there don't seem to be many buyers.

In Portland, Me., the Blethen family (of Seattle Times fame) appears to be having a hard time selling the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram. Several rumored local buyers have looked at the papers, but so far, no deal. In Austin, Cox is looking for a buyer for the Statesman–a good paper in an affluent college town, with a good Web site–but there have been no reports of any nibbles. In San Diego, the Copley family has the Union-Tribune on the block, and while over-eager newsroom rumors claim potential buyers like William Dean Singleton, Sam Zell and The New York Times Co. are kicking the tires, that speculation seems far-fetched at best, given that trio's problems at the papers they already own. Dow Jones put the Ottaway chain on the market a while back–and then took it off a few months later when no buyer could be found.

This is not a good time to be selling a newspaper. 

A couple of years ago, selling a paper was much easier. Local investors like Brian Tierney could be found to snap up papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, or robber-barons like Zell would use financial ju jitsu to pick up a Tribune Co., or an investment firm like Avista could convince itself that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was a good buy. Hell, McClatchy, which should have known better, grabbed Knight Ridder (though the paucity of competing bidders should have been a clear warning sign). Even former GE CEO Jack Welch, a certified captain of industry, made a bid to buy the Boston Globe from The New York Times for $600 million.

Ah, those were the days. Now all of those buyers probably wish they hadn't written the check (their banks certainly do). Welch, rebuffed by the Times (oops!), reportedly is no longer interested in the Globe–much to the Times' chagrin, I'll bet. And notice that no rich Los Angelenos (Ron Burkle and David Geffen, white courtesy phone please) have stepped up to bid for the Los Angeles Times, despite pleas from Times staffers and others for somebody to free the paper from Zell's ownership.

Problem is, newspapers aren't a very good investment anymore, for reasons that are all too familiar: Declining ad sales and circulation, collapse of the classifieds business, aging readership, all sorts of new competition and bankers who are leery of loaning money for such speculative investments. The ongoing economic turmoil magnifies almost all of this.

There have been a couple of major newspaper sales lately, but they've been special circumstances: Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal for his ego; Cablevision buying Newsday for the alleged synergy with its Long Island cable operations (but overpaying, in the eyes of most analysts, including losing bidder Murdoch); and Singleton flipping some Connecticut papers to Hearst, apparently to reduce the debt elsewhere in his empire.

My point is that for Portland, Austin, San Diego and other papers currently on the block, new ownership doesn't appear likely to be the solution to the structural and economic problems that are rocking the industry. For now, the current owners are probably stuck with these papers–unless they want to explore other, more dire alternatives. Eventually, we'll probably see some vulture investors move in to buy sick papers at pennies on the dollar, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Yet.

In investing, there's something called the greater fool theory. It's based on the idea that an investor can always find somebody to buy something that's a bigger fool than the seller who originally bought it. But it may be that newspaper sellers have just about run out of fools.

--30-- On Wall Street

There are a lot of reasons why newspaper people should be closely watching this week's turmoil in the financial markets. But here are two particularly scary ones:

The collapses/bailouts of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and American International Group, and the resulting slide in stock prices, are signals that the U.S. economy remains in serious trouble. That means that the economic problems that are buffeting newspapers (and their advertisers) aren't going to get better any time soon. Layoffs, buyouts and other cutbacks are going to be with us for a while. We probably haven't even seen the worst of it.

More ominously, the sudden upheaval or even disappearance of some of Wall Street's biggest names is a foreshadowing of what's to come in newspapers. A week ago, few on Wall Street could imagine a world in which Lehman Brothers had liquidated, Merrill Lynch was absorbed into another company and AIG had just missed collapse. It was unthinkable. These were well-respected, bedrock names in the financial world.

Now project that onto newspapers. It's highly likely, probably within a year, that we'll see one or more major newspapers suddenly closing their doors, bankrupt or radically restructured. There will be plenty more after that, and their disappearance will be just as shocking as the demise of those big Wall Street names. And there won't be any government bailouts of newspapers, either.

We're in the midst of a very bad time for the newspaper business. Worse times are ahead, and this week's events on Wall Street underscore that. We probably shouldn't be surprised by anything that happens. Think the unthinkable.

Thinking of Linking

Publishing 2.0 has a sensational report arguing why aggregation is a winning strategy. Based on numbers from the Drudge Report, aggregation revs up both user visits and time on site. Those are good metrics to rev up. So it's too bad virtually all news sites are so caught up in their own not-invented-here walled gardens that they don't dare provide their readers with comprehensive lists of links to other sites–yes, even competitors. Duh!

It's a great read–here, natch, is the link.

