Recovering Journalist

What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?

The Boston Globe had a story the other day about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper:

"Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?"

We're going to find out the answer to that before very long, I'm afraid. And it's worth thinking about what such a city will look like.

No, its skyscrapers will not fall, its roads will not collapse, its populace will not move out en masse. In fact, I'll bet that whatever city loses its daily paper–and it will only be the first of many–will continue to be a major city, pretty much unabated. Its media landscape will change, but in ways that may be much less radical than many people think.

Let's think about an imaginary major American city–let's call it Whoville–and its media ecosystem. Today, Whoville has a major daily paper (the Whoville Bugle), four network TV stations with news departments, an AP bureau, an alt-weekly, a weekly business tabloid, a couple of weekly (or daily) ethnic papers, college papers, perhaps an all-news radio station (and at least a couple stations that still do some local news), a ring of suburban papers–mostly weekly, maybe a couple daily–and perhaps a handful of in-city neighborhood weeklies.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? And that's just the traditional media. Whoville and it's 'burbs also are bristling with new media. There are enough local online news and bloggers that Examiner.com and Outside.In each can devote a dedicated channel to aggregating Web content about the city.  Craigslist, Yelp, Citysearch and others have beachheads in the market, offering classifieds and reviews that are especially appealing to younger readers. Local outposts of MerchantCircle, Kudzu and other online business directories and Yellow Pages wannabes target local businesses.  Local restaurant bloggers, sports bloggers and other specialists write about things they're interested in.

Whoville's suburbs have blogs, as well, and perhaps a startup hyperlocal site or two. Just about every neighborhood has some sort of listserv or Yahoo group on which neighbors exchange information. And there are any number of specialty newsletters, Web sites, mailing lists and publications that serve specific audiences, ranging from PTAs to moms to local hobbyist groups. Oh, and of course, there's WhovilleBugle.com, the daily paper's Web site, not to mention Web sites for the local TV and radio stations and the community papers.

All of these media outlets are competing for readers in Whoville and its suburbs; most of them are competing for advertisers, too. In other words, there's a lot more to the Whoville media ecosystem than just the Bugle. And I'm sure I left a few things out (every market has a slightly different collection of local media, of course).

It is precisely this growth in competition that has helped to make the Bugle's financial position so tenuous. Surrounded by competitors that are picking off different audiences and advertisers and offering services for free that used to be revenue streams for the paper, the Bugle has been eaten to death by fleas (some of them very large fleas!). Once king of the jungle, it's now just another player–albeit probably the dominant player–in the Whoville media.

Now let's take the Bugle out of that mix.

The Bugle's owner, frustrated by mounting losses and departing advertisers and readers, decides to close up shop. It shuts the paper, idles the presses, and lays off the staff. (There are somewhat less dire versions of this situation, in which the print product disappears but the Web site remains, or the print product is drastically reduced to perhaps publishing a couple times a week, but for the sake of argument, let's go with the full doomsday scenario.)

What happens? The entire Whoville media ecosystem, described above, steps up to pick off the Bugle's advertisers and readers. Some of the media outlets that were dependent on the Bugle's coverage to inspire their content (e.g. TV news and bloggers) will learn to look to other sources. But there's already a lot of diverse media in Whoville serving local news and information needs, and they'll fill a lot of the gap left by the death of the paper.

Inevitably, a group of ex-Bugle staffers, backed by local money, will start the Whoville Daily Trumpet, a fraction the size of the Bugle but much more focused on the city itself. The new paper will leave suburban coverage to the community papers and be smart enough to not even mess with national and international news that's available in a zillion places. With more focus, a much leaner business plan, hungry ad sales reps and hired printing and distribution, the Daily Trumpet can be competitive in ways the bloated, overextended Bugle could not be. 

Many other ex-staffers will join the other existing media, beefing up their staffs and smarts. Still others will start blogs or small print or online media outlets to cover specific topics. Not all of these will make it, but many of them will, covering things the Bugle used to cover and serving various parts of the old Bugle audience.

Indeed, a year or two after the Bugle's demise left a seemingly enormous hole in the city's media landscape, that hole will essentially be gone. It will be filled by thriving, competitive media that already exist and a few new outlets that spring up in the wake of the newspaper's closing.  The Whoville media ecosystem will prove to be self-repairing, much more quickly than a lot of people would expect. The residents of Whoville and its suburbs will get their news and information from these old and new replacements, and advertisers will use those substitutes for the Bugle to reach those customers. 

