Recovering Journalist

Horse-Trading on the Gold Coast

Just when you thought the market for buying and selling newspapers was all but dried up, news comes that Hearst has scooped up a bunch of dailies and weeklies on Connecticut's affluent Gold Coast.

But there's something odd about this deal. The seller is Hearst's frequent partner MediaNews Group. And just a few months ago Hearst announced that it was partnering with MediaNews to buy and run some of the papers.

A hint about what's going on may come in a statement from Joseph Lodovic, president of cash-strapped MediaNews, who said, "This transaction allows MediaNews to manage its balance sheet during a challenging economic environment and transfer ownership ... to a company we admire." 

"Admire" is an understatement. The chummy Hearst-MediaNews relationship is fascinating, with the two companies co-managing some papers and Hearst investing money in MediaNews to enable it to buy others. Is it possible the Connecticut deal is a way for MediaNews to square its accounts with Hearst using newsprint rather than banknotes? And what does a transaction like this portend for Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle, which is losing more than $1 million a week and surrounded in the Bay Area by MediaNews papers? A lot of people have speculated that Hearst's San Francisco endgame might be to turn the Chronicle over to MediaNews–if antitrust regulators would permit such a thing. Will there be more trades between the two partners?

In the meantime, we have this interesting Connecticut deal, which must be making heads spin among the employees at a couple of the papers. Let's review: In March 2007, Tribune struck a deal to sell the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time to Gannett, but that deal fell through because of union issues. Last November, it was announced that Hearst was buying the two papers for $62.4 million–but with MediaNews managing them. Now, as part of the latest deal, Hearst has "assumed management" of the two papers, plus MediaNews' Danbury News-Times. In addition, Hearst gets ownership of several suburban weeklies and MediaNews' Connecticut Post (based in Bridgeport), the third-largest paper in the state.

No terms for all of this horse-trading were disclosed. But MediaNews bought the Connecticut Post in 2000 from Thomson for a whopping $205 million. Wanna bet the pricetag was a lot lower this time around?

It's the Election, Stupid

It's a Presidential election year, about as big a news story as there can be. But too many news organizations still are not doing a particularly good or innovative job of providing online campaign coverage that goes beyond standard print and broadcast coverage.

In fact, it's taken a startup site to redefine campaign coverage in this Presidential cycle. The remarkable FiveThirtyEight.com is providing daily updates of polling activity and adding sophisticated statistical analysis tools to attempt to track and project what's happening among the ever-changing electorate. 

While most mainstream media sites still are fixated on essentially meaningless national voter polls, FiveThirtyEight.com is breaking down state-by-state results to attempt to chart what's going to happen in the all-important Electoral College (the site's name refers to the number of Electoral College votes up for grabs). Poll data is weighted based on the pollster's past record of accuracy. And the site applies tools like regression analysis and similarity scores to attempt to bring clarity to the mass of numbers it collects.

Who's behind FiveThirtyEight.com? A guy named Nate Silver, whose day job is being one of the principals behind legendary baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. (Silver invented the legendary baseball player stat-projection tool, PECOTA.) 

Silver is bringing the kinds of advanced statistical analysis beloved of baseball stats geeks to the Presidential political arena, and the results are revelatory. He's even run 10,000 simulations of the election to try to project the outcome, and constantly changes his probability estimates of various outcomes based on the latest polling data. At the moment Silver thinks there's 17.44 percent chance of an Obama landslide, a 3.98 percent chance that McCain could lost Ohio yet win the election, and a 0.82 percent chance of an electoral college tie.

This is heady stuff, especially when most major news organizations' idea of sophisticated political coverage is pretty much limited to reporter blogs. How 2004. Last time around, ABC News' The Note defined campaign coverage, and naturally, this year every major news site has its own version–The Fix, The Trail, The Caucus, Top of the Ticket, etc. Some are very good. But they're still pretty conventional, especially compared to what Silver is doing. Also conventional: Politico, the much-ballyhooed politics Web site/newspaper startup from two former Washington Post reporters that's quickly become a player on the national political news scene. Politico is solid, but it's still basically a newspaper on a screen (disclosure: I did some pre-launch consulting for Politico).

FiveThirtyEight.com is not the only one exploring new ways of looking at the election, but other good examples are few and far between. A handful of others worth checking out:

• PolitiFact.com, by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, whose Truth-o-Meter is a clever way to look at the back and forth between candidates. PolitiFact is very witty and engaging about holding the candidates accountable for their statements, matched only by The Daily Show's masterful use of videos that catch contradictory statements. WashingtonPost.com has tried something sort of similar with its FactChecker blog, but FactChecker is inexplicably taking the summer off. Don't they know there's an election coming up? 
• Patchwork Nation, by the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting way to try to move election coverage away from the Washington vortex. Based on 11 blogs from around the country, each attempting to represent a different voter interest group (Evangelical Epicenters, Immigration Nation, Tractor Country, and so on) Patchwork Nation offers a different perspective, for sure. But I wish it had gone farther, and opened itself up to blogs and contributions from readers all over the nation, not just those 11 blogs. That would really bring the patchwork map that dominates the site to life. Still, it's a good effort to get beyond the usual political coverage.
• Poligraph, by HealthCentral.com (another former client) does an interesting job of tracking the candidates' positions on health care issues, with an easy to understand interactive graphic tool. You can even compare your own stance on various health issues with the candidates'. Extra credit: HealthCentral has made it easy for other sites to add Poligraph to their political coverage as an embeddable widget. One only wishes there were similar tools for other major issues.
• YouDecide, by San Francisco public TV station KQED, offers a smart interactive tool that both assesses your stands on various issues and challenges your position through a series of questions. It's an interesting approach, and it's also available for embedding in other sites (hint: embeddable widgets like this are a great way to spread a brand name).

Other than that, the list of interesting political coverage efforts is pretty thin. There are various versions of electoral maps and campaign finance databases, and WashingtonPost.com–which should be the ESPN.com of politics but never seems to rise to that level–does have a candidate-travel tracking tool, an issues-tracker (powered by DayLife) that seems out of date (it still lists Mike Gravel as a candidate), and a few rudimentary Facebook widgets (again, spreading the brand).

But FiveThirtyEight right now is way ahead in the election coverage innovation polls. But there could be a dark horse: Google did an incredible map-based site to cover last year's Australian election. If the company has something similar coming for the U.S. Presidential race (with less than three months to go, it had better get cracking), all those campaign blogs are going to look even more like also-rans.

The New York Times, Big in La Crosse. Or Maybe Not

A New York Times distributor in La Crosse, Wisc., managed to convince the paper that it had several thousand subscribers there (pop. about 51,000–pretty good market penetration!). Federal wire fraud charges are now pending against the guy, who is accused of defrauding the company of nearly $325,000 over a couple of years.

But you have to wonder–how did it take so long for The Times to become suspicious when its La Crosse subscriber base jumped from 65 daily and 103 Sunday to 2,781 daily and 2,818 on Sunday? Shouldn't somebody's eyebrows have been raised immediately when nearly 3 percent of The Times' circulation was coming from a small town in Wisconsin? And don't miss the comments on the La Crosse Tribune story, which includes notes from people who fruitlessly tried to tell The Times that something was wrong. Sheesh!

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?