Hyper About Local

Howard Owens has a fantastic post up touting local community sites as the future of newspapers and the Web. It's well worth a read, and among other things it debunks the notion advanced in some quarters that the best definition of "community" isn't about geography but about shared interests. Hogwash. The primary community for anyone is geographical–where they live. Hyperlocal sites are about replicating that georgraphical community experience online. 

Anyone who questions that people are interested in talking about their communities hasn't dug in to the plethora of listservs, Yahoo groups and organization sites that already provide coverage of many local communities. The trick is to find a way to create a portal site (I know--"portal" is a dirty word from the bad ol' '90s, but it's the best description) that ties together all those local interests in a locally focused destination site, mixed in with calendars, social tools and many other elements. Nobody's really cracked the code on hyperlocal yet, but there are a lot of interesting efforts out there–and there are a lot of local advertisers looking for those sorts of venues to reach their local markets.

Howard, in his role as Gatehouse's digital wizard, just launched a very interesting hyperlocal effort, The Batavian, serving Batavia, N.Y.–basically, an online equivalent of a good community paper, minus the printing press but with lots of Web 2.0 goodness. At the moment, it's sort of a glorified community blog (it needs more photos out front, for one thing), but Howard promises more to come. It's a very interesting effort by a traditional publisher to launch a local publication in a new market, sans the printing and distribution expenses. (Its antecedent, in many ways, is Morris Communications' pioneering print-free hyperlocal site, Bluffton Today.) It will be interesting to see how The Batavian develops, and whether Gatehouse will launch similar products in other communities to tap into the power of local information and discussion (and advertising).

Incidentally, I don't meant to dismiss Web sites and products aimed at non-geographic communities--I'm on record as loving niche products like Gannett's "moms" sites, for instance. But local is a community, too, with passionate interests that cry out to be served. And there's real magic, I think, in combining the two ideas and building local niche sites, as Gannett is doing. There's not nearly enough activity in that space. But at least efforts like The Batavian show that some publishers are willing to launch some innovative experiments in an effort to break out of the industry's malaise.

Patching the Leaking Lifeboat

Newspaper Web sites, the theory goes, are the future of the industry. Sometime in the next few years, newspapers will make a transition to the Web, and the online business will pay the bills the print business once paid. Print will become the secondary product. A lot of us have been predicting this for years.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be quite working out that way. Seen the latest revenue numbers? Online newspaper revenue has stagnated, at best. Print revenue continues to tumble. The bridge to the future appears to be lengthening, if not crumbling. The lifeboat has sprung a leak.

And why? Well, frankly, a lot of it can be traced to a simple problem: Most newspaper Web sites just aren't very good.

Yep, that's what I said. I don't mean to denigrate the thousands of newspaper Web producers, editors, designers and programmers who are working their butts off every day to put out online versions of their printed newspapers. But that's the problem: They're usually putting out online versions of printed papers. They're still pasting newspapers onto a screen–and the state of the online art has moved way past that.

Spend some time with an online newspaper–and compare it to leading Web sites–and you know what I mean. Most newspaper Web sites have a gazillion links on the home page; the eye has no idea where to look. They're ugly, overstuffed and foreboding. They're trying to do way too much. The most successful Web sites, by comparison, usually are minimalist, and designed for quick scanning and visiting. Believe me, there's no fast read when the "National News" header on a newspaper Web site sits atop 10 or 20 small-type headlines. Snore.

There's more: Newspaper Web sites still are organized like, well, newspapers. They follow the traditional News/Sports/Local/Features model from print. That's not a bad organizing principle, but it may not be well-suited for the Web, where readers are used to quicker, even simpler organizational schemes. (Check out Google's home page, which is still all about pretty much one thing: search.) Focus on what readers want, not on how your print newsroom is organized.

Too many newspaper sites still are trying to fight hoary print battles online: Pushing print subscriptions, overhyping the classifieds (newspaper classifieds are all but dead. Craigslist and others won that war. Deal with it), trying to foist replicas of the print paper onto online readers who don't give a damn, running national and international wire stories that are available at countless other sites. All wasted space.

Newspaper sites are too fixated on banner ads and their like. Again, this is a holdover from the print display mentality. Few if any newspaper sites are doing anything sophisticated with contextual advertising (again, see Google) or offering low-cost alternatives to advertisers like self-service ad programs. So they're tied to the declining fortunes of, well, newspaper advertisers. And so the problems of print are echoed online.

Far too many newspaper sites assume that visitors come by every day (or more often), failing to understand that site visitors actually are far more infrequent, and often arrive via search to something other than the home page. Site designs rarely understand or reflect that.

