Tools of Change for Publishing: Search Results

"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"

Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The whole thing is unflinching, powerful, and nearly every word worth reading if you're part of a media company hoping to survive the current digital environment, much less the shift to the mobile web. It was hard to pull out highlights, but here's a few:

As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, "We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn't give up the idea that we were newspaper companies."

Also an admission of the (in hindsight) classic mistake of judging new ventures using the expectations of the old:

The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because "we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue."

Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.

And some great words about understanding that you're working with a new medium, not just a new format in which to present the old:

You have to have a strategy and you have to be committed to pursuing it. We perceived the Web site as a newspaper online, as a complement to the paper, not as its own thing. That's not a strategy.

Go. Read it now. Thanks to Jay Rosen for the link (via Twitter).

Anderson: "It's All About Attention"

Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title "Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job." The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:

In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.

The complete interview is worth a read.

Tags: business models chris anderson free journalism media

Content is a Service Business

Andrew Savikas
July 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (25) | Listen

I've been a fan of Trent Reznor's music since first hearing Pretty Hate Machine in junior high school, but in the past few years I've been increasingly impressed by his attitude and approach to the economics of the modern digital media business. His release of Ghosts I-IV is a case study in how to do exactly what Kevin Kelly outlines in Better than Free : "When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied." Notice that even though the Free Download option is right there at the top, the $300 "ultra-deluxe" version is sold out (and was sold out within 24 hours of being released).

On his forum a few days ago, Reznor posted advice to aspiring young musicians eager to make it in the music business, and the advice is just as applicable to writers and other artists working in almost any digital medium and attempting to compete with the vast content available on the Web:

[W]hat you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever. [emphasis added]

This is not just about using free digital content to sell physical goods. It's an acknowledgment that what you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying.

Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they're not paying for the goods they're paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download.

This is not new to digital content. Why would the price of admission to see a given year's Razzie Award winner be equivalent to the price of admission to see the year's Best Picture? Because the price of admission is not for the content. It's for the privilege of seeing it early, and doing so on a big screen in a social environment -- movie patrons pay for the service provided by the theater, not for the movies themselves (here's a counterpoint on movie pricing). That's the point that Reznor and Kelly are making: think long and hard about what your customers want, and provide the service of giving that to them.[1]

"But people are still buying content when they buy a book or an album," the argument goes. Yes, they are. The same way that you're buying food when you go to a restaurant. You are purchasing calories that your body will convert to energy. But few restaurants (especially those you visit frequently) have ingredients any different from those you can get yourself at the corner store, for much less money. So it can't be true that your primary goal is to purchase food; you're purchasing a meal, prepared so you don't have to, cleaned up so you don't have to, and done so in a pleasing and convenient atmosphere. You are paying for the preparation of the food and the experience of eating it in the restaurant, not the food itself [2] (beyond the raw cost of the physical ingredients, which in the case of digital content is effectively zero).

This came up during a discussion on Peter Brantley's email list recently, in the context of what someone is paying for when they buy one of our Cookbooks (which contain "Recipes" for how to accomplish specific tasks with a particular computer language or technology, often culled and curated from material and techniques previously published in blog posts, mailing lists, or help forums). I asserted that rather than the content itself, people are paying for the preparation of that content, to the extent that it helps them solve their problems more quickly and conveniently. When you think about what we do as a service business, then it makes perfect sense: readers are paying us for the service of finding a bunch of great and interesting stuff, and putting it together in a convenient package. It's the convenience of not having to find it themself, and the concise package that saves them from having to dig through a bunch of web bookmarks or search results. I didn't buy "Home Buying for Dummies" last year because I wanted a book on home buying; I bought it because I didn't want to screw up something really important (buying a house) and was willing to pay someone to spell out all of the stuff I needed to worry about in one place. People don't buy Jim Cramer's books because they want Jim Cramer's content -- they buy his books because they think it will help them get rich, and they think paying him is a great shortcut alternative to acquiring his knowledge (knowledge, not "content") themselves. These are services, not products.

The recent (and absurd) notion put forward by European publishers to "strengthen copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online" is intimately tied up with this issue of the value of content (and therefore the value of various players in the content value chain, like authors, publishers and the latest bogeyman, aggregators and search engines). Arguing that you need to beef up copyright protection to make sure there are ways to generate revenue online incorrectly assumes that what people are paying for is the copyrighted content itself. People do not care about content, they care about themselves and their problems.

