Archive for March, 2009

Hmmm. InDenverTimes, the digital-only “replacement” for the dearly departed Rocky Mountain News, to be staffed by about 35 former Rocky journalists and funded by three non-publisher entrepreneurs, wants to get by on paid subscriptions (at least initially). If 50,000 noble people sign up for monthly subscriptions by April 23 (which would have been the 150th anniversary of the Rocky), then the venture will launch. Online (and at some point mobile) readers will pay $5 a month if they sign up for a full year (that is, $60 up front; pay more per month for shorter subscription terms).

Can they make it?

Well, first off, there’s the challenge of getting people to pay for something that doesn’t exist yet. That’s unlike ponying up when your local NPR station begs for money, since the station is operating and broadcasting and podcasting content, so that’s a challenge. Paying in advance to get InDenverTimes.com is an altruistic act to keep journalism from at least completely falling apart in Denver. (If the group doesn’t get at least close to the 50K goal, none of the donors will get charged.)

Of course, the InDenverTimes staff is a known quantity; it’s not quite a start-up, since the site is being hyped as staffed by former Rocky journalists, and intended to replace the Rocky, minus the paper part and with less news. (The group couldn’t get the Rocky Mountain News brand or URL because owner E.W. Scripps is keeping it tied up; one of InDenverTimes.com’s co-founders told me he’d be interested in bidding on it if it became available. And the Denver Post grabbed about 10 of the Rocky’s top journalists.)

I’m not going to get into the argument of whether charging content will work or not. But briefly, the InDenverTimes model is that news is free, but some set of “premium” content is behind the subscription pay wall, and the ability to post comments and interact with the journalists is part of the pay plan, too.

There’s already skepticism about hitting the 50,000-subscriber goal in a little over a month. For comparison’s sake, I looked for stats on NPR station pledge drives. WBUR in Boston during a recent pledge drive had 7,770 people participating, with an average gift of $105 per donor. Boston is a much larger city than Denver. That’s $815,850. Other drives have brought in as much as $1 million. And NPR outlets do two pledge drives per year.

I couldn’t find stats on Denver’s NPR station and its membership drives. But if that Boston station is bringing in less than $2 million a year from memberships (equivalent to InDenverTimes.com’s paid subscriptions), then the news website’s goal for raising $3 million in a short time is overly ambitious and probably unreachable.

Founding managing editor Steve Foster admits that the initial subscription drive is very NPR-like, in that InDenverTimes is asking the community to support its start-up. But after that, he expects that continuing subscribers and new ones attracted down the road will pay because of the content. And advertising sales will be added later on (no ad sales people at launch).

I wish them luck. They’ll need it, because the odds are against reaching that goal. I’m all for experiments like this, but the business model doesn’t look achievable. I hope they’ll prove me wrong.

Increasingly of late, I’m seeing writers use the term “hits” when talking about webpage usage. I’ve lost count of how often this has assaulted my ex-copy editor eyes, but it happened again in this story. An excerpt:

“Thousands of Seattlites will miss their morning ‘fish wrapper.’ But as other newspapers saw fewer web ‘hits’ after the November election, the P-I website has climbed close to the three million mark.”

Ugh. As an Internet publishing veteran, I have to point out to the growing horde of misinformed writers that a “page-view” is the word they’re looking for. It indicates that a web user has seen a particular webpage. If the P-I website only got three million hits (the writer doesn’t says if that’s per day, but I assume so), that’s pretty poor because it represents far, far fewer page-views.

What’s a “hit”? I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

“A hit is a request to a web server for a file (web page, image, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheet, etc.). When a web page is uploaded from a server the number of ‘hits’ or ‘page hits’ is equal to the number of files requested. Therefore, one page load does not always equal one hit because often pages are made up of other images and other files which stack up the number of hits counted. Because one page load does not equal one hit it is an inaccurate measure of a website’s popularity or web traffic. A more accurate measure of web traffic is how many page views a web site has. Hits are useful when evaluating the requirements of your server, depending on the number and size of files which need to be transferred for one request. Servers should be tested to make sure they meet throughput targets (i.e. they should be capable of processing a certain amount of ‘hits’ per second).”

