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- The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
- The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
- The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country.
- USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie chart format.
- The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could spare the time—and if they didn’t have to leave LA to do it.
- The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
- The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country, and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
- The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
- The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for.
- The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
- The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
The Jakarta Globe unveiled its new look today. I think it looks great! Far more usable than the previous design. Kudos.
The app economy: a better model for publishers?
The plan by The New York Times to license its iPad/iPhone publishing tool represents a big step forward for the newspaper industry.
The platform, simply called Press Engine, will be used by the Telegraph Media Group and newspapers such as Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Press-Enterprise in Southern California.
The publishers will pay the NYT a one-time license fee for the platform and then a monthly maintenance fee.
This is a great idea since it reduces the barrier to entry for small publishers, while at the same time, provides major newsppapers like the NYT a chance to experiment with a new revenue stream. This could be a viable business model. Just look at the software industry.
The app economy offers an alternative to the pay-wall model that some publishers have adopted. As I was telling an Indonesian newspaper editor last night, it’s time the industry took a page from the software industry — sell applications, not subscriptions. As a consumer, I’d be more likely to pay for an upgraded app with great features every six months. I wouldn’t — and have never — paid for an online subscription.
The real threat to journalism
It isn’t as though journalism needed another threat; there are plenty to choose from.
But the rise of paywalls, most recently seen in the UK’s Times, Sunday Times and Rolling Stone magazine, may be the medicine that kills the patient.
Repeat after me: Traffic leads to money and in turn, is far more capable at enhancing the quality of journalism than undermine it.
Putting great stories, photos and video behind a ringed fence only diminish the overall pool of news in the industry. As David Amerland, an SEO specialist describes it:
“The approach threatens journalists, whose jobs will be the next to go as online news readers dwindle and revenue drops even further. This threatens journalism because it encourages the emergence of less professional services that directly, and more successfully, compete with it.”
Is isolation really the best way forward for news organizations? Advertising, long abandoned as a savior for online newsrooms, could be a viable option in the near future.
According to Peter Kirwan, who crunched the numbers in an article for Wired, an ad-supported Guardian could turn off the presses by 2015. Assuming no increase in the cost of operating the Guardian newsroom and a modest 20 percent increase in ad revenue, freedom could be a mere five years away.
Can newsrooms afford to wait? More importantly, will the audience?
(Photo: Jeremy Brooks/Creative Commons)
The irony and the pessimism in journalism
There were two vastly different points of view in the world of journalism today.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that most leaders of today’s newsrooms in the U.S. don’t believe their operations will survive another 10 years.
The gloomiest: Nearly a third of those surveyed believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less.
The deepest pessimism is seen among broadcast news execs, who are more worried about where the industry is headed than editors at newspaper-based operations.
Strange but true. The medium that helped create the “Now Revolution” is feeling the heat as it tries to keep up with social news.
On this very same day however, support for the news industry came from an unlikely camp — Google.
CEO Eric Schmidt told the American Society of News Editors in Washington, DC that journalism is irreplaceable:
We’re not in the news business, and I’m not here to tell you how to run a newspaper. We are computer scientists. And trust me, if we were in charge of the news, it would be incredibly accurate, incredibly organized, and incredibly boring. There is an art to what you do. And if you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are.
I can’t think of a better way to look at what we do. As Schmidt put it, “We have a business model problem. We don’t have a news problem.”
Nikkei’s content moat — a bit extreme?
Just how far will a publisher go to protect its content assets in an online world?
The Nikkei this month took the extreme (and inexplicable) step of restricting any links to its articles — even to its own home page.
Under its new policy of requiring paid subscriptions, the Japanese financial news publication wants written requests for linking to the site. The Nikkei said the rules are meant to protect the pay wall and to stop linking from “inappropriate” sites that may try to manipulate stocks by misrepresenting the articles. Offenders are threatened with legal action.
Despite its role in the digital revolution, Japanese media still work in an isolated pond, stifiling innovation in news. Perhaps this is best understood in context: The country is home to the world’s biggest newspapers — the Yomiuri (with about 10 million readers) and the Asahi (8 million). Publishers are clearly trying to build a moat to prevent the cannibalizing of newspapers.
Extreme times — and equally extreme measures indeed.
