Newsies: Recapture The Serfs!

Newspapers are being fed feet-first into the whirling teeth of history’s shredder – they’re in at about knee-level now – and it’s making them understandably cranky.

Their final agony has caused all sorts of howls, one of which is that copyright law ought to be rewritten. The villain here is the Dreaded Aggregator, those outfits that make money publishing or searching links to content produced by others.

Links, as in hypertext, is a large part of what makes the internet. It guides readers to content. Money is what newspapers used to make when they had the exclusive on selling ads around their content. No longer.

Now Aggregators sell ads around links to newspaper content and other stories. They usually sell those ads for lots less than newspapers, and they can tell advertisers exactly who got the full ad pitch, when, and whether it resulted in a sale. Placing online ads is often much easier than placing a newspaper ad. And the online audience is defined more by a community of interest than a geography-tied circulation list. Those online advantages – cost, reach, metrics and convenience – have been snatching revenue from traditional newspapers.

The newspaper industry’s posture has been head down in the paper dust mumbling “copyright violation” while the industry’s upthrust rear sports a Kick Me! banner. Aggregators have been happy to oblige, noting that they’re not republishing the stories – a violation of copyright – just pointing to where those stories are lawfully published.

That makes newspaper types suggest that the solution isn’t to figure out how to beat the aggregators at their own game in the future, the solution is to re-create the past. And the past they’re trying to regain never was, but that’s a fact, and newspapers aren’t about to let a fact get in the way of a good revenue story.

The story the newspapers want to tell is that in the past, they developed their audience through their outstanding content that brought loyal readers flocking to become the audience that they sold to advertisers. So if they get Congress to change the copyright laws and prevent anyone from linking to their content for a period of time without paying them, their problem will be solved. Readers will stay for the content, advertisers will stay for the readers, and all will be as it was in the days of yore.

Ahh, those days of yore – when the Newspaper Baron was lord of the only game in town and the readers were bound to the paper and advertisers respectfully paid their tribute. You know, kind of like serfs being bound to the land and tradesmen paying for a spot in the Baron’s market. Or forcing even the serfs who grew their own content to grind it in the Baron’s mill.

Newspapers are fond of saying they write the first rough draft of history. Instead, they ought to read a little of it, especially the success of the feudal barons and other nobility who tried to get liberated serfs rebound to the land and the manor. Or the success of the nobility that passed laws to prevent them from leaving in the first place.

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Here’s a link to Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz calling for a change in copyright: http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/index.ssf/2009/06/tighter_copyright_law_could_sa.html

Here’s a different view from John Temple, former president, editor and publisher of Denver’s The Rocky Mountain News, which died in February: http://www.johntemple.net/2009/06/before-journalists-go-too-far-in.html

And here’s a thoughtful discussion with lots of links by Jeff Bercovici in the Daily Finance at: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/06/30/mixed-media-changing-copyright-law-wont-save-newspapers/

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Weekend Tids and Bits

FLY INCIDENT STILL BUZZING -- It seems the fly unfortunate enough to fatally annoy the First Swatter in a CNBC interview isn’t an isolated incident. The New York Times reported last week that the Obama White House is infested with flies. Sources in the Agriculture Department who requested anonymity to remain employed suggest that any large concentration of manure is bound to be a fly magnet.

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HARDLY AN EXPLOSIVE ISSUE -- The AP reports that a couple of lawsuits have been filed against propane gas companies who are accused of putting less than 20 pounds of propane in the tanks that fuel backyard grills. The explanation offered was that putting less propane in the tanks was a way to deal with last summer’s fuel costs. A quick backyard check here showed both fuel tanks from FerrellGas, one of the companies named in the suit, were clearly labeled as containing only 15 pounds of propane. The real damage is mostly to one aging Baby Boomer’s ego. The old guy had been congratulating himself that he could still handle a full 20-pound tank one-handed.

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NOT HALF BAD --The Guardian reported that an analyst told Parliament that half of Britain’s local and regional newspapers could be shut down within the next five years. Revenue that’s already declined by half gets the blame. Mirroring their U.S. counterparts, newspaper executives whined about the recession and changes in technology. No word in the story of any MP expressing outrage or even interest.