The Whoville Bugle will be a nostalgic memory of local life–much like the Whoville Herald, the afternoon paper that closed without much of a fuss a generation ago, or the Whoville Daily News, which quietly bit the dust a generation before that. The Bugle will be toasted at annual reunions of the staff and remembered in dusty collections at the library and historical society, but it will soon be seen as yesteryears' news.

Let's get back to the original question. Will Whoville still be a major city? Sure. It will still have its various corporate headquarters, beautiful architecture and parks, international airport, pro sports teams, a thriving music scene, opera, theater, good restaurants, great neighborhoods and all of the other things that make up a major city. It just won't have its old-fashioned daily newspaper. And sorry, but the Bugle really won't be missed.

The End of Mass

Stowe Boyd has a good post on hyperlocal that touches on something I've said before: hyperlocal has to be a "fully edged phenomenon," drawing from a variety of the hyperlocal models we've seen so far.

But then Boyd segues into something even better: a discourse on how newspapers simply don't understand that their previous model of being all things to all audiences is permanently broken.

What the newspapers' management fail to understand is the end of mass: people simply do not hold with mass identity now that they are free to find human-scale identity, and once they find it, they will not go back. Newspapers and other mass media is falling first and fastest because we are rejecting the erstatz, mass belonging that they offered, as part of the expansion of the industrial Western democratic ideals. 

Newspapers–and other media–just can't keep following the old playbook of publishing for a general audience. The audience is rejecting that model and wants more specificity—products that are mostly useful to them, not mostly thrown away. (What percentage of the newspaper do you actually read, anyway? What a waste!)

Just as the magazine industry fragmented in the late 1960s and early 1970s from general-interest titles like Life and Look into specialty titles for every audience under the sun, newspapers have to find new ways to target key audiences with focused products. Those audiences may be geographic or they may be demographic. But the era of the large-scale, regional, mass-market newspaper is over, as painfully demonstrated by declining advertising and circulation numbers. 

The sooner newspaper publishers and editors recognize that, and move on to competing in niches within their own markets, the sooner they'll start to pull out of the current death spiral. Mass just doesn't cut it anymore.

Drudging Local

As if big-city newspapers didn't have enough trouble, now they're about to get some interesting competition right in their own backyards.

Arianna Huffington has revealed that she's going to start a series of local versions of Huffington Post, beginning in Chicago. The model will apparently be a single local editor who, as in the national version, will assemble the best stories from a variety of local sources–and presumably create or contract for some original content as well.

HuffPost isn't the only one trying this model, which basically is a local riff on the Drudge Report. Very quietly, billionaire Phil Anschutz' Clarity Media, aka Examiner.com, has been hiring local editors–called, cleverly, "Examiners"–rolling out a series of local news aggregation sites in cities around the country. (Disclosure: I worked last year on Clarity's strategy for this.) 

It's an obvious idea, and a little shocking it hasn't been tried before–especially by an existing local media organization. The key is to be agnostic about sources, tap into all of various local online news operations–newspapers, TV, radio, alternative weeklies, community papers, hyperlocal sites, local blogs, whatever–and create an ongoing best-of local news/information, regardless of where it comes from. 

Topix and Outside.In, it might be argued, already do this in a crude, automated sort of way. But what HuffPost and Examiner are aiming for is an edited approach, sorting through all the local news available in a given city and highlighting the best stuff. And guess what: Taken altogether, there are a lot of unbundled sources of local news. The comprehensiveness of an aggregated local news site would dwarf any single traditional local news outlet.

No doubt, the traditionally competitive, "not-invented-here" approach to content will keep existing media entities from experimenting with this sort of local news aggregation. Too bad. Because a one-stop-shop for local news and info is going to be one hell of a competitor for the existing local media. 

When Local News Breaks—Fix It!

There are right ways and wrong ways to cover fast-breaking local news on the Web, and as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, washingtonpost.com is providing a good lesson in how not to cover a high-impact local story.

I'm generally reluctant to write about Post.com, because it's my alma mater and it's run by good friends of mine. But they're not having a good day. 