You don't get an "A" for effort just by spending time and money creating content (and you are not entitled to your business model -- you have to earn that money every day by doing something that people find worth paying for -- and they decide it's worth paying for, not you). Content only has value to the extent that someone will pay for it because it accomplishes something they'd rather exchange money for than do themselves -- and when was the last time you said "Gee, I really need some content. I could write some of it for myself to read today, but I'd rather pay someone else to do it." [3] Google and other aggregators haven't stolen any value from the creators of the content they are aggregating -- they have done what intermediaries have always done, which is create new value based on doing for customers what those customers cannot or do not want to do themselves -- the service of sorting through all that content to find the thing that solves their problem. (I use "problem" loosely -- it may be boredom, loneliness, a tax audit, an idea for a first date,...) Again I'll return to Kevin Kelly, who elucidated the role of aggregators in relation to content creators far more eloquently than I ever could:

The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the "long tail" phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The "long tail" is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL) will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it "guided" combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability -- in addition to the other generative qualities.

I love his metaphor of the internet machine ("a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly"), and it's one worth keeping in mind if you think you're in the business of selling "content," because you are probably wrong.

Update: Jim Lichtenberg kindly reminded me he gave a presentation [PPT] on the same topic at the 2008 TOC Conference. Worth a read.

1. Many publishers have actually been doing the same thing for years with hardcover, trade, and mass-market editions of the exact same content at different prices.

2. This is why celebrity chefs aren't particularly worried that doing TV shows and selling cookbooks describing exactly how to make the food they serve in their restaurants will harm business.

3. There are people who do in fact want to pay someone to write content for them as a service. They're called publishers.

Tags: business drm economics free free content journalism media music news trent reznor

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

Tags: disruption experimentation innovation journalism newspapers strategy

Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11) | Listen

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I'll second Tim O'Reilly's reaction to the piece:

This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.

It's a long post, but well worth a close read (and re-read). Though Clay's talking about newspapers, much of what he has to say applies to book publishing in particular, as well as media in general.

More on Shirky's post from Mark Bertils (@mdash) over at indexmb.com:

Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.

Tags: clay shirky containers disruption innovation journalism media newspapers

Tricky Relationship Between Mainstream Media and Citizen Journalism

Mac Slocum
October 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Citizen journalism took a beating last week when a post on CNN's iReport incorrectly reported that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. (The post has been removed, but Google still has a cached version.)

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis pushes through the ensuing cit-j firestorm and redirects the conversation:

It may be a mistake for news organizations to keep begging people to send them stuff. That's the way they think -- centralized, controlling, exclusive. But the better structure may be for journalists to curate the best of what is out on the web. Rather than playing wack-a-mole on the occasional mistake/rumor/lie sent it, editors would better serve if they found the best content anywhere, not just among that which was sent to them.

The core issue here isn't whether citizen journalism works; it's whether it works in association with mainstream media (MSM). CNN goes out of its way to explain its connection to iReport -- with an exclamation point -- but rational explanations can't disentangle CNN's name from iReport's posts. The association is implied.

This is why Jarvis' suggestion makes sense. If MSM editors aggregate and filter posts from across the Web -- including third-party citizen journalism hubs -- there'll be no need for carefully-worded explanations of association. The New York Times is already employing a similar strategy in its technology section, and the Washington Post is aggregating political news/commentary in its Political Browser.

Tags: anonymous reports citizen journalism journalism mainstream media

Boston Globe Spins Off Weekly Sports Tabloid

Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Newspapers are turning to niches these days. The latest example is "OT," a new weekly sports tabloid from the Boston Globe:

The 24-page, full-color, oversize tabloid - called OT, which stands for "Our Town/Our Teams" ... costs 50 cents and will be published every Thursday ... The publication's goal is to provide coverage of professional sports teams that goes beyond daily news ...

... OT joins a growing roster of niche publications created by the Globe in the past two years. They include Lola, a monthly magazine targeted at young women; FB, a monthly with a name that stands for "Fashion Boston"; and Design New England, a bimonthly magazine about home and garden design.

The shifting media landscape has turned the Boston sports journalism market into a game of musical chairs in the last year. Reporters and columnists are bouncing between national outlets, the Globe, the Boston Herald, local television and radio stations, and upstart publications. Boston-based sports reporters used to be closely associated with their media organizations, but in recent years a handful have boosted their individual brands through simultaneous relationships with newspapers, broadcast stations, Web sites and personal blogs.