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NO BOYS ALLOWED – or wannabe Supreme Court Justices either it seems. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor resigned from the Belizean Grove after Republican senators questioned her membership in the exclusive women-only group. While the Senate itself used to be a mostly all-male bastion, the current Senate has 17 females, four of whom are Republican. You know you’re in trouble when a Republican Senator has the high ground on diversity.

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BRIDGING THE GENERATION GAP – Actually, maybe floating over it. Polls showing something like half of the adults in America would legalize pot. That lights up common ground between today’s college students and their aging Baby Boomer parents. Both groups tend to be for legalization, although there was concern about adolescent pot use, which would then join adolescent drinking, tobacco and sex on the list of things parents themselves did but now counsel against.

LAST WEEK’S DISCUSSIONS:

n Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana’s porn star Senator Wannabe Stormy Daniels could be a 2012 Republican Dream Ticket at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/gov.html

n The recession must be ending because the political But Birds now have the time for English-only nonsense at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/recession-must-be-ending-springtime-for.html

n The cross-border trade of guns and drugs between Mexico and the U.S. is blooming, so the Customs and Border Protection folk are going to get tough – on pocket knives at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/customs-and-border-protection-cutting.html

n Newspaper consultants are telling their nervous employers that the way to make money in a nation of nymphomaniacs is to open a brothel at http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/newspapers-and-nymphos-dying-newspapers.html

n Why do we need to know whether or not the employees of Brooksville, FL, are wearing underwear at work? See http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/internet-tower-of-babel-informed.html

Happy Fathers Day!

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More Talk, Less To Say

 

 

Communications technology has proven beyond doubt that having the ability to say more does not mean that you have more to say.

 

The old ways of communication were slow and limited, forcing judgments on what was worth a slice of a limited delivery pie. Newspapers had the daily “news hole,” the space left over after the ads. Broadcast journalists had a time slot governed by both the clock and the sales staff ‘s success in finding sponsors. Even those of us who did our print journalism for wire services were constrained by 66-words-per-minute printers.

 

The result was that a lot of stories died when someone said there wasn’t enough space in the paper, or on the newscast, or on the wire for something that trivial.

 

That sometimes excluded the Obscure But Important. For the most part, it defended us all against the Obscure And Deservedly So.

 

No more. The steady clack of an old wire service machine that managed to work a full 24 hours without a break or breakdown could deliver just a tad more than 95,000 English words in a 24-hour day.  That’s about 4.5 million bits in a digital world – or slightly less than a broadband home internet connection can transmit in a second.

 

And that’s nothing like higher speeds now in professional use. So what does this communication bounty bring us?

 

n  From Granite City, IL, comes the news that a man and his daughter were arrested after a fight involving some folks she brought home from a bar. This is clearly worthy of attention because no other fights after bar visits have ever been recorded in Granite City or elsewhere.

 

n  A Massachusetts medical device maker has gone bankrupt, so arrangements are being made to dispose of the nine cadavers it used for training. The knee-slapper is that they were listed among the company’s assets in bankruptcy proceedings, clearly making it worth worldwide dissemination.

 

n  A rural Taiwanese man got bitten by a snake when he tried to use his toilet. And yes, it bit him there, which news helped mankind’s advance in ways not immediately apparent.

 

n  A lawsuit involving a man who may or may not have been deliberately kicked by a stripper after he may or may not have slapped her bottom too hard is clearly an important part of covering the nation’s judicial system, not to mention the behinds of all parties involved.

 

There are so many more examples available every day that it’s difficult to resist the impulse to scream – until you realize that doing so would cause someone to file 250 words on it for breathless (and brainless) relay around the world.

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Newspapers, Advertising

Burn At Adjoining Stakes

 

Newspapers thrash and wail as they are burned at the stake of change. Most were too dumb to arrange for a quick garrote before the flames started, and now the crackle, smoke and sizzle of dying assumptions is the chorus to their final screams.

 

Which keeps them too preoccupied to do some basic reporting and look at the next stake over, where the print advertising business is the unwilling guest of honor at a final barbecue of its own.

 

When it’s not busy holding the most publicized secret meetings since Eliot Spitzer and Friends, the Newspaper Association of American collects data. Some recently released stuff gives details on advertising, the source of almost all the money in the newspaper game.