A serious line of thunderstorms swept through the Washington area a couple of hours ago, knocking down trees and power lines, and reportedly spawning tornados in the area. Local TV is all over the story, with a veteran local weatherman calling it one of the worst storms he's ever seen here. Local schools even locked down students until the storms passed.

But washingtonpost.com has been very, very slow off the mark. For a half hour after the storm, all the site had was a headline at the top of the home page linking to weather updates, even as TV was carrying the first reports of damage. The site has now put up a short staff-written story that's gradually being updated, but it's awfully basic, and not very helpful—it reports that a person was killed in the storm somewhere in suburban Fairfax County, but doesn't really say where. It glosses over the commuter problems and a storm-related shutdown of the Metro subway system, and barely mentions the tens of thousands of people without power. And not a word about the school lockdowns.

This is a scary storm that's disrupting the afternoon commute and has clearly caused a lot of damage (which TV is showing, of course). But the Post site seems all but unaware of its scope, and is handling it in old-media sorts of ways. 

Why not put up a news blog to provide fast-breaking developments? (Ironically, that's how the Post was covering the national political developments last night!) How about a map showing the path of the storm? (TV can do this in its sleep.) Why not put out a prominent call to readers for information, anecdotes, photos and videos? This is elementary stuff, and should be at the top of the playbook for a local media site dealing with a nearby disaster.

The New York Times gave a textbook lesson on breaking local coverage in last week's crane collapse, for which they used blogs, maps and user photos within minutes of the disaster—but Post.com seems unable to provide similarly sharp local coverage.

Of course, there is one place on the Post site that's provided live coverage of the storm: The well-hidden, ill-fated hyperlocal experiment, LoudounExtra.com, which is doing a great job with a staff-written news blog. It tracks the storm in that western suburban county and mentions the school lockdowns there. But none of that coverage is being integrated into the main site. What a wasted opportunity.

Post.com friends: This is a major, fast-moving local story, affecting millions of people in your primary coverage area. Many of them doubtless are checking the site (if they have power!) to find out what's going on around them. You've got to do better than this.

Addendum: I wasn't the only local washingtonpost.com reader frustrated by the site's storm coverage today. Scott Karp's good take is here.

The New Philly.com

When I took a temporary gig as VP-Editorial at Philly.com a few months ago, I wrote that I probably wouldn't be able to say much in this blog about what we were doing while we rethought the site. Well, now I can: We launched the new version of Philly.com this weekend, and I think we've broken some important new ground in what it means to be a newspaper Web site.

To start with, the new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

And this is really only the beginning. As with any redesign and relaunch there were a few things that didn't make the deadline, most notably some social features, which will be phased in over the next few months. Philly.com will continue to grow and improve, but it's already light years ahead of where it was before this redesign. (For a glimpse at what it used to look like, see the screen-grab at left. The change is really dramatic.)

There are a number of people who deserve great credit for the new site, starting with Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who have strong ambitions for what the site can be and how it has to move from simply being a "newspaper site;" the aforementioned Avenue A/Razorfish, which delivered a great design (further polished by Jill Hoover and Jeff Aiken); Jennifer Musser-Metz, who did an incredible job project-managing the design and launch process; and the talented and hard-working production and tech teams at Philly.com, who brought it all together and will keep the site evolving and growing over the next weeks and months.

As you can tell, I'm very proud of what's been accomplished with the new Philly.com, and I'll be excited to see it get even better in the future. We're defining what makes a great newspaper site. Up next: Philly.com does hyperlocal. Watch this space.

Living La Vida Local

What's your hyperlocal strategy?

If you're a newspaper publisher or editor, or a TV station exec, you'd better have one. Because competition is coming fast for your most local business, providing news and information to your readers and viewers and monetizing that with advertising from local businesses. That's your strongest remaining franchise, and it's already under siege. But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Google is now fine-tuning Google News to deliver local headlines. Topix has been doing a version of this for a couple of years. Meantime, upstarts that traditional publishers have probably never heard of—Outside.In, EveryBlock, YourStreet—are doing ever-more-interesting aggregations of hyperlocal news, blogs and data, mashed up with maps, which just scream "local."