Sorry for nitpicking, but doing time as a copy editor at any time of your career will make you this way.

Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com, we have not given up on newspapers turning those downward-and-steepening revenue trend lines back upward.

Christopher Ryan, president of FutureofNews.com, and I have written a Classifieds Manifesto with some solid solutions for revolutionizing newspaper classifieds.

If you are involved in newspaper classifieds, are in a position of power or influence in your newspaper, or simply care about the future of newspaper journalism (print, online, mobile, wherever) and want to see it continue to be adequately funded, I implore you to read our Manifesto. Add to it in the comments if you’ve got additional ideas.

Let’s get that revolution going before it’s too late. READ IT HERE…

(I’ve turned off comments on this post, because I’d like to keep the discussion in one place, on the Manifesto itself.)

Last night I was reminded of the power that digital media have of bringing people together. My wife and I attended a birthday party for our friend, Bud, who chose the occasion to hold the debut public concert for his basement band, tentatively called “Doc Hollywood.” He rented the Altona Grange Hall north of Boulder and he and the band invited their friends (who brought food and tossed money into a big jar to cover the hall rental).

The band that Craigslist formed.

Now Bud and the band are not exactly spring chickens. (Surely it’s OK to use that cliche when I’m writing about an event in a grange hall. ) The average age of the musicians is in the 50s; Bud is 57, and recently rediscovered his love of playing the drums, which he’d put aside since he was in his teens and early 20s and played with a rock band.

Other than his wife, Cheri, who sings backup vocals, the rest of the 6-person band was introduced via an ad in Craigslist looking for musicians interested in joining a band for fun. There’s no intention of the group to get paid gigs or otherwise make it big; they’re mostly ordinary folk who used to play and perform when they were younger, and just want to have some fun again.

Now, last week was an awful one for traditional media. The Rocky Mountain News shut down; there’s talk of the San Francisco Chronicle going down; the newspaper industry overall has proven itself mostly unable to handle a bad recession and the challenges of adapting to the digital revolution. Last night’s concert gives a hint as to why, if you look hard enough.

Craigslist, of course, has hit newspaper classifieds hard. The decline of newspaper classifieds revenue is a huge part of the reason for newspapers’ current troubles. It’s not all Craig’s fault, of course, but he has a lot to do with it. But Craigslist’s ability to bring people together is something that newspapers don’t do well at in the digital age. Perhaps in the old days, Bud’s band might have come together via a newspaper classified ad, but more than likely he would have asked friends, or posted a notice at the local music store. Now there’s a better way. Thanks, once again, Craig.

If newspapers are to pull out of their crisis — indeed, if they are to survive long term — they need to learn to take better advantage of the ability of the Internet and mobile devices to introduce people with common interests and bring them together. Alas, most traditional publishers continue to think more about how to make money from the old model of one-to-many, and pay lip service to serving the qualities of the Internet that make it so important to the individuals who live in 2009: its ability to connect people and form communities.

Bud’s band members might have found themselves thanks to a local newspaper’s online service, had that publisher grasped the potential of the Internet as builder of local sub-communities and relationships — and put more effort into developing as part of its digital strategy ways to help people connect and find each other.

Listening to my friend’s band last night, and realizing that they’re all in the age group that still reads newspapers, it occurred to me that were it not for Craigslist, none of us would be in that grange hall. Newspapers still think big; “how can we reach a larger audience with our great content?” They also need to think small; “what can we do to once again be the institution that not only is at the center of our community, but that also facilitates and helps people in our community to create their own connections and communities?”

It’s probably too late for newspapers. But as they struggle to survive, I urge them to spend a lot more time thinking about the small ways they can become big again.