I was privileged to be able to spend the first few months of this year helping to rethink and redesign a big newspaper Web site, Philly.com. We made a lot of progress in breaking away from the traditional newspaper Web site mold, though we didn't go far enough, because of resource and technology limitations and internal politics. But the Philly.com experience gave me hope that newspapers could do something fresh on the Web, particularly because it showed me that there were a lot of people on the print side who wanted their Web site to be better. At this critical time for the industry, it's important to get all the good thinkers together to find new models and ways to cooperate to hasten the transition from print to online.

What should newspaper Web sites be doing to break out of the box they're in and get traffic and revenue moving in the right direction again? At the Online News Association meets in Washington this week, there will doubtless be a lot of discussion of this among the smart people who run newspaper Web sites. Let me offer a few things for them to think about:

Simplify: Knock half the links off your home page. Then go back and knock off half of what's left. You'll still probably have too many, but at least the page will be easier to use (and produce!). And don't forget to put some of that simplified home page navigation on every page–unlike printed newspapers, few readers enter Web sites through the front door. Seems obvious, but too many sites don't have decent site navigation on internal pages to keep visitors around and clicking for more.

Specialize: Decide what audiences your site can best serve, and focus on them. Chances are, nobody's coming to your site for national news or a stock portfolio. Build strong niche products–possibly as separate sites with their own brands–to go after targeted audiences and advertisers. One-size-fits-all ain't working in print anymore, and it sure doesn't work on the Web.

Serve: Be sure that you're providing essential content to your readers. Every newspaper site should have a killer local events guide that's broad, deep and easy to use and navigate. Too few sites do this well. Follow the example of TribLocal and YourHub and others and build a bunch of hyperlocal sites to serve distinct local communities. Do it right (hint: user-generated content) and the readers will help you do a lot of the work of sharing information about what goes on in their communities. Serve advertisers, too: Create products that will attract new revenue streams and diversify beyond traditional newspaper advertisers. This may require major changes in how you sell and produce ads. That's long overdue.

Innovate: Web-savvy companies like Google or Apple or Facebook or Yelp think nothing of jumping into smart new technologies and ways of producing and displaying information. Newspapers...well, not so much. Too often, good new ideas get talked to death, or outsourced to a vendor, or simply poo-poo-ed because they're new. Watch what your youngest, Web-native staffers are doing and using–and find ways to work it into your site. Twitter has been a great example of that: a technology that, while not for everybody, can be a terrific news-gathering and -distributing tool for certain audiences.

Participate: Get everybody on your staff to mix it up with readers. Blogs, comments, chats, whatever. I hear too many traditional journalists admit that they don't even read comments on their stories, much less answer what readers are saying. The conversations about many stories have more value than the stories themselves, to readers and journalists alike. Staying out of them shirks an important obligation and resource. Put an industrial-strength commenting system into place and use it to help everybody on the staff interact with your readers.

Aggregate: "Not invented here" is a scourge of the news business, a reflection of bygone monopoly days. It reflects ego and false pride. Let it go. Use your site to create the best possible guide to what's going on in your market, regardless of sources. Create aggregations of links from rival sites, blogs and anybody else who has information your readers want and need. Make it essential that your readers come to your site first to find out what's going on around them. You can't do that alone–and there's plenty of content out there you can aggregate to bolster what you produce in-house. If you don't aggregate, be very afraid: others are trying to beat you to it.

Syndicate: Now go the other way. Spread your content far and wide. Do content-sharing deals anywhere you can–with competitors, social networks, blogs, aggregators, whatever. Again, the monopoly on content and distribution is over. Put your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible and use it to drive business back to your site and your advertisers.

Deliver: Stop waiting for people to come to your Web site. Go to them. You deliver the newspaper, don't you? Deliver your Web content any way you can: e-newsletters, RSS, Facebook apps, Twitter, whatever. Get it out there (and be sure to include ads!). Syndication is just the start–you need to go where the readers are. And if you must wait around for them to show up, for god's sake get some first-rate help with search-engine optimization and page design.

There's lots, lots more that newspaper Web sites can and should be doing to serve readers and advertisers better and get traffic and advertising rising so that they can fulfill their promise to bail out the sinking print side of the business. But these are basic notions, and they're long overdue.

These are tough times, I know, to be in newspapers–budgets are tight, hiring is frozen, cutbacks are devastating newsrooms and the business side. Morale sucks. But it's going to get worse if newspaper Web sites don't step up and greatly improve. We're not in the early, experimental days of the Web anymore. This isn't the 20th century. But too many newspaper Web sites still seem stuck there–and it's being reflected in their bottom line.