 

According to NAA’s figures, the value of print advertising in 2005 was $47.408 billion. In 2008, that was down to $38.704 billion – a drop of more than 18 percent over the three-year period. That’s bad enough, but the NAA’s figures show an accelerating year-to-year decline.

 

In 2006, the decline was 1.7 percent. In 2007, that had increased to 9.4 percent and by 2008 it was 17.7 percent. In the first quarter of this year, the rate of decline for print sales was 29.7 percent, and even online sales declined 13.4 percent.

 

While print journalism wraps itself in the First Amendment to cover an otherwise naked lust for the First Annuity, equally profound changes have been rocking advertising.

 

First, if all those print ads are not being placed, it means lots of folks are not being paid to create, produce and place them. You know, the folks in the advertising business. Which in turn means that the advertisers themselves are getting along without those mass-market print ads.

 

Well, yes, there was a severe recession that now seems to be ending, but the betting is that neither mass-market print journalism nor mass-market print advertising will rebound to track with the economy.

 

And the reason for both is the same, although it’s small comfort as they crackle and pop on adjoining stakes. They are no longer needed.

 

Individual consumers want to read only news and ads of interest, but the technology of our past didn’t permit that, except in a clumsy way. That meant herding both news and ads into special sections of a newspaper or to niche magazines or direct-mail demographics.

 

In all cases, the consumer got some of the wanted information along with lots of the unwanted, while the advertiser got some potential customers along with lots of those who just weren’t interested. And both paid.

 

The internet changed that in important ways. First, the consumer decides what interests them and now has the tools to exclude what doesn’t, which goes for both news and ads. Second, for both news-providers and advertisers, there is an instant-feedback loop that tells publishers exactly what got read and what didn’t and advertisers not only what got read, but whether or not that resulted in a sale.

 

You can’t do that with mass print journalism and the advertising that once supported it.

 

So both consumers and advertisers have stopped paying for news and eyeballs they don’t want and can’t use.

 

What, if anything, either group will pay for in the future has yet to be confirmed. In the meantime, if you’re looking to invest in a growth industry, get into stakes and kindling. It’s a booming business.

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Reporting Well Is The Best Revenge

 

Leaders of supposedly competitive businesses who get together and discuss things tempt both fate and the federal anti-trust laws, especially if the discussion is about prices. And if they lead big enough companies with high public profiles, they can probably count on having five business reporters for every meeting invitee.

 

Unless, of course, they’re the titans who employ most of the reporters. Then they can simply not say anything and feel safe from the glare of the media spotlights they own and control.

 

That must have been the reasoning as a couple of dozen certified media hotshots fluttered into the O’Hare Hilton Thursday for a discreet Newspaper Association of America-prompted discussion sanitarily titled “Models To Lawfully Monetize Content.” The discussion among most major U.S. newspaper publishers was so lawful, in fact, the NAA would later say it took place “with anti-trust counsel present.”

 

That’s reminiscent of a couple of young Alaskans who said they used protection, but anyway, the hush-hush meeting’s agenda was said to have an 8:10 a.m. kickoff.

 

James Warren had it on The Atlantic’s web site at 8:31.

 

In detail. With names of individuals and the companies they represented, the topics to be discussed and Warren’s take on the day, including the full disclosure that as a former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune:

 

 “At the behest of new corporate superiors (yes, some from radio), I helped oversee the painful layoffs of about 100 in the Chicago Tribune newsroom last year, before being dispatched by someone the Marlon Brando character in ‘Apocalypse Now’ might characterize as ‘an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.’”

 

A less-sanitized title of the NAA’s meeting might have been “We’re All Bleeding Ad Dollars, So How Do We Start Making A Buck From The Content We’ve Been Giving way For Free?” And a person without a trusting soul might speculate that on the advice of counsel, all the participants were thinking individually, by coincidence and without collusion that “if we all stick together, here we might pull this off.”

 

But that’s speculation.

 

What isn’t speculation is that Warren’s reporting found its way into the online worlds of Editor & Publisher, Poynter Online’s Romenesko, Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, Politico, Slate, The Huffington Post, Gawker, MediaWeek, mediabistro.com and elsewhere. The story even made the AP’s news report, which dutifully mentioned that AP CEO Tom Curley had been at the meeting.