(Via Romenesko)

Tags: blogs journalism multimedia newspapers niche niche publications radio stations reporters tv tv stations web sites

The Rise of Freelancers

Mac Slocum
September 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Multi-skilled journalists who can handle the rigors of freelancing may soon be in high demand as mainstream media adapts to new forms of information consumption. Former BBC reporter Angela Saini discusses her jump into the freelancing fray:

I was trained by ITN and BBC News to produce, film and edit as a lone-working video and audio reporter. Although I'm one of the first generation of journalists who are multi-skilled in this way, in the long-run it is likely to be the way most of us work. And if we want to have the biggest possible impact on the world, then we need to make the most of all the different kinds of platforms, from the Internet, to emerging digital channels.

(Via Craig McGinty's Twitter stream)

Tags: freelancers journalism mainstream media media

Validators: Asking for Donations to Pay for the News

Andy Oram
August 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

How many ways can content (news, books, movies, etc.) be funded? There are really only a few ways throughout history. Unit sales (treating a movie or a book like a candy bar or a pair of shoes) are increasingly obsolete when information can travel the Internet. There are also subscriptions, advertising, and various kinds of subsidies (a category that also covers academic positions for people who do research).

The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way technical information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.

Tags: citizen journalism community-funded journalism journalism media news

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
August 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

What's Really Killing Newspapers (Jack Shafer, Slate)

Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting--be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans--conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me. A well-executed Facebook presence, like a superb pontification at the bar or a great phone-in to sports talk radio, demonstrates one's status within one's existing social network. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.

The Plight of Politico -- And Everyone Else (Ezra Klein, The American Prospect)

A year-and-a-half after launch, [Politico is] getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.

Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known (Mark Hurst, Good Experience)

Publishers and bookstores are in it for the money. But you, the author, can't be in it for the money - it doesn't pay enough. You should write a book because you believe in it. And that's the trouble: what you love isn't necessarily what publishers believe will sell. If you can find a topic that you love and that will sell in the market, well then, go forth and type. You're one of the lucky ones. [Emphasis included in original post.]

Tags: authoring authors book publishing journalism media newspapers revenue streams web publishing

Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs

Mac Slocum
August 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Alan Taylor, a Web developer at the Boston Globe, hit the sweet spot between immersive storytelling and simple technology with his photo blog, The Big Picture. Taylor discussed the genesis of the blog with Waxy.org in a June interview. Here's a few notable excerpts relevant to publishers:

I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bulldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion.

Taylor's photo selection process combines technology and editorial curation. He selects photos from Web searches, photography sites, and wire services. Then he uses custom scripts to extract meta data and resize images for the blog.

When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

On his personal site, Taylor explains the simple ideas that brought The Big Picture together:

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I'm glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)

The Big Picture brought in 1.5 million page views in its first 20 days; phenomenal numbers for any upstart blog. More importantly, the site shows how tech skillsets and big media resources (those wire services aren't cheap) can catalyze innovation within a large publishing organization.

Tags: blogs innovation journalism media industry photojournalism programmers

Photography Up, Photojournalists Down

Peter Brantley
July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In a Columbia Journalism Review essay, Alissa Quart looks at the future of photojournalism, which is not unlike that of journalists now that everyone has a camera in their hands:

While professional photographers are suffering, news photography and photography of all kinds is flourishing. Citizens around the world can cheaply photograph and distribute images of their own countries and cities, places like Dhaka and Freetown. Citizen journalism projects like Rising Voices teach photography in Africa and elsewhere. Local image-makers challenge both the valor and necessity of the American or European photographer shooting in a foreign clime, a model that has a certain amount of voyeuristic baggage, as the critic W. J. T. Mitchell has written -- a dynamic where a "damaged, victimized, and powerless individual" is "taken" by a photographer who is a "relatively privileged observer, often acting as the 'eye of power.' " Instead, we will have amateur photographers -- some lucky people at the right awful place at the right awful time (Nigerians who are at the next explosion of a pipeline, say). And I hope that innately gifted photographers will emerge as well -- a Chinese Kratochvil, a Nigerian Gilles Peress.

Tags: journalism photojournalism user-generated content

How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

News of a looming downgrade of NYT stock to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's sadly isn't all that shocking. I'm certainly glad I'm not an investor holding any NYT.

But there's something going on at the Times that probably won't make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it's something that's starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it's over).

So what's the Times doing that's so important? They're hacking.

