Recovering Journalist

The Chronology of Newspaper-Think

I recently worked on a project that involved examining the history of the newpaper industry's interaction with the challenges of the digital revolution and innovation over the past 20 years. Painful memories, for those of us who were there from the start—we've seen a lot of self-inflicted wounds and crappy executives. And I realized that the chronology of the past couple of decades of newspaper-think boils down to a few key milestones (or is it millstones?) that go something like this:

1995: This Internet thing? Just a fad. The CB radio of the '90s.

1998: Oh wow--we may have missed the boat on the Internet.

2000: Ha! We were right! Just a fad! Phew! All is well!

2005: Are newspapers a great business, or what??

2008: Oh shit

2012: Help! We'll do whatever you tell us to do! Just make it stop!!

It's not going to stop, of course. The change going on right now in the news business is the greatest story we'll ever see up close—the complete transformation of an industry. But unless newspaper leaderships break out of this cycle of naivete and arrogance and fear, pronto, the next entry in my chronology may be R.I.P.

 

More Must Reads

I started to write a post inspired by John Paton's terrific "Old Dogs, New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives" speech last week (money quote: “Crappy newspaper executives are a bigger threat to journalism’s future than any changes wrought by the Internet.”), but realized that John railed against the newspaper industry's self-inflicted wounds far better than I could. Go read it.

You should also check out John Robinson's post asking newspaper execs to ask themselves, truthfully, "Has your newspaper improved in the past 10 years?" Sadly, we all know the answer to that one. And Paton's speech provides some prescriptions for change—if it's not too late.

One questionable prescription: The non-profit route as a magic bullet (er. the intentionally non-profit route). Jeff Jarvis, looking at the implosions of the Bay Citizen and Chicago News Cooperative, pretty much demolishes that wishful thinking. As I say to my media entrepreneurship students, non-profit is a tax status, not a business model. Many journalists have somehow managed to convince themselves otherwise. As Jeff says, painfully accurately, "The problem is that journalists don’t know shit about business. Culturally, they don’t want to." That has to change, pronto, or newspapers continue to get saddled with the kind of crappy executives and non-visionary thinking that John Paton is talking about

Must Reads

Where have I been? Well, let's just say I got tired of saying many of the same things over and over. Besides, other people sometimes say them much better. Two cases in point today:

John Robinson, recently departed editor of the Greensboro News & Record and all-around smart, good guy, has gotten even smarter now that he's gotten some distance and perspective from his former job. (Same thing happened to John Temple.) He's blogging good suggestions on how newspapers can make themselves more relevant to and trusted by their communities, quickly and easily. Obvious stuff—except, as John admits, it wasn't so obvious until he got away from the daily grind.

The great Clay Shirky, who seems to have perfect pitch for understanding, explaining and analyzing the changes roiling the newspaper industry, takes on paywalls, er, online subscription models—and how they're changing the news business in many subtle, largely unrealized ways. It's very provocative stuff—there's too much of it even to pick out a representative quote. Go read it!

In Defense of Jim Romenesko

Who would ever have believed that Jim Romenesko, the ace chronicler of journalism's foibles, would himself wind up the topic of a post in his own blog alleging malfeasance on his part. But incredibly, it's happened.

Problem is, the alleged misdeeds being attributed to Romenesko are, not to put too fine a point on it, horseshit.

If I understand the convoluted, garment-rending, self-flagellating post about the situation by Poynter Online Director Julie Moos correctly (no mean feat), Poynter has suddenly decided, after 12 years of running Romenesko's invaluable blog, that Romenesko has been lifting material from sources he cites without properly attributing it. Or, what Moos calls "incomplete attribution." Here's her allegation, in quotes, of course:

Though information sources have always been displayed prominently in Jim’s posts and are always linked at least once (often multiple times), too many of those posts also included the original author’s verbatim language without containing his or her words in quotation marks, as they should have.

Okaaaay. This is the Web, of course, and information is posted on blogs without quotation marks all the time. It appears Romenesko may have occasionally grabbed a few words here and there and incorporated them in his summaries of articles he linked to, but HELLO! They were summaries, credited to the source and linked to the originating site. Every reader understood that. Indeed, Romenesko all but invented the aggregated, curated blog, and drew enormous amounts of traffic to Poynter in the process. It's only now that his efforts and ethics are being questioned? C'mon.

But wait, it gets better. Moos again:

To our knowledge no writer or publication has ever told us their words were being co-opted. That raises some questions of its own. Surely many writers whose words appeared in Jim’s posts have read them there.

Nobody complained? Nobody? Wow, helluva problem you've got there, Poynter. And I'll speak from firsthand experience: Not only have I read Romenesko's blog daily, nay, hourly, since its inception, I've been lucky enough to have been cited and linked to in it more than a few times. Not once did it occur to me that Romenesko was improperly lifting my words, or anybody else's. As Moos admits, he always attributed his sources—sometimes to a fault—and I understood, as I thought everybody did, that he was providing a summary of my work, and others. I have zero problem with that—it's how the Web works, for chrissakes. And Poynter should have zero problem with it.

