Recovering Journalist

All Or Nothing

On this day of national rebirth and renewal, some tough yet wise words about transformation for newspapers, broadcasters and other old-line media players from Diane Mermigas on the Seeking Alpha Web site:

There are no shortcuts for TV broadcasters and newspapers going digital. The internet's unique niche and scale economics must be adopted at every level of the media business to translate into sustained growth, profits and engagement with consumers and advertisers. ... It just takes courage to jump in all the way. If not now, when?

This echoes Marc Andreesen's similar advice from a couple months ago: You're simply not playing seriously–or succesfully–in the digital world as long as you're still primarily clinging to–and defending–your old business. 

It sounds radical, but to survive, media companies need to commit fully to online products and regard their traditional businesses as secondary. The focus has to be on making the online business model work–not on preserving a failing older model. Until that happens, media companies are going to continue to struggle with the transition–and, as Mermigas and others point out, consistently get beaten by more-focused competitors like Google, YouTube, Twitter, craigslist, Facebook or some startup you've never heard of...yet.

The Dominos Start to Fall

It's hardly a surprise, but the struggling Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last night. Coming right on the heels of Gannett's announcement of one-week unpaid employee furloughs, more cuts at the Boston Globe, the spectre of the likely closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (if it cannot be sold) and a similar fate looming for the Rocky Mountain News–not to mention the bankruptcy filing last month by Tribune Co.–the magnitude of the newspaper's industry's problems is becoming starkly apparent. (See the Falling Dominos list in the right column of this blog for a running tally of the most significant, industry-changing events. I'll keep it up to date.) (Update: Oops, there goes the Tucson Citizen.)

These won't be the last tremors to shake the newspaper business–just count the ads and classified pages in your local paper. It won't take long. There's much more to come. 

Who's next? The Chicago Sun-Times? Lee Enterprises? Journal Register? The San Francisco Chronicle? The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News? A paper or company nobody expected? Probably all of the above, and more. These are dark times indeed for newspapers. The only bright spot may be imagining what can emerge from the wreckage. It's time to look forward, not back. 

To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution will not be printed. It will be Tweeted, Flickred, Googled, craigslisted, and a million other things. Print isn't going to disappear. But a year from now, the American newspaper business is going to look very different than it does today, and some cities will be learning to get their daily news and information fix in new ways. Bet on it.

Doing Journalism Differently

It's widely argued that the mainstream media did a fairly poor job of holding George W. Bush accountable during his presidency by failing to adequately challenge the administration's claims and positions. And it's just as widely argued that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama. Neither position is exactly true, but perception is reality, and those alleged media failings are undermining a lot of the public's faith in journalism at a time when the news business is already struggling for economic and business reasons.

With Obama about to take office, the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact site is trying to get off on the right foot in keeping track of the new president's record. You don't automatically think of the St. Pete Times as a bastion of political reporting or government watchdogging, but Bill Adair and his crew at PolitiFact have carved out a nice niche trying to use non-traditional journalism forms to monitor politicians' words and actions. 

During the 2008 campaign, PolitiFact ran a solid fact-checking service, based on a nice visual gimmick called the Truth-O-Meter, to keep watch on the truthiness of the candidates' promises. Now the site has expanded that concept to tracking Obama's many pledges to change the way government works. More than 500 pledges, in fact, culled by the PolitiFact team from speeches, position papers, interviews and the like. 

Voila: The Obameter. The site rates each promise on a scale ranging from "Promise Broken" to "Promise Kept," with some nuances in between, like "Compromise." So far, with the administration yet to officially start, virtually all of the promises are rated as "No action," but two–Republicans in the Cabinet and more detailed reporting of capital gains–have been scored as "Promise Kept."

This is a cool tool, and PolitiFact is going to be making it available as a widget (several widgets, in fact) so that other sites and blogs can keep track of the new administration's performance, as well. That's the sort of content syndication that should be standard for sophisticated Web sites, pushing to have their content carried far and wide, with branding and traffic advantages redounding to the home site. (Politico is doing a master class in this these days, with dozens of newspapers now signed up to carry its content.)

None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn't follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and thrive.

