Entries tagged with “newspapers” from Tools of Change for Publishing
"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"
Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009
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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).
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009
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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.
Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers
Mac Slocum
May 5, 2009
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The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market:
Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.
There's also considerable discussion about the impact a large-form Kindle could have on newspapers and magazines. Large-form e-readers from Plastic Logic (due in 2010) and iRex (currently avaialble) are aimed at the same business/media-consumer market.
We'll know full details after tomorrow's Amazon press conference.
Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing
Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009
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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.
Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game
Mac Slocum
February 27, 2009
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Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:
According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.
The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.
Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.
Photos from New York Times R&D Lab
Andrew Savikas
February 12, 2009
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Nick Bilton was a hit yesterday at the TOC Conference, and during his keynote he talked about what they're working on with content at the NYT R&D Lab. Nick was kind enough to give a few of us a private tour earlier this week, and here's some photos from the trip:
The Economic Realities of Digital-Only Newspapers
Peter Brantley
February 2, 2009
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Alan Mutter has an incisive analysis explaining why an all-digital strategy would be unacceptably painful for the majority of established newspapers:
Because newspapers on average derive approximately 90% of their sales from print advertising, the only ink-on-paper newspapers that can afford to attempt digital-only publishing are the ones that are irreversibly losing money. Moving to digital publishing is the last, best hope to salvage at least some value from their waning franchises.
But those web-only franchises would produce far less cash than their print predecessors, reducing the value of those businesses by several magnitudes. How much less? A conventional newspaper moving to online-only publishing might produce at best 10% of the cash generated by its print-plus-online predecessor.
This would be catastrophic for any of the newspaper companies that operate today on the premise of selling both print and interactive advertising. This is especially true for the many publishers that borrowed billions in recent years to finance acquisitions that for the most part have not produced sufficient profits to service the loans.
Google Doesn't Have Answers for Newspapers
Peter Brantley
January 8, 2009
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Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:
Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?
No. They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.
So what else can Google do?
We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We've tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours. We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base. We have tools that make that easier. I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamentally solve the problem.
Newspapers Pursued New Tech with Wrong Intentions
Mac Slocum
January 6, 2009
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In a column at Slate, Jack Schafer says newspapers' overcommitment to form and content lock-in led to the industry missing Web opportunities:
From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.
The Inevitability of Newspapers' Downturn
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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In a post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky takes issue with the newspaper industry's slow adaptation to digital and its propensity for playing the victim:
I'd only arrived on the net in '93, a complete newbie, and most of my opinions about newspapers came from talking with Gordy Thompson of the NY Times and Brad Templeton of Clarinet. Instead, what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.
Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine. [Emphasis included in original post.]
800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader
Peter Brantley
December 6, 2008
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iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads:
Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten a rocket boost from the Dutch firm iRex Technologies, which announced it has made a deal with NewspaperDirect to deliver 800 newspapers on iRex's Digital Reader 1000 ...
The iRex/NewspaperDirect partnership will undoubtedly cause some headaches for Amazon.com, too. A visit to Amazon's Kindle newspaper web page shows 28 listings. The 800 titles to be carried on the iRex 1000, dubbed 'Kindle Killer' by some, will obviously dwarf Kindle's offering. Of course, many of them are foreign language papers like Le Figaro and Die Welt. But 800 is 800 and that's good news for the environment.
Politico Expands Content Sharing Service
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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Here's a sliver of positivity from the gloomy news business: Politico's content sharing network has added more than 100 clients since launching in September. From Editor & Publisher:
Politico Network, which makes the political news Web site's content available in exchange for advertising placement, launched Sept. 9, according to Beth Frerking, an assistant managing editor.
Newspapers and broadcast outlets utilize the content for their Web sites in exchange for placing advertisements provided by Politico, with revenue shared by both.
Frerking says different content packages are available that provide between five and 15 Politico items per week. The more content the client uses, the less their share of the ad revenue.
"We sell ads for the entire network and the revenue is based on how much you use, either 50%, 40% or 30%," she explained. "Rather than charging you for it, it works like this."
CNN is also getting into the sharing/subscription game via its recently announced wire service, which is positioned as an alternative to the Associated Press wire.
Report: Wall Street Journal Grabbing High-End Ads from New York Times
Peter Brantley
November 21, 2008
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Silicon Alley Insider and others are reporting on Bloomberg's notice that the Wall Street Journal is grabbing high-end luxury advertising revenue from the New York Times:
As if the New York Times wasn't having enough trouble keeping up with an ad recession and the Internet crushing its print business. Now the newspaper is facing increasing competition for print ad s... from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal ...
