Death of a Chronicle Foretold

If you want some idea why the San Francisco Chronicle is on the brink of extinction, just take a look at its Web site, SFGate.

It's a perfectly adequate newspaper Web site–and that's the problem. Newspapers have been fumbling their Web sites for years, and that's one reason why the future for the Chronicle, and many other large papers, may be bleak. They've failed to concentrate on building great, useful Web sites rather than merely adequate ones. Satisfied with pasting newspaper headlines and stories on a screen and trying to convince print display advertisers to run online banners, the Chronicle and other papers have been left behind by smarter thinking on the Web. Their cluttered designs are hard to navigate; many still labor under the misconception that readers come to their sites looking for foreign and national headlines rather than focusing on local news; and they've failed utterly to keep up with the latest trends in online advertising and content delivery.

Sure, they've got blogs, maybe a podcast or two (how 2005), possibly some online discussions with staffers, maybe, just maybe, a submit-your-photo feature, or story comments. But where's the aggregation of local content, the hyperlocal and niche sites, the local database maps, the sophisticated ad formats, the aggressive efforts to bring readers into the conversation and solicit user-generated content to augment and enhance expensive professional coverage? You find occasional examples of sophisticated Web work here and there around the industry, but almost unanimously, newspaper Web sites, like the Chronicle's, are adequate–at best. And don't get me started on the amateurish design of most newspaper sites, or the lack of search-engine optimization smarts, social media links, iPhone apps and other leading-edge thinking that's a staple of any good Web company. Newspapers just don't do that.

It's not like the Chronicle didn't have good local examples to follow, sitting as it does at the headlands of Silicon Valley. Yelp is just around the corner from the Chronicle's headquarters at Fifth and Mission. Craigslist is just a few blocks away. Google is just down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. And so on. All of these were founded and thrived in the shadow of the Chronicle until they themselves cast their own shadows over the paper and its Web site, grabbing away local readers, shoppers, advertisers and others.

The Bay Area is the most fecund place in the world for the development of the Web ideas that have helped cripple the newspaper industry, but the Chronicle seems to have been all but oblivious to what was going on all around it. Like other newspapers, it's been unable to break free of its print shackles and think aggressively and wisely about how to compete–really, seriously compete–online. Hell, SFGate could have established itself as the leading, um, chronicler of and gathering place for all that was going on around it in the technology industry (you know, like neighbors CNet or TechCrunch). But it missed that boat, too.

The problem was, as it is at so many other newspapers, that nobody at the Chronicle or Hearst ever really took the paper's Web site seriously or devoted real management cycles to it. It never was given the proper resources to develop, and with the exception of a visionary or two like Bob Cauthorn, who ran SFGate for a while a few years ago, it never really had bold, imaginative leadership, at any level. (A smart friend who interviewed for a top job at SFGate a few years ago all but ran screaming from the building, astonished at the lack of sophistication he found.)

Corporate machinations multiplied the problem. A couple of years ago I had a fascinating and thought-provoking dinner with a group of high-ranking Chronicle and Hearst executives. We brainstormed way outside the box about how to rethink the paper's Web site as a revolutionary guide to the best of the Bay Area, tapping into myriad non-newspaper sources to create a compendium of local news, information and opinion. It was heady stuff, and then ... nothing. I heard later that the problem was that the Chronicle execs didn't really control the Web site; the Hearst execs in New York did that, and they had their own, different priorities. We had the right people at the dinner table, but between them, they were unable to make significant changes to reinvent the Chronicle's site in a way that might have made it a breakthrough Web product. Opportunity lost.

So now the Chronicle, and SFGate, are on the brink. Maybe Hearst can make the drastic cuts necessary to save its San Francisco operation, in what now looks like the best-case alternative to closing the paper. But it's hard to believe those cuts won't also gut the already thin SFGate Web operation. And so the Web site, which should have been a big part of the solution to the Chronicle's woes, will totter on, nothing better than adequate–if the whole shebang survives at all. What a pity.

PS: Jeff Jarvis offers a telling contrast between the Chronicle and Google. And Marc Matteo has an excellent overview of what's wrong with newspaper Web sites.

Comments

[David Israels]

Of all the many critiques I've read about the Chron's coming demise, yours is the smartest and most on target.

Good work.

thanks

[Cynthia McCune]

And to think ... it was just a few short months ago that the Chronicle announced it had signed a 15-year contract on a new state-of-the-art printing plant.

At the time, I remember thinking the Chron's focus on printing plants was misplaced, an prime example of looking backwards instead of looking forward. Now I think it explains a lot.

[Mark Potts]

Cynthia: Actually, the Chronicle's printing plant deal is one of the smarter things it did. It didn't buy a new plant--it rented one. In fact, better than that, the paper cut a deal to outsource its printing to a Canadian company that's building a new, non-union plant in the Bay Area. There's some speculation that the Chronicle is now trying to modify that deal, but nonetheless, it was a good move: Rather than investing in expensive printing capacity (and attendant labor contracts and costs), the Chronicle got somebody else to do it--and is then going to lease the printing plant. Very smart.

You can read more about the Chronicle's printing deal here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/18/BUGDRMF8LJ1.DTL&hw=pressmen&sn=004&sc=240

[Marc Matteo]

This is exactly what I was talking about here: http://www.lectroid.net/2009/02/10/newspapers-could-actually-try-online/

SFGate is just another struggling "newspaper web site" when it should have been a "news web site".

[Beth Lawton, Newspaper Assoc. of America]

The Newspaper Association of America is tackling this very topic at our mediaXchange conference in March. The session ("Better, Faster, More Profitable!") is Wednesday, March 11 in the morning with Bill Ostendorf, Sean Ammirati and Kelly Dyer Fry. (More info at mediaxchange.naa.org.)

[Tom]

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this smart and provocative article. Seems to be telling of the industry over all, and somewhat unnerving for those of us studying journalism, although it demonstrates some of the areas that young journalists should be looking into.

Thanks for posting.

[kdoctor]

Mark: Spot on. Now that we are seeing the wave of pay-content wall ideas, the shortcomings of the "newspaper" sites are surfacing. Your review of SFGate -- what it is and isn't -- should be a primer and a gut-check. Yesterday, I posted on Newsday's potential pay plans and heard from a Newsday reporter with similar take on that woeful site. Ken

http://www.contentbridges.com/2009/02/paid-newsday-parsing-what-it-meansand-those-45-minutes-.html

[Richard Complainary]

The problem with the Chronicle is reporting; they don't. They reprint news from the news networks and from PR talking points handed out locally.
They don't do the digging to develop news stories of their own.
The result is another boring newspaper.
Richard Complainary, Publisher
http://www.complainary.com/

[Rocky Agrawal]

I think a big, big problem that very few people have touched on in analysis of the shortcomings of online news sites is their compensation structures.

The companies that you refer to Google, Yelp and others earlier (AOL, Yahoo!) incent employees in ways that they get rewarded for taking risks.

Newspapers haven't done that in the Web era. If anything, the people who toe the line are more likely to be rewarded than those that take risks and try new things.

The best and brightest wouldn't work at SFGate. You get the frustration of working for backward focused management for a smaller salary and no equity upside.

Even the feeble attempts by the newspaper industry like NCN and CV didn't offer meaningful equity rewards for employees.