Want to see more non-traditional news presentation and distribution examples? Check out these two excellent posts from Mark Luckie's 10,000 Words blog, listing a half dozen other sites that are changing the way news is covered and presented.

When Readers Search, Does Your Newspaper Site Show Up?

Almost nothing is more a symbol of Philadelphia than a good, gooey cheesesteak. And Philly.com, the Web site of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is the city's No. 1 local online information source. So it stands to reason that if you do a Google search on "cheesesteak," or even "Philly cheesesteak," results from Philly.com will pop right up.

Um, nope.

You'll go several pages into a Google search on either one of those terms before you find anything from Philly.com–although dozens of other sources, including out-of-town newspapers, show up in the results. Don't like "cheesesteak" as a Philly icon? Try "Liberty Bell." Same deal: Philly.com is nowhere to be found in the first few pages of results about the city's No. 1 tourist attraction. And it's not that Philly.com doesn't have the content–the site has a good Visitors Guide, and it even ran a poll the other day asking readers to vote on the best Philly cheesesteak. Philly.com's internal search unearths dozens of "cheesesteak" hits. But Google isn't seeing it. And that's not good.

I don't mean to pick on my friends at Philly.com. The problem is not unique to them. Try "inauguration" as a search term. You'll have to go three pages into the results before washingtonpost.com shows up, even though the upcoming inauguration (and the resulting tourist crush) is the biggest story in Washington right now and washingtonpost.com is doing an admirable job of trying to provide coverage and information about it. But again, Google–and the thousands of people searching for information on attending the inauguration–are not seeing it.

The problem lies in an arcane but critically important piece of Web art (and science) known as SEO–search engine optimization. Fine-tuning Web sites so that their content is highly visible to Google and other search engines is crucial to success on the Web–and very few, if any, newspaper sites are fully using this important tool.

There are a lot of components to SEO–it includes proper page naming and tagging, search-friendly headlines (watch those local abbreviations and colloquialisms), how a site is structured and how much effort a site puts into getting other sites to link to it (and linking out). There are experts who make a living maximizing search optimization for successful Web sites. It's a growth industry, for sure.

But this is still a little-known skill on newspaper Web teams, even though it's arguably as important as many newsroom traditional skills. As I wrote a while back, newspapers wouldn't think of not doing print promotion or keeping their newsboxes working to collect those precious quarters. But they don't seem to understand that in the Web world, skills like search-engine optimization are just as important to success, and that they need to have those skills on staff.

If you aren't actively optimizing your newspaper site for search–and it's a full-time job, at minimum–you're all but hiding your Web site under a bushel for the many, many Web users who navigate via Google search. When somebody searches Google for a local institution, icon, person or place, your local news site should come up on the first page–if not the top of the results. If that doesn't happen, you're giving away traffic and ad dollars.

Update: More on SEO and newspapers from Andrew Shotland. And a quick overview on the SEO industry from The New York Times.

Printless in Seattle?

Can you imagine the shock that Frank Blethen, owner of the chronically beleaguered Seattle Times, is feeling upon learning that his newspaper now appears to be the survivor of the long war with the Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer? Similarly, those of us who thought Hearst's first big money-saving cutback would be the San Francisco Chronicle are just about as surprised as Blethen.

Hearst's announcement that it was looking for a buyer for the P-I–or else–is another indication that we're in the midst of a major shakeout in two-newspaper towns, as the newspaper business contracts in general. Denver's Rocky Mountain News is on its deathbed, also in search of a buyer that's unlikely to materialize, and some smart people believe the distribution cutbacks in Detroit are part of a larger game of chicken in which Gannett is trying to force MediaNews to shut the Detroit News and leave the Free Press as the last paper standing in the Motor City. 

We'll probably see more of this in two-paper markets like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Honolulu over the next few months. While those of us who have worked in two-newspaper cities know that the competition makes everybody better (and is great fun), today's newspaper economy just doesn't support that model anymore. Of course, newspaper consolidation has been going on, city by city, for decades. We're just getting down to the point where there aren't that many multi-paper cities left to consolidate. The next step down is from one to zero newspapers. And we'll probably see that later this year.