Not hacking in the nefarious sense, but in the original sense of experimentation, and curiosity, and solving interesting problems (as Paul Graham put it, "Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.") How many other publishers are running blogs about their work with open source software? Even fewer are developing and releasing their own high-quality open source software:

Quite frankly, we wanted to scale the front-end webservers and backend database servers separately without having to coordinate them. We also needed a way to flexibly reconfigure where our backend databases were located and which applications used them without resorting to tricks of DNS or other such "load-balancing" hacks. Plus, it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born.

That is not typical newsroom conversation.

But this isn't just about open source software, or even about some developers building cool software to run backend system. The Times has put developers right in the middle of the newsroom. At a MediaBistro event in May, Aron Pilhofer from the "Interactive News Technology" group at the Times (sharing the stage with their Editor of Digital News, Jim Roberts), talked about how the Minnesota bridge collapse was when they realized they needed to develop their own tools to cover the news with the web, and not just on the web. Less than a year later, when Hillary Clinton's infamous public schedule was released, they had the people and the skills in place to crunch 12,000 PDF documents (containing images of scanned documents) through a text-recognition program, on to Amazon's "Elastic Computing Cloud" and finally into a Ruby on Rails Web application providing full-text search across all eight years of calendars.

Just this week, the Times' Derek Gottfrid gave a talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) titled "Processing Large Data with Hadoop and EC2" based on work he'd done on the Times' archives. Again, this is the kind of talk you're not likely to hear at most newspapers (or magazines, or book publishers) these days:

I was able to create a Hadoop cluster on my local machine and wrap my code with the proper Hadoop semantics. After a bit more tweaking and bug fixing, I was ready to deploy Hadoop and my code on a cluster of EC2 machines. For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. Using some simple Python scripts and the boto library, I booted four EC2 instances of my custom AMI. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked.

Earlier this month at FOO Camp I had the pleasure of meeting another hacker from the Times, Nick Bilton, part of the Times R&D lab -- the folks who built the impressive NYT iPhone App.

UPDATE: Nick Bilton points out via email that:

There were people from nytimes.com that were instrumental in building the NYT iPhone app also ... Is there anyway you can add a couple of words that the R&D Group 'worked with nytimes.com' to help build the iPhone app?

If you're worried about EBITDA and EPS, then you're rightly worried about the Times right now. But if you're worried about the future of journalism, and about the ability of established media companies to adapt to a digital world, there's also reason to be excited about the Times right now too.

Tags: digital content digital publishing experimentation hacking journalism newspapers

Acknowledge and Move On: A Useful Debate Format

Mac Slocum
July 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Mindy McAdams tries to kick start a useful conversation about the future of journalism by outlining 10 facts that should not be part of the debate. Here's a select few:

#1. Newspapers did NOT make a huge mistake by giving the content away for free.

#5. Newspapers were a nice business ... However, this is clearly over. It's done. It worked for a long time, but now, like trans-Atlantic leisure travel in big passenger ships, it will never work again.

As we've recently discussed, book publishers would be well served by a similar debate format -- i.e. put away past models and current fears so you can take on the issues and opportunities at hand.

Tags: digital digital content digital transition future of book publishing journalism

Downward Slide Continues for Newspaper Revenue

Peter Brantley
June 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The news, for newspapers, is monotonically downwards. From the New York Times:

On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

Tags: advertising content journalism newspapers revenue

The Rise of "Found" Media

Peter Brantley
May 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Alissa Quart's editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review compares "Lost Media" (magazines, newspapers) with "Found Media" (blogs, Web efforts, etc.), and how different generations interpret journalism's current standing:

Right now, journalism is more or less divided into two camps, which I will call Lost Media and Found Media. I went to the Nieman conference partially because I wanted to see how the forces creating this new division are affecting and afflicting the Lost Media world that I love best, not on the institutional level, but for reporters and writers themselves.

To be a Found Media journalist or pundit, one need not be elite, expert, or trained; one must simply produce punchy intellectual property that is in conversation with groups of other citizens. Found Media-ites don't tend to go to editors for approval, but rather to their readers and to their blog community. In many cases, they disdain the old models, particularly newspapers, which they see as having calcified over the decades, and, according to generally youthful Found Media logic, in deep need of a re-think, using all of youth's advantages: time and the ability to instantly summon a crowd. For Found Media's young journalists and bloggers, the attitude toward our craft tends not to be one of mourning for the ashram gone. Rather, it is of not needing a guru at all.