It's unfortunate, with Romenesko about to retire from his eponymous blog and move on from Poynter, that Poynter officials have chosen to besmirch his reputation and raise questions about his work in this way. It's a tempest in a teapot, one that could have easily have been handled internally. There was no need to make Jim Romenesko the subject of his own blog, especially after what he's meant to Poynter over the years. He deserves far better. Poynter officials should be ashamed of themselves.

 PS: Choire Sicha's take on this non-story is superb. Ditto Felix Salmon's.

Newspaper Next, Five Years Later

Everybody in the newspaper business needs to read and think hard about Justin Ellis' Nieman Lab post mortem of the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project from 2006.

Then ask yourself: Why are you still thinking about it as the "newspaper" business? Because that means you weren't paying enough attention.

Newspaper Next had its flaws, principally that it didn't go far enough in its "blueprint for transformation." (At the time, Jeff Jarvis correctly carped, "the project seems to be trying to move a big, old barge five degrees when we need to blow up the barge and pick up the pieces and build new boats.") But it still was a manifesto for change in a hidebound industry that was—and sadly, still is—staunchly resisting transformation.

As Ellis notes, even Newspaper Next's fairly timid recommendations had limited effect, further blunted by what he describes as newspapers' "near-extinction level event in 2008" (I wasn't aware it was limited to 2008—it's still going on!). The industry's dire financial problems and the massive staff cuts that followed choked off just about any of the kind of creative thinking about new products that Newspaper Next recommended.

As a result, five years on, newspapers haven't taken the kind of bold steps that Newspaper Next—much less bolder visionaries like Jarvis—prescribed for them. There's been a lot of talk, and too little action by an industry still gripped by fear of change, multiplied by unprecedented financial woes. The newspaper of 2011 isn't really radically different from the newspaper of 2006. Just thinner. Meantime, rivals like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and the mobile revolution portended by the iPhone have flourished in the same period. At best, newspapers are playing catch-up—from farther and farther behind.

Worse, there have been unfortunate rollbacks of the sorts of interesting projects that Newspaper Next advocated, like Gannett's idiotic and ham-handed snuffing of the once-excellent MomsLikeMe initiative a couple weeks ago. John Paton, with his Digital First initiative at Journal Register and now the MediaNews properties, is doing by far the most interesting work in the field, but its results remain to be seen, and it feels too little too late. The time to act was long before Newspaper Next's 2006 manifesto.

Steve Buttry, part of Paton's Digital First team and an architect of Newspaper Next, has his own reflections on the project's legacy; he's disappointed, too. You should also read James Rainey's LA Times' analysis of the Philadelphia Inquirer's ill-fated effort to sell its own custom tablet, which on one hand is the sort of bold move Newspaper Next might have been applauded, but on the other hand was so ill-timed and botched that it just looks boneheaded. ZDNet's "How Not to Launch a Custom Tablet" story sums up the Philly fiasco nicely.

Newspapers, as Jarvis said five years ago (and before), don't need small experiments and test projects and niche products. They need rethinking from the ground up, with every single facet of the product and business severely questioned and cold-bloodedly scrapped if they're found wanting, with creative new products and approaches put in their place. Do you need every single feature you're stuffing into the paper? Do you need to print every day of the week? Are you selling to the right advertisers? Are your readers moving inexorably to the Web while you're still stubbornly trying to keep them on a printed product? (Hint: yes) These are all fundamental, foundational questions that newspaper managements need to be asking themselves (and their advertisers and readers), then truly listening to the answers and acting on them. That's what Newspaper Next, at its heart, was trying to encourage.

Jarvis was right five years ago, and he's even more right today: Blow up the barge. Build new boats.

I'll double down on what I said at the beginning: Still think you're in the "newspaper" business? Then you're part of the problem.

Old-School Newspapering

You may have already seen this—it's been making the rounds over the past day or two—but it's great: A scarifyingly hilarious story in which a group of modern-day college journalism students produce a newspaper the old-fashioned way—you know, the way those of us of a certain age did it back in the day. With typewriters, darkrooms, layout sheets and other antique stuff (they failed to find a hot waxer, though. Pity).

Man, do I feel old. If anybody needs me, I'll be reading the news on my iPad, thank you very much. What is this "paper" stuff you speak of? Now get off my damn lawn, you kids. 

 

Read It and Weep

I wonder sometimes if the people who run news organizations actually look at their own Web sites.

I mean, look at them the way readers do. Use them to find out what's going on, to get the news, to search for needed information. I ask because a lot of big-name news Web sites occasionally seem designed to frustrate readers as much as possible.

I'm not just talking about bad design, endless lists of small-type headlines or site searches that simply don't work, often in comical ways. Those are all sins, of course, and they're chronic. Brad Colbrow added a few more in an excellent post last week, including missing links, incredibly jumbled templates and photo thumbnails that click through to...photo thumbnails. There are other good gripes in the comments on his post.

I'll add a few myself: Pages that load incredibly slowly and/or erratically—you know, so that when you click on the link you want, items jumping around on the still-building page cause you to accidentally click something else. Or how about those maddening 30-second pre-roll ads, not just on videos, but even on slideshows, for crying out loud (I'll bet the stats triumphantly show the item was clicked, but fail to note that many readers are long gone three seconds into the commercial.) Or how about faulty Flash-laden ads or content packages that unfailingly crash the visitor's browser?

