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How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?

February 15, 2009 /

In October, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media critic, rounded up the opinions of a few practitioners. Some bravely took the blame (“We all failed,” ventured cnbc’s Charlie Gasparino), but the majority chose to blame the audience: “If we had written stories in late 2000 saying this whole thing’s going to collapse,” said Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer, “people would have said, ‘Ha ha, maybe,’ and gone about their business.” Ditto Marcus Brauchli, a top Wall Street Journal editor during the bubble before taking over last July as executive editor of the Washington Post: “I regret that when I was at the Journal, we didn’t keep the focus on some of these questions, including the possible moral hazard posed by the structure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are really difficult issues to convey to a popular audience.”

Full Story: Mother Jones

Much more to it than this exceprt – this is mandatory reading.

(via Jay Rosen

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New York Times article skimmer

February 15, 2009 /

The New York Times has a very nice “article skimmer” prototype up. Basically, it’s an easy to scan grid of each major section of the news paper.

Newspaper and magazine web sites are notoriously bad at designing readable front pages, so this is a welcome alternative.

(via Steven Walling)

Ethan Zuckerman wrote about the problem of the NYT’s online front page here.

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Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the rest of the industry

February 11, 2009 /

1) Show Hearst the door
2) Assemble a local ownership group
3) Kill the print edition
4) Bring in a top technologist
5) Bring in a top Internet executive
6) Supplement salaried reporters with paid community bloggers
7) Automate the advertising process
8) Keep the globe
9) Resurrect the print edition
10) Act quickly

Sounds good, but as previously noted there’s some serious caveats. Maybe switching to a weekly paper to start with (a la the Portland Tribune) rather than killing it off and then resurrecting it would be a better approach.

But having smart tech and ‘net folks running the show is key, as is automated contextual advertising.

Here’s another idea: sell an archive of Nirvana coverage through Lulu.

Online only Seattle PI could employ 10 reporters at best says Glenn Fleishman

February 11, 2009 /

If they could sell several ads per page and sell every single page view they offer, they might be able to generate something on the order of $10 per page per thousand views, or $450,000 per month—$5.4 million per year. (Niche sites can charge more. My Wi-Fi site once had about an $80 CPM when you added up all the ads spots on a page; the more general you get, the far lower the ad rates.)

That’s a reasonable amount of money, but no site sells all its inventory when they have that much to offer; the current ad climate is poor; and $10 per page might be too high an estimate.

Assuming a more reasonable set of assumptions, let’s say that the P-I could pull in the equivalent of $1.5 million per year starting on its first Web-only day from all ad efforts, including sponsorships, advertorial, and other relationships.

That’s enough for a publisher, a handful of back-office folks (programmers, administrative staff), and, with middling salaries and benefits, maybe 10 actual reporters who also act as videographers and podcasters. A lot of functions, including legal, would have to be outsourced. This also sidesteps any union issues the P-I would face in the transition.

Full Story: Publicola

(via Jay Rosen)

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New revenue sources for professional news media outlets

February 10, 2009 /

As promised, here are some ideas for new business models for professional journalism. This is geared towards established companies rather than start-ups.

I’m ignoring established revenue streams. Not necessarily because I don’t think they can’t work, but because I’m trying to focus on new ideas. I don’t necessarily think the following ideas can successfully support massive newsrooms on their own – but they could certainly bring in additional revenue. Think of this as a proof of concept that there’s room for innovation in news media business models.

Leverage archives and brand

What do the established media companies have that upstart online companies and bloggers don’t? Massive archives of content – decades of material. How can this be leveraged to make more money and fund the newsrooms producing new content?

The other thing established newspapers and magazines have is a recognizable brand. More on that later.

Idea # 1: Provide business information services – compete with LexisNexis

I don’t know exactly how LexisNexis works. I assume they license archives from the New York Times and others. So this is already a revenue stream for the papers who sell content to Nexis.

But what if they fired the middleman and expanded their offerings? Gannet, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post Company, and a few other companies could find ways to offer a lot of value. The Time’s open search API is interesting, and the possible start of “newspapers as platforms.”

They’d have to compete head-on with Google (I assume Nexis already is) to provide premium business with premium access programs and meaningful search systems. Business intelligence companies might be good acquisition targets. The key to success here will be not in just dumping tons of raw data on companies, but finding unique and useful ways to sort it and find value in it. Which is exactly what newspapers are supposed to be doing for the public.

There’s a conflict of interest potential here, but I’m not sure having a few big “business information service” clients is any worse a conflict than having a few big advertisers.

Idea # 2: Offer archival material – maybe personalized

Time has a publicly accessible online archive of all their articles all the way back to their beginnings in 1923, including covers. This seems really smart since they can run ads on all these millions of pages (I don’t know if they make more than way than by selling to Nexus and similar databases, or if offering everything up for free like that prohibits them from also selling to databases). They also have special collections based around particular themes or people, like World War II and Johnn Lennon.

The New Yorker sells a DVD of their complete archives. I don’t know if there’s any sort of topical sorting features on the DVD to help you find stuff based around a theme.

But here’s an idea: Couldn’t Time, The New Yorker, and any other magazine or newspaper with sufficiently deep and archives and quality content sell hard cover commemorative books and/or slipcase editions on topics of special interest to collectors (like WWII, John Lennon, JFK, Marilyn Monroe). Books of photos, stories, covers, etc.

I’m sure a few such thing already exist, but it seems there could be quite a market for such products.

When Time published their archives my friend and Buckminster Fuller historian Trevor Blake went through their archives to read everything they had ever published about Bucky. I don’t know if there would be a huge market for, say, a Harper’s Buckminster Fuller Archive but it gives me another idea: media companies could partner with print on demand services like Lulu to sell special customized archives of material from their archives. Build a simple interface to let people drag and drop text and pictures into a template and charge them a premium for a nice hardbound collection of material. Maybe even let them make their customized books available for sale and cut them in on the profit.