But Hearst left open an interesting door in its announcement about the Post-Intelligencer. If it can't find a buyer within 60 days–not likely, unless some foolish Microsoft millionaire has been hankering to own a paper–Hearst says it will either close the P-I...or move to a Web-only format. "One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print," said Hearst newspaper chief Steven Swartz.

That would be an interesting strategy, providing a big-city laboratory for something that many of us think is worth trying. I'm not optimistic it's going to happen in this case. But Seattle's a great town that's always deserved better journalism than its papers have given it. Maybe a Web-only model, in such a tech-savvy region, would allow for a rebirth that would create a fresh kind of next-generation news product.

The Truth Hurts

Dave Morgan, retiring from writing about the newspaper industry out of frustration with creeping irrelevance, goes out with a bang:

The notion that the purity of newspaper journalism is the cornerstone upon which today's great metropolitan newspapers were built is revisionist history. Most of today's great newspapers were built through achieving dominant distribution in their markets, not through delivering better journalism. Most U.S. cities used to have two or more competitive newspapers. The eventual winner was almost always the one that won on the battle on distribution or advertising, almost never on journalism. Great journalism came later. ... Pulitzers don't make great newspapers. Local distribution monopolies make great newspapers.

Looking to the Future

The new issue of the Nieman Foundation's Nieman Reports magazine, in another example of old-school journalism reaching the stage of acceptance about what's happening to newspapers and the news business, looks forward to where we might go next. Lots and lots of good reading here, highlighted by a smart, concise prescription from Telegraph.co.uk Digital Editor Edward Roussel, who sums up:

None of this will come easily. It breaks a newspaper culture forged over a 400-year period. For decades now, newspaper newsrooms have centered on “going to press,” which has meant pointing all efforts towards a single deadline that culminates in the publishing of a definitive version of a story. Journalists who’ve spent a lifetime working around this kind of deadline often cannot make the switch to the continuous reporting demanded by Web audiences.

Nor are reporters and editors particularly good at interacting with readers. As long as newspapers have existed, editors have determined the news agenda and then rammed it down readers’ throats. Sure, readers are welcome to send a “letter to the editor.” It may even get published. But typically most editors have little interest in an ongoing dialogue. Linking to competitors’ news services certainly doesn’t come naturally to newspaper editors either, whereas it’s seen as a sign of sophistication on the Web. Then there’s the lack of familiarity with multimedia and the art of stitching together text, video, photos, maps and graphics.

And Roussel offers a glimpse of hope for the traditionalists:

Still, the dominant newspapers have a huge advantage over start-up news operations: They are trusted brands at a time when the proliferation of news sources has made trust a premium for readers and advertisers alike. That’s a good springboard for success. But time is running out. 

Essential reading. Similarly, from another corner of the world of academia: Wharton business school professors make some tough suggestions for the news industry.

Update: Still more good stuff, from Matt Welch at Reason magazine. Aside from the over-the-top last rites for the New York Times, this has been quite a week for newspaper industry punditry. Now we have to start turning the smart talk into action.

Somebody Had to Say It

A lot of traditional newspaper people aren't going to like this, but Web thinker/professor/pundit Clay Shirky pretty much nails the current (and quickly passing) state of the newspaper business:

The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.

In other words, there's no natural law that says that the traditional newspaper business model–hire large staff, report news, sell ads, crush trees, smear ink on them, throw on doorsteps, collect some circulation revenue, reap 20 percent-plus profit margins–is inviolate. Unfortunately, the reality may be that it's not that the Web news business model is broken–it's the print business model that's screwy. And now rapidly going extinct. 

Rather than bemoaning that or wasting time trying to save something that can't be saved, newspaper people need to devote all their energies–all of them–to inventing the next news thing. Or, to trample Shirky's metaphor, it's high time for some serious perestroika.

Stage Five: Acceptance

Traditional journalists have been progressing fairly predictably over the past few years through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' infamous Five Stages of Grief, and it looks like a few of them have finally reached the final stage. Just to review, here's how things have gone over the previous four stages, more or less:

• Denial–"This Internet thing is just a fad," or "Craig who?"
• Anger–"Bloggers are NOT journalists," or "Stop linking to our site!"
• Bargaining–"But wait, maybe we can figure out how to get people to pay for news on the Web."
• Depression–"Another buyout/layoff? We're all gonna lose our jobs."