 

You remember reporting. It used to be done in newspapers, and some of it still is.

 

But as James Warren just demonstrated, including to a couple of dozen media moguls who shouldn’t have needed the lesson, reporting doesn’t depend on newspapers. Newspapers, especially ones seeking to replacer ad dollars with content dollars, might hope to depend on reporting.

 

You know, reporting from the folks who’ve been let go by the thousands, or had their salaries and benefits slashed to keep up debt payments or stock prices for the bonus babies at the helm.

 

So here’s hoping reporters will continue to report, but not in newspapers – reporting well is the best revenge.

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See Warren’s Atlantic piece at: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php

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Barn Doors and Newspapers

 

 

Alarmed after finally noticing that readers and advertisers were out of the barn, the American newspaper industry has thought long and hard about what to do.

 

The emerging consensus is that it needs to design a better barn door.

 

Most designs lean heavily on subway turnstiles for inspiration – no pay, no service. It’s a concept simple enough for most newspaper executives to understand, which is a large part of its attraction.

 

Where the emerging designs are weakest is in a nagging little detail – getting readers and advertisers now frolicking in the fields of hypertext to want to come back in the barn.

 

As posted on Poynter Online’s Romenesko, a May 8 MediaNews memo from Dean Singleton and Judy Lodovic to their many minions embraces the turnstile, noting “First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.”

 

Although coming from MediaNews brass, the sentiments are a safe bet to get embraced at other media companies, where doing an injustice has also become unpopular at about the same pace as it became unprofitable.

 

The memo goes on in MarketSpeak, but one quote stands out “To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.”

 

Newspapers are compilations of the news of the day, whether that is a change of government or the price of broccoli. For readers, they compiled events and information that would be difficult or impossible for most readers to match. For advertisers, they compiled an audience, some of whom might be thinking of broccoli with dinner tonight.

 

Both readers and advertisers might grumble, but they paid up because there was no other practical way.  They stayed in the barn, and when they strayed with alternative media or direct mail, they came back.

 

That’s changing.

 

For readers, gathering – and often, publishing -- information is easy, quick and cheap. The old saw “Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one,” is true with a vengeance. Just about everyone owns the means to distribute information widely, which is the same tool used to gather it.

For advertisers trying to peddle broccoli, it’s no longer required to pay for all the readers who don’t cook, or those who do but hate broccoli. Online ads after the first click are by definition viewed by those who might be interested in whatever you’re trying to sell. And if you have your own web site, regular customers will come to you for information instead of you sending it unbidden to them.

 

Newspaper brass should ponder that scribes in centuries long past once had a lucrative trade, since they could both read and write and a largely illiterate population had to use them to communicate at a distance. And then change in the form of widespread literacy came along.

 

Scribes disappeared.

 

Change has come again.

 

Newspapers. . .?

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Back To Top

 

 

Newspapers And Digital Pixie Dust

 

 

If you think the problem with newspapers isn’t the news as much as the paper, today’s announcement by Amazon of the Kindle DX is encouraging, kind of like hearing that one of your hangmen discovered a previous commitment.

 

Aimed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a better alternative to ink-on-paper newspapers, magazines and maybe textbooks, the pencil-slim tablet slightly smaller than a sheet of typewriter paper boasts a 9.7-inch diagonal black-and-white display and a $489 pricetag. (Two earlier, smaller and cheaper Kindle versions aimed more at books, although they included newspaper content.)

 

The idea behind all Kindles is that you pay a small amount to download what interests you and mechanical production/delivery costs for the information providers largely disappear. Since newspaper production can be 20 percent and more of fixed costs, publishers are tempted to jump into Amazon’s lap with tails at full wag.

 

New York Times Company Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., there for the Kindle DX unveiling with Bezos, called it "an important milestone in the convergence of print and digital."

 

The publishing industry buzzed with talk of subsidizing Kindle costs in return for multi-year subscriber commitments, taking the mobile phone industry as an example. And other equipment manufacturers hastened to remind that their own digital reader widgets were also in the running.

 

Now let’s insert some of the “balance” so beloved by traditional reporting.

 

Here’s a widget that costs as much as a cheap notebook computer and has lots less functionality. It may sell as well as mobile telephones that only make phone calls, assuming you can still find any for comparison.