It's been more than a year now since Backfence failed, but smart people are still exploring the hyperlocal sphere, and while Backfence's problems were unique, our basic concept remains sound. Somebody is going to figure out how to make it work and make a business out of it, and when that happens, newspapers and local broadcasters lose their last unique offering. If you don't have an aggressive hyperlocal strategy, you're not going to be around in five years.

So where are the hyperlocal strategies? With the possible exception of WashingtonPost.com's terrific Local Explorer product, no traditional news organization is even close to being as advanced as the various upstart efforts in leveraging technology to reach down to the neighborhood level. And there still are only a handful of user-generated hyperlocal experiments by newspapers—notably Denver's YourHub and the Chicago Tribune's TribLocal.

With budgets being slashed, this isn't a good time to find money at traditional publishers for experiments like these. But they're vital to hope for long-term survival. Google and the others are coming for a piece of the $100 billion local advertising pie, and newspapers and local broadcasters need to start competing in this space, pronto.

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.

De-Classified

Looks like we're seeing the first major Sam Zell-inspired move at the Chicago Tribune: The paper is dropping its daily help-wanted classifieds. Instead, the paper will publish "a listing of basic information in the business section every Tuesday" with a refer to the online jobs classifieds. Does this mean they figured out it cost more to print the classifieds than they were taking in? Wow.

In a possibly related development, The Washington Post's "Mega Jobs" classified section this past weekend was so thin that it probably would have better been titled "Nano Jobs."

More interesting Tribune news: The paper has expanded its ambitious TribLocal user-generated hyperlocal project to 21 suburbs, with a total of 35 planned by the end of the year.

On the Whole, I'd Rather be in Philadelphia

My blogging activity has been light for the past few days, and that's probably going to continue for a while: I have a new gig. I'm doing a three-month stint as Acting Vice President-Editorial at Philly.com, the Web site for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

This is an extraordinary opportunity, even though I think it means the Recovering Journalist has technically fallen off the wagon. Despite its brevity, this is anything but a caretaker position, even though I've got a startup in the oven and I'm definitely not a candidate for the job long-term (if you're a senior Web editor who'd like to succeed me, please let me know. We're also looking for experienced Web producers).

I'm going to get to apply a lot of what I've been talking about in this blog (and for years) to a top-drawer newspaper Web site. I've been asked to use my brief time at Philly.com to be a change agent, to upgrade an already good site, to help to rethink everything the Web editorial operation does, to help more fully integrate the Web and print news operations, to help oversee a redesign of the site and to greatly accelerate the launch of many new initiatives. (Many, hell--there are more than 100 projects, large and small, already on my list!)

For confidentiality reasons, I can't talk in much detail about what we're doing, and I probably won't be able to blog much of it as we go along. But suffice it to say that we'll be aggressively deploying user-generated content (is there any other major newspaper—or news—site putting live user comments on the the home page? We've already started doing it on some lead stories at Philly.com, and there will be much more), experimenting with hyperlocal efforts and crowdsourcing, doing cool new things with video and audio, reaching out to Philadelphia's large network of bloggers and other third-party content sources, baking social networking into the new design, spreading our content far and wide across the net, and doing a lot of other things that every newspaper Web site should be doing.

Best of all, I get to work with the talented, incredibly hard-working staff of Philly.com. I'm also fortunate to be working for a couple of guys who have very lofty and creative ambitions for reinventing the Philadelphia newspapers and the Web site: CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly. And I'm blessed, really blessed, to be able to work with a group of print newspaper editors who understand the importance of doing great, innovative things on the Web and aren't encumbered by the old ways of doing things: among others, Bill Marimow, Mike Leary and Vernon Loeb at the Inquirer and Mike Days and Wendy Warren at the Daily News. They really get it. It's amazing.

So that's where I'll be when I'm not here: applying everything I've learned over the past 15 years in the online world (and 15 years in print before that) to helping to build a world-class news Web site. It's put up or shut up time for this knowitall. I can't believe how lucky I am to get this chance!

Crossing the Chasm: A White Paper

My three-part series on the chasm and challenges facing newspapers—and what they can do about them—received a great deal of attention and traffic last week. So I've repackaged it as a white paper, adding some charts, graphs and examples in the process. If you're interested in receiving a PDF copy of the "Crossing the Chasm" white paper, please drop me a note at recoveringjournalist(at)cox.net. Thanks!