Which brings us to Stage Five: Acceptance. While there are still many journalists and newspaper executives still trapped somewhere in the first four stages, all of a sudden we're seeing several prominent thinkers come to the realization that newspapers, as we know them, may be going away–soon. And they're starting to realize that the world won't end at the same time. (Sudden thought: How dare the world end if there are no newspapers to cover it? Discuss.) 

Moreover, they're understanding just why this is happening–that much of the damage was actually self-inflicted, by newspaper managements who failed to understand and properly react to the threats they faced. And they're starting to think about the future.

Impending doom does tend to clarify the mind. As some of us have been predicting for a while, the one-two-three punch of the newspaper industry's structural changes (thanks to the Internet, mostly), the rotten economy and, in some cases, foolish financial risk, has put many papers on the brink. It's no longer radical to say that major papers are going to die or be significantly cut back over the next few months. In fact, the challenge is guessing which one topples over first. Not a happy game to play, but journalists always did have a thing for gallows humor.

Just this week, there have been three examples of forward-thinking traditional journalists accepting that the end may be nigh, and, more importantly, understanding why and What It All Means:

Former San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein writes on his blog:

The notion that we old media institutions are still the big boys, so much more important and, well, HEFTIER than these pesky digital newcomers sounds familiar: we had the exact same view of things when CraigsList started cranking up at the beginning of the 2000s.

We were up to important things then, too important to worry about this quirky little community, sell-your-bicycle site. Weren't we? Hundreds of millions of dollars in lost classified revenues later, newspapers no longer feel that way. Too late for crying.

Next up, Slate's excellent press critic, Jack Shafer:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

And finally, Michael Hirschorn, writing in The Atlantic about the potential demise of, gasp, the New York Times:

Ultimately, the death of The New York Times—or at least its print edition—would be a sentimental moment, and a severe blow to American journalism. But a disaster? In the long run, maybe not.

This is a very different tenor than most previous writings about the newspaper business, by traditional journalists, have had until now. In other words, there's now acceptance of what's happening, why it's happening, and what it means. 

What's needed now is a next stage of grief over the newspaper business: How to reinvent it. It will look radically different than what we know now, and it will be much more about "news" than "paper." Some of us are already working on it, and have been for some time. But now that the traditionalists are starting to understand and accept what's happening, it's time to move very quickly to figure out what comes next–and to stop mourning what will soon be gone.

The New Media Audience

Tim Windsor posts a shout-out to Don Tapscott's book about the new generation of digital natives, Grown Up Digital, along with a telling photograph to illustrate that audience and why it's different from the audience that most of us are familiar with (and members of). As Tapscott writes:

If Wonder bread builds strong bodies in 12 ways, this generation is different from its parents in 8 ways. 

To wit:

• They want freedom in everything they do, from freedom of choice to freedom of expression.
• They love to customize, personalize.
• They are the new scrutinizers.
• They look for corporate integrity and openness when deciding what to buy and where to work.
• The Net Gen wants entertainment and play in their work, education and social life.
• They are the collaboration and relationship generation.
• The Net Gen has a need for speed–and not just in video games.
• They are the innovators.

That last point is critical. Those of us of the older generation (can't believe I'm typing that!) are really from a different age these days. We're have media and business behaviors and desires that are radically different from this new generation. We're a bunch of old fogeys, horse-and-buggy drivers in an era of supersonic vehicles.

Th members of that new generation are not only the new audience–they'll be building the new successful products (they already are, in fact). When I talk to journalism classes, I tell them to go out and create and build things that they and their friends will like and use–not what our generation wants. We're dinosaurs, and the way we consume media is fading fast. 

Everybody in the media business needs to be looking hard at this new generation's values and targeting products to them–and letting that generation take the driver's seat in deciding what those products will be. Seems obvious–but too many of us are still clinging to what is increasingly clearly past.