 

Newspaper and magazine publishers hope you’ll stop getting news and information for free from the web and start paying for it on this widget. It’s the same strategy employed by smitten young things who move in with their boyfriends while their mothers wail “he won’t buy the cow if he gets the milk for free!”

 

Textbook publishers hope you’ll stop paying outrageous prices for new text books and buy them via Kindle. Already grumbling about used textbook sales, they know deep in their hearts that no student will ever find a way to copy and distribute the information illegally. They know because the entertainment industry told them it never happens with music and videos.

 

Maybe those hopes will come to fruition and maybe the whole idea of a newspaper, magazine or textbook will adapt to the digital age.

 

Or maybe it will develop that publishers as we know them once prospered because they owned the very, very expensive and therefore rare means of production and distribution. Advertisers paid hefty fees to in effect “rent” those production/distribution machines to reach readers, providing almost all the money in the game, grumbling but quite aware that for many markets, it was the only game.

 

The advent of technology supporting personal computing devices and the internet changed all that forever, and sprinkling digital pixie dust on old economic models does not guarantee that they’ll fly, even when Tinkerbelle is Jeff Bezos and Neverland is an Amazon subsidiary.

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News-Fish In A Waterless Ocean. . .

 

Pale and growing cold as the lifeblood of readers and advertisers drains from them, newspapers are flopping about trying to find the mistake that laid them low.

 

Dinosaurs millions of year ago probably asked the same question, and in both cases, the answer is that they made no mistake, did nothing terribly wrong. The dinosaurs disappeared when the world around them changed dramatically through no fault of their own, and daily printed newspapers are meeting the same fate.

 

Paleontologists speculate about dinosaurs and climate change, but with newspapers, it’s community change, and the change is that the geography-based news community is disappearing, leaving newspapers like fish in an ocean going back to component hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

 

Look at the roll call of the dead and you’ll notice that they’re all tied to a place. RIP the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, the Cincinnati Post, the Albuquerque Tribune and whoever follows this week or next. Like all newspapers, they were of, by, for and about a geographic community. As Wikipedia says, “Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location.”

 

Folks interacted in a common location because it was a major pain and expense to interact much beyond a circle of 20-25 miles. Newspapers fostered that sense of community and fed upon it, telling readers about their own doings and those of outsiders who might affect them. Those readers in turn were offered to advertisers. Newspapers collected from both.

 

There were flaws. If you were peddling cars, you hoped to reach the couple thousand or so readers in a newspaper’s hundred-thousand circulation who were looking for cars – but to do so, you paid to reach everyone. Or you might subscribe to the newspaper because you liked the sports section, even though you seldom read the other sections but paid for them anyway.

 

It was like a couple whose kids were long grown paying real estate taxes to support local schools – they got no direct benefit, but it supported the community. As the folk saying put it “It goes with the territory.”

 

Now the folk ought to update that saying to “There goes the territory,” and with it the base for the editorial and marketing scheme that supported newspapers so profitably for so long.

 

The internet enables the extremely economical transfer of information without regard to geography and forms “communities” the same way. Politico.com serves the political junkie community whether they are on K Street or Kodiak Island. It has a large audience. Click on the web site button it labels “Community” and you’ll find forums about all flavors and subsets of politics, none of them tied to a particular location except incidentally.

 

But as a reader, you’re not likely to find sports, home and garden or any of the other one-size-fits-all trappings of a community-focused newspaper. Nor, as an advertiser, are you forced to pay to reach those who very likely aren’t interested in your product.

 

And if you’re running the place, you aren’t paying for all that content that might or should interest some segment of your geographic readership. You’re just producing the content that you’re rock-solid, damned-straight sure will interest your readership community. Plus, that’s a certainty easily checked.

 

A business model that dumps barely sorted content on a community defined by geography can’t compete for very long with a business model that matches both editorial and advertising content to interest-defined communities.

 

Maybe some newspapers will adapt and survive, but consider: some scientist think that chicken you’re roasting for dinner is a dinosaur that adapted and survived.  A chicken, of course, is insignificant next to a Tyrannosaurus Rex – except that the chicken survives and Rex doesn’t.

 

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