... And then there's the stats: The WSJ has a paid circulation of 1.4 million, up 2.4% y/y. The NYT: 859,000, down 5.5%. With more readers, the WSJ can charge more for ads, $264,426 for full page color vs. $193,800 at the NYT.
U.S. News Shifts Focus to Digital
Mac Slocum
November 5, 2008
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U.S. News & World Report is pulling the plug on its regular print edition. From the Washington Post:
The financially struggling magazine, which cut back to biweekly publication earlier this year, now plans to reinvent itself on the Web. While it will publish one print edition each month, according to staffers briefed on the decision, these will be entirely devoted to consumer guides -- such as its annual rankings of colleges and hospitals -- and contain no other news.
Last week, the Christian Science Monitor announced that its daily print edition will be replaced by Web coverage in April 2009.
New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API
Peter Brantley
October 30, 2008
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The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog:
Finally -- and this is the key -- we're giving you access to our Movies search feature, containing all 22,000 reviews indexed by title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords. So, if you'd like to build a list of what The New York Times thinks of Pedro Almodóvar or Lindsay Lohan, we've got you covered. And this is only the beginning: in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out better lookup and search features that will let you call up reviews based on publication date or the movie's release date, just to name two.
The Times also released campaign finance and metadata APIs earlier this month.
Could a Young Newspaper Company Still Succeed?
Mac Slocum
October 27, 2008
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The Internet is usually fingered as the key disruptor for newspapers, but could change also come from leaner, smaller and younger print publications? James Erik Abels mulls this over at Forbes.com
The newspaper industry's cost structure, staffing and share price are based on an outdated business model that continues to define financial expectations. So the goal would be to slough off enough costs to let younger, more nimble newspaper businesses live without the artificial market pressure of year-over-year comparisons ...
... Certainly, newspapers are being battered by massive declines in advertising due to a bad economy. Yet that decline is merely accelerating an ongoing and devastating trend of the newspaper business being destroyed by the Internet. The financial expectations on a younger company--and the staffing and business costs it agrees to build into its organization--may be more manageable than they are for today's behemoths.
Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"
Peter Brantley
October 23, 2008
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Arthur Sulzberger Jr. indicates he is willing to consider radical change to continue the New York Times' relevance in the digital age. From News.com:
Sulzberger would brand this not as a crisis, but rather as change that requires adaptation. "It's important for traditional companies to adopt strategies that enable us to be of the Internet, not on the Internet," he said. "There must be an institutional commitment to engage in reinvention, especially as the information revolution picks up steam."
That's why, he said, the Times has undergone some digital initiatives unusual for the print media business. It launched bookmarking and sharing service TimesPeople earlier this year. Soon, it will launch TimesExtra, which integrates acquisition Blogrunner onto the publication's home page to provide related links from across the Web. And it has also announced an API for developers to work with one of its most popular online features, the "Most Emailed" list.
The Economic Value of Trust
Mac Slocum
October 21, 2008
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Philip Meyer looks at the connection between consumer trust and publishers' viability. From the American Journalism Review:
The best publishers have always known that trust has economic value. In "The Vanishing Newspaper," I reported that advertising rates increased by $3.25 per Standard Advertising Unit (SAU) for each one percentage point increase in the persons who said they believed what they read in the paper. And papers with higher trust were more successful in resisting the long-term decline in household penetration.
Newspaper Chain Refuses to Renew AP Contract
Peter Brantley
October 17, 2008
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The Tribune Company, owner of 10 newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, has given the required two years' notice to suspend receipt of Associated Press news. Tribune's move follows cancellations from a number of other papers. From Editor & Publisher:
The recent decisions to drop AP service follow the planned AP rate structure change, which was announced in 2007 and takes effect in 2009. The rate change initially prompted complaints from numerous newspapers, including two groups of editors who wrote angry letters to AP to complain in late 2007 and early 2008.
The Digital Generation and E-Readers are Tied Together
Mac Slocum
October 8, 2008
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Over on Radar, Nick Bilton from the New York Times R&D group weighs in on the future of paper and e-readers:
A common response to the prospect of an eReader is, "But I love the feel of paper, I love a good book in my hands." I can empathize with that sentiment, but I don't think the digital generation can. If it's not a touch screen, or hyperlinked, or instantly available at the press of a button, then it's not worth their time. And as soon as a reasonable iPod-like replacement comes along, paper won't be worth the publishing industry's time either.
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