(Photo/Creative Commons: Okinawa Soba, Flickr)
Sanity check needed on WSJ’s iPad subscription pricing
The Wall Street Journal’s pricing for its iPad subscription offers an interesting insight into how Rupert Murdoch is looking at tablet computing — in short, a premium cash cow.
WSJ’s app is free to download but costs users US$3.99 a week. For that amount, you’ll get access to the Business, Markets and Opinion sections.
This is how it compares to other WSJ subscriptions in the U.S. on a monthly basis:
Is Murdoch insane? I’m not sure if I get it; what is it about the iPad that warrants a premium? The cost of production for iPad content is virtually zero for the WSJ — so why is that almost double the price of the physical newspaper?
Clearly, the WSJ is looking to test the market for iPads. But this is risky and runs the risk of alienating a wider audience that the paper needs to reach. The iPad has a tremendous opportunity to connect with new users. So why blow it?
What do you get for $1.99?
What does $1.99 get you in terms of content?
The Washington Post this week started an interesting conversation about what consumers will pay for news on the iPhone.
Instead of building a paywall like the New York Times, the Post is playing with a $1.99 iPhone app that gets you a full year of “customized access and offline reading.”
This marks a major shift in thinking — away from paywall desktop revenue models to the mobile phone, where in the iPhone ecosystem, many consumers are already comfortable making micropayments.
According to paidContent, the Guardian’s iPhone app was downloaded about 100,000 times from December to February. That’s pretty good for an app that sold for $3.99.
At $1.99, the Washington Post’s attempt to find a revenue foothold is admirable. “It’s not really so much about this from the point of view of a large revenue stream, but trying to gauge how our readers react to paying for content,” Goli Sheikholeslami, VP and GM for the digital ops at the Post told Nieman Journalism Lab. “It really provides us with a platform for experimentation.”
So where does this leave the desktop?
Ok, now I want an iPad
I recognize that I’ve been quick to dismiss Apple’s iPad; now I want one.
When I first saw the keynote by Steve Jobs, I thought to myself how lame it was — that really, the iPad is nothing more than a bigger iPod Touch or an iPhone.
I’ve come around to see that there’s more to that. In many ways, it is just a larger screen, but the iPad will give content publishers a new and far more interesting way to distribute and engage their audiences.
So what got me going? This video by Wired and Adobe. Check out what Wired wants to do with its articles on an iPad. Then come back and tell me if this doesn’t get you going.
And if you haven’t already heard, the iPad hits the shelves in the U.S. on April 3. It reaches Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.
Imagine a world without newspapers
David Schneiderman, the ex-CEO of Village Voice Media, has a fantastic piece in TechFlash about the current ecosystem we live in, and in particular the all-too-familiar view of the world after newspapers.
His forecasts aren’t as interesting as his concise summary of the current state of play. Here are the main points:
I find the first point especially interesting. You can’t deny the fact that web editors and producers are counting the clicks, comments and page views that you leave behind.
This is worrying; in the last two years alone, there has a been a dramatic change in the way we write headlines (primarily to feed hungry search engines). There are more lists, more magazine-style coverlines. And all this at the expense of good, clear writing.
The definition of “news judgement” has changed. It’s no longer about what people need to know (and what you, the editor, know), but what people will find “interesting” — the definition of which is vague, but ironically, measurable.
I miss newspapers already.
(Photo/Creative Commons: inju, Flickr)
Finding value in the content ecosystem
I hate the c-word.
Content. It refers to this huge murky cloud of online articles, video, photos, comments, Tweets, status updates, etc. And it’s a commodity without a price tag.
Despite its inherent supply and demand, it’s hard to identify a price or any proper way to value “content.”
In a recent study titled “How News Happens,” the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that of all the outlets that produced news in Baltimore, almost all of them simply repackaged or repeated previously published information.
Of the media that actually created new “news,” 95 percent of them came from traditional media — most of them newspapers.
The report triggered a number of questions, in particular: Is the real value of content found in original reporting — the stuff you mainly find in newspapers?
Let’s try a broader approach. There are three systems to consider, and each has a unique value attached to it:
1. Traditional “gumshoe” reporting: This is the bread-and-butter reporting that you find in newspapers and wire services. It’s the kind of stuff you learn in journalism school — how to source and produce your own original stories.
2. Social news reporting: Value is created in the shepherding of articles and links. Here, personal brands matter most as value is created in the person who forwards, links or seeds the dialogue in the community.