Idea 3: re-invent the online classified

There’s only so much leverage a small local paper or alt-weekly can get out of its archives. But they do still have their brand names. So whatever online offerings they may have will probably draw a lot of attention – the trick is to monetize it.

Papers have been complaining that Craig’s List killed their classifieds, and are therefore killing their papers. I’ve got news for them: Craig’s List is far from perfect. It’s ugly. It’s been years since there’s been any significant improvement (since the addition of RSS feeds I’d say).

There’s plenty of room for local papers to compete with Craig’s List. They just don’t want to have to give the bulk of their classifieds out for free. Why not? Craig’s List changed the game (actually, eBay did even before that), so it’s time for papers to start playing it. Simply Hired and Indeed compete with CL for job listings. OK Cupid competes with them for personals. Cars.com competes with them for auto listings. Get in the game.

Select Alternatives is making some headway here, offering online personal sites for alt. weeklies. The Portland Mercury uses ’em and I’ve heard very good things.

Hint: there are major opportunities in geolocative services.

Conclusion

In short: papers should be acquiring and partnering with tech companies, and hiring innovative software developers. There are plenty of untapped markets that newspapers are in a unique position to take advantage of if they’re willing to experiment and innovate before it’s too late.

How Niche Bloggers Fill Gaps Left by Local Newspapers, Alt-Weeklies

February 10, 2009 /

Tribbett is not the only example of a local or regional blogger quickly gaining power with an influential readership. As city daily papers continue to strain under the pressure of massive reporter lay-offs, hundreds of knowledgeable and independent local bloggers are rising up and finding themselves with small, niche audiences that sometimes provide massive political sway. And as these local bloggers continue to carve out their beats, local politicians and reporters are increasingly courting them in attempts to steer media coverage.

Full Story: Media Shift

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Are newspapers worth saving?

February 10, 2009 /

By and large, newspapers have done this to themselves. Long before the Internet started lure readers away and undermine advertising models, newspapers were replacing editors with journalism backgrounds with editors with business and marketing backgrounds. Journalists were being laid off and serious reporting was being replaced with fluff pieces. (See the works of Robert McChesney for more info.)

I’ve got no particular attachment to Gannett, the Washington Post Company, or any media conglomerate losing their shirts right now. I wouldn’t care if every established newspaper in the country shutters its doors if there was something out there to replace them. But as of now, there isn’t.

Josh Ellis wrote a good piece on what newspapers are for, and in the comments admits that it doesn’t have to be newspapers that fulfill this function. But here’s the real point: we need fulltime reporters with the resources to do serious investigative reporting.

Josh uses the example of Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein’s Watergate stories to illustrate his point. I don’t think this is the best example. There will always be investigative coverage in DC – there are bloggers already making good money covering DC (the Talking Points Memo staff for instance).

Likewise, if there was no New Yorker, I don’t think it would have been hard to find someone else to publish the Abu Ghraib prison photos. Someone like Russ Kick or John Young would have published them, and blogs would have spread the story far and wide.

But what about The Jena Six? The local paper still dismisses the story. It took Howard Witt of the The Chicago Tribune, who spent a week in Jena before writing about it, to get the story international attention. Bloggers brought the story to Witt’s attention, but it was his real on-the-ground reporting that made the difference.

Here’s another example: Margaret Talbot’s coverage of immigrant detention centers for The New Yorker.

Are blogs in a position to do this sort of investigative work? I don’t really think so. Online media outlets (blogs or otherwise) are going to need to start making a LOT more money.

Los Angeles Times punked on renditions

February 3, 2009 /

In a breathless piece of reporting in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, we are told that Barack Obama “left intact” a “controversial counter-terrorism tool” called renditions. Moreover, the Times states, quoting unnamed “current and former U.S. intelligence figures,” Obama may actually be planning to expand the program. The report notes the existence of a European Parliament report condemning the practice, but states “the Obama Administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.”

The Los Angeles Times just got punked. Its description of the European Parliament’s report is not accurate. (Point of disclosure: I served as an expert witness in hearings leading to the report.) But that’s the least of its problems. It misses the difference between the renditions program, which has been around since the Bush 41 Administration at least (and arguably in some form even in the Reagan Administration) and the extraordinary renditions program which was introduced by Bush 43 and clearly shut down under an executive order issued by President Obama in his first week.

Full Story: Harper’s

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Where Did The Pajamas Media Money Go?

February 1, 2009 /

And sure, there had to be operating costs, but running a site like PJM and an ad network is not a massive operation. The staffing model is distributed by its very nature and can easily be managed by 5 key staff and a network of part time contractors. And even if their operating costs were $500,000 a year, with the 50% capacity utilization I was talking about before they’d have a nice tidy sum of $250,000 of profit and $250,000 left over to pay out to their bloggers.

So going back to why this doesn’t add up…either Simon paid bloggers more than they actually made, which is INCREDIBLY dumb, or he’s lying and just wants to focus on PJTV, which I think is probably a lot more likely. Also, the PJM news portal will remain as is with staff to support it. So where do you think the money to start up PJTV and keep PJM going came from? It doesn’t make ANY financial sense to shut off the ad network and keep the other sites going.

Full Story: Donklephant

(via Jay Rosen)

See also: Economy Hits Pajamas Media: Pajamas Media Ad Network To Shut Down As Bigger Focus To Be On Internet TV

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Dan Gilmore on Endowing Newspapers: What Are We Saving, Anyway?

January 30, 2009 /

Seward reasonably points out that we’d be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

Full Story: Center for Citizen Media

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