There's a good one in Colbrow's post that drives me nuts: random links to vaguely related stories or galleries, inserted into body text every couple of grafs to break up story flow (magazine sites, never the brightest examples of digital thinking, are principal offenders here). How did anybody think this was a good idea? I saw one today that's a really unfortunate howler:

(That's from a Time story that ran on Yahoo, but Yahoo added the oddly juxtaposed link, which wasn't in Time's original.)

These things aren't just embarrassing. They all make news sites harder to read and harder to want to come back to. Readers are smart. They know when they're seeing sloppy work, and with unlimited choices in the digital world, they'll take their eyeballs elsewhere.

News sites don't seem to understand that user interface and user experience are critically important online. Instead, they're rife with this sort of sloppy stuff. That's why I wonder whether the people who run news sites read them regularly. Then they'd notice these things that drives readers away and exert a little more quality control.

 

American Newspapers: Rise and Fall

There's a fascinating piece of data visualization here, done by a group of Stanford researchers, tracing the rise of the American newspaper, and its march west, beginning in 1690. The visualization, which plots 140,000 U.S. newspapers, continues through today, so you can see the number of papers diminishing, as well, over the past couple of decades.

Good stuff, and sort of reminiscent of the animated map tracing the rise and fall of Charles Foster Kane's media empire in the fictional "News on the March" newsreel in Citizen Kane (at the 2:30 and 7:10 mark, but watch the whole thing, because it's great cinema!).

Is the Alacarticle the Answer to Selling Content Online?

Could it be that publishers are looking at the notion of charging for online content all wrong?

To date, just about all the talk and experiments with paid content have involved selling online subscriptions or, on the iPad, individual issues. Makes sense, since that's how publishers historically have sold their print versions. Or, actually, it doesn't make sense, because many of us believe that online customers who can find equivalent free content elsewhere will simply ignore the publishers' subscription/single-copy offers.

We need more empirical evidence to prove or disprove these theories and settle this religious debate, but so far, only a handful of specialized sites have made online subscriptions work, the jury is still out on The New York Times' much-watched Web subscription effort and single-copy magazine sales on the iPad started strong and then sputtered in most cases.

But maybe there's another model: selling content by the article.

Last week, Fortune magazine published a big takeout on Apple—and held it off the magazine's Web site. Instead, it made Inside Apple available as a downloadable file for Amazon's Kindle, at 99 cents a pop. 

By all accounts, it sold like hotcakes, even reaching the Top 10 in Amazon's Kindle bestseller list. Behold: the a la carte article. Let's call it the alacarticle.

The alacarticle may not be the ultimate answer to legacy media's online revenue woes—no one solution is. But Fortune's experience, while a limited sample, of course, seems to indicate that readers will pay by the story, under the right conditions.

For years, some publishers have babbled hopefully about "micropayments," a term none of them really seemed to be able to define. Theoretically, I think, it meant that any article could be sold for a few pennies, but the publishers could never quite figure out how to actually collect those pennies (long-established online payment systems like, oh, PayPal, Amazon and iTunes being just a tad too futuristic for these publishers to grasp, apparently). 

For all the talk about the micropayment idea, the problem is that, even with the long tail, there's not a big market for the vast majority of articles, and too much free competition. Advertising is still a much better bet for mass-market online publishing revenue, as it always has been in print.

But there may be a market for certain, high-interest, high-value articles, as Fortune is demonstrating. If the (excellent) argument against online subscriptions is that readers can usually find pretty much the same news and information elsewhere, for free, then maybe Fortune's alacarticle experiment shows that there may still be specific stories or packages that could be held off the Web and made available as Kindle or iBook downloads, or apps.

The number of potential stories that fit this model is small—they probably have to be major and exclusive—and there's a calculable tradeoff in lost traffic and associated ad sales. But the Fortune experiment points to a new way of selling content that lets customers buy just a story they want, rather than a broad subscription they may not care for. Other examples are appearing as well: Long-form journalism site Byliner is also selling content by the story for Kindle and iPad, incidentally. And ProPublica's "Wall Street Money Machine" investigation was just made available as a 99-cent Kindle download.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because there's a parallel in the recent evolution of the music industry, which found its favorite form of distribution, the album, unbundled by iTunes so that customers could buy just the songs they wanted, individually. The music industry is still grumbling about this, but selling songs a la carte is preferable to not selling albums at all. Maybe that's also true of selling alacarticles, as opposed to subscriptions. It's giving the customers what they want, at a price they're willing to pay. What a concept.

 

 

 

A (Slightly) Premature Report of the Death of The New York Times

Former Oracle/Microsoft exec Dick Brass famously predicted more than 10 years ago that the last print edition of The New York Times would roll off the presses in 2018. Slate and a group of parodists have jumped the gun a bit, imagining a suddenly final edition of the Times. In the grand tradition of 1978's Not The New York Times, it's hilarious. But I'm still betting on Brass' prediction.