3. Commentary: This is the pinnacle of the personal brand. Commentators such as op-ed writers in the newspaper model add spit-and-polish to the newsflow by “value-adding” an expert view to original reporting.
Where are you creating value in the reporting that you do?
(Photo: U.S. Naval Historical Center. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, USN, Senior UNC Delegate, (left) with Rear Admiral R.E. Libby, USN, UNC Delegate, (center) examine a Chinese typewriter at the UNC Advance Camp)
Newsday gets only 35 subscribers to its news service
Here’s a reality check for media companies thinking about putting up a pay-wall (even though you’ve ignored surveys telling you exactly this) — there’s no guarantee you’ll find the subscriber numbers you’re looking for.
Proof: Newsday.
After three months of putting up its pay-wall, only 35 (yes, thirty-five) people have subscribed to the news service, which costs $5 a week or $260 a year.
In that time, it’s not surprising that the company would have taken a hit on its traffic numbers, further depressing its ad revenue.
Newsday is especially important for the industry since it was one of the first non-business dailies to establish a subscription-based system online.
Plenty of lessons here for the New York Times. But really, are you surprised?
Did the pursuit of the ‘now’ kill storytelling?
Michael Kinsley has a funny column in the current edition of The Atlantic. In it, he argues that people are abandoning newspapers for the Internet not because of technology, but the simple fact that print articles are too long.
The software industry has a concept known as “legacy code,” meaning old stuff that is left in software programs, even after they are revised and updated, so that they will still work with older operating systems. The equivalent exists in newspaper stories, which are written to accommodate readers who have just emerged from a coma or a coal mine. Who needs to be told that reforming health care (three words) involves “a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system” (nine words)?
I don’t agree. Well, not completely at least.
It comes down to this: People are busier. They (We) have more competing activities and face numerous distractions even while sitting at our workspaces. Pings, tweets, new emails, text messages. Arrgh.
It’s not about the length of the article — it’s about the storytelling. Concision has never mattered more. And in this age, if you can’t get your point across before the next tweet comes in, you’ve lost the plot.
In effect, our pursuit of the “now” has killed storytelling. Who cares if a reporter is giving enough “color” to the piece? News is now faster than ever. And in shorter sentences. And connects faster. That’s compelling.
Dow Jones restructures, joins consumer and enterprise units
Dow Jones & Co. is merging two of its biggest business units in one of its most aggressive moves yet to integrate the company under the leadership of News Corp.
The consumer media group, which produces frontline products like the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s, will be merged with the enterprise media group. The latter carries the namesake newswire service as well as Factiva.
This is the biggest restructuring at Dow Jones since the News Corp takeover in 2007. Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton says this change wasn’t driven by a need or desire to reduce costs but to help serve customers “irrespective of platform or distribution channel.”
This is an important acknowledgement of the shift in content consumption — ultimately, the consumer doesn’t care where the news comes from, as long as it’s credible and accurate. The question then: Does Dow Jones still need as many brands as it has in its product showcase?
Do newspapers have to die for news to survive?
What better way to start sizing up the new year.
Do newspapers have to die for news to survive? In a recent article in The Economist, the magazine offered a reminder that the industry is still evolving, as it has been for more than 150 years.
Case in point: the arrival of the electric telegraph in May 1845. Yes, pre-Twitter, news existed.
The telegraph was an immediate threat to newspapers, whose survival hinged on the speed of fast boats, carrier pigeons and express trains. The arrival of the telegraph was thus greeted with the same worries that we have in 2010 about what the internet is doing to the news business.
So what’s so different about where we are today?
In a nutshell (and I know I’m simplifying this), technology has bridged that elusive “last mile.” While newspapers have gone on to flourish post-1845 (due largely to an increased volume of both news and demand), they faced issues with distribution. Social news today — where news finds you — has turned the industry on its head.
The biggest question for news in the “now revolution” is context. Oddly, we’re not the first generation to call for that. In 1891, W.J. Stillman, a journalist and critic, complained in the Atlantic Monthly:
“America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence… The frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition.”
So 150 years and a little more, we are still looking for context. But here in 2010, there is much to be thankful for as new technologies allow us to work with better maps, better illustrations, better graphics — and by adding the voices of readers, a more measured experience.
Context is key. Do newspapers need to be around to make that happen?