Tags: blogs journalism magazines media newspapers

Glimmer of Positivity in Media Industry Analysis

Mac Slocum
May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

A handful of recent media industry reports inject a small but noticeable degree of optimism into their examinations of the current business landscape.

Lauren Rich Fine of Kent State University tells the The Economist that adaptation could guide certain types of newspapers through the industry's rough transition:

Ms Fine also points out that although all newspapers are being buffeted by the internet, their ability to respond will probably depend on whether their audiences are national, metropolitan or local. The first category can afford to invest in distinctive international or business coverage, while the last can prosper by becoming “more intensely local”. But she fears for the big metropolitan newspapers, which may find themselves trapped in the middle.

Fine's analysis doesn't benefit medium-sized papers, but the prospect of success at large and small papers is a shift from typical declarations of "all" newspapers dying.

On the broadcast side, NBC co-chairman Ben Silverman says TV shows will need to exist on multiple platforms to succeed, and variations across formats have to be distinct. From TVWeek:

"Around our new offerings there will literally be shows that end on air and the last scene will continue online," Silverman said at the recent TelevisionWeek Upfront Summit.

Rather than feebly slapping Band-Aids on the established system, Silverman's comments suggest an acceptance -- and an embrace -- of the industry's position. This is a perspective shared by Wired editor Chris Anderson, who, in a recent talk, said the media industry needs to examine the current environment and then find ways to add value. From Journalism.co.uk:

"... we need to do something that the internet has not either not already done or done too well, that may be original reporting, maybe it's investigative reporting. Maybe it's long form narrative; maybe it's the packaging of stories with photography and diagrams ... That's basically our mission, I think, to figure out where the market failure is in the amateur internet and there in lies the commercial opportunity for us to do something that still has value and which people will pay for, either directly or in terms of their attention, which can be monetised through advertising.

On first glance it would seem that newspapers and broadcasters are in a different digital realm than book publishers, but as we've seen time and again, a development in one part of the media landscape often pops up elsewhere. There's also much to be said for a positive outlook in an uncertain environment.

Tags: book publishing broadcast journalism media media industry newspapers online print

Newspaper Circulation Falls to WWII Levels

Peter Brantley
April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Population growth and newspaper circulation are going in opposite directions. From Reflections of a Newsosaur:

Though circulation has fallen back to pre-Baby Boom levels, the population has more than doubled since 1946. If you divide circulation by population, you will find that fewer than 18 out of 100 Americans today buy a daily or Sunday newspaper. Back in 1946, 36% of the population bought a daily paper and 31% took a Sunday edition.

Tags: circulation journalism newspapers publishing

The Inertia of Digital Turf Wars

Mac Slocum
April 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Two recent news stories touch upon a core question in the conflict between established businesses and digital creators: what's the point of a turf war when the turf keeps shifting?

First up is a New York Times story that examines the murky relationship between professional sports teams, bloggers and multimedia coverage:

Mike Fannin, the president of the Associated Press Sports Editors and the managing editor for sports and features at the Kansas City Star, said the dispute was the result of traditional news organizations redefining themselves in a changing technological environment.

"Ten years ago newspapers weren't in the world of video and audio," he said. "We were in the world of print. The leagues don’t have a print product. Their view of this is that we entered their world."

That is one point both sides agree on. "I'm all for selling newspapers and magazines," said Bob DuPuy, the president of M.L.B. "What I'm not for is them branching off in to other enterprises."

The second story comes from the publishing world. Author JK Rowling and Warner Bros. sued to block publication of the Harry Potter Lexicon, a book derived from Steven Van Ark's Harry Potter fan site. From the Associated Press:

The author and her lawyers said they were stirred to action by the proposal to move the Potter lexicon from the anything-goes Web, where it was available for free, into book form, where it would compete directly with a Potter encyclopedia that Rowling plans to write herself.

In short, by deciding to sell his material, Vander Ark was stepping across a line. He was no longer just an enthusiastic fan, but a professional and potential competitor -- fair game for the lawyers.

The conflict between digital envelope pushers and traditional businesses will take years to subside (or move on to a new skirmish on a new platform). But isn't there a better way? Rather than throwing huge resources at lawsuits and posturing, especially when you're confronting a gray area, why not allocate some of that time, energy and money toward trial runs and acquisitions? Digital initiatives don't require abandonment of established business models, and the knowledge gleaned from experimentation -- knowledge that could lead to new revenue -- is far more useful than a turf war.

Tags: business content digital digital content digital delivery journalism publishing

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Entries tagged with “journalism” from Tools of Change for Publishing