Archive for May, 2009

This has happened a few times (including recently), and it’s become a pet peeve that I need to get off my chest. As I occasionally do digital-media consulting work for media companies, or bid on consulting jobs, it’s not uncommon to be asked after presenting a new idea: “Has anyone else tried this and shown positive results?”

Sometimes the motivation for asking such a question is pure: “Is this really a new idea or model, or has it been tried before? And if the latter, how did it work out?” That’s fine.

Yet other times, I realize that the motivation is: “Interesting idea, but you better show me that someone else has tried this already and proved that it works, because we’re not going first.” And that sucks.

I’ve had a company ask me for ROI justification for one of the models that’s at the core of the media transformation: social media. Hey, that’s great if executives just want to put some rough numbers on what making an investment in social media staffing and programs will bring in. But it sucks when if my answer comes back, “You’ll make some money, but short term probably not a lot based on competitors’ experiences; but this is an important component of your company’s future that you ignore now at your peril,” and social-media expansion and expenditures get tabled, that sucks.

And finally, with my consultant’s hat still on, a pet peeve specific to newspapers is the disconnect between what the digital/interactive department or division of the company thinks is a smart strategy, and what they can actually get approved from top executives. There’s a common thread that I’ve noticed, where an idea or strategy that seems logical to me as a way to deal with newspapers’ ills is also supported by the interactive manager and most of the staff, but can’t get past the executive level, because the guy or gal who makes the most money at the newspaper trumps the informed recommendation of the digital-media experts hired for their expertise.

It’s little wonder that the newspaper industry is a mess. Too many of its top executives seem unwilling to try new models that might turn things around, but seem too risky since they’re not proven.

I wish there were a way out of this situation. But I’m proven time and again that old-media publishers and CEOs consider many untested digital-media models too risky for shareholders, whose interest they must uphold. Doesn’t seem to be working too well, does it?!

Created by the artist with an iPhone painting app.

Hint: It’s the leadership and corporate culture!

Check out this video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt being interviewed for WashingtonPost.com’s “On Leadership” series by Steven Pearlstein:

Wow. I hadn’t heard Schmidt talk about the Google corporate culture before, but watching this video interview made me realize why his company is so successful, and how the newspaper industry might be able to thrive if it adopted a similar networked, bottom-up decision structure.

To amplify that point, today I received a private e-mail from a frustrated interactive leader at a daily newspaper. She complained about her publisher and other top executives ignoring the good ideas for new revenue generators that she and her staff have suggested, and instead deferring to their own judgment and making the decision to move toward charging for news content on their website. In other words, this publisher has hired online/digital experts, and has access to smart web developers at corporate HQ, but chooses to ignore their advice in favor of his own “better judgment,” even though he’s not a digital-media expert.

If you watched the Schmidt video interview above, you’ll know that that couldn’t happen at Google.

The e-mail I mentioned is not the first I’ve received of its ilk. I periodically hear privately from newspaper online managers about their inability to get new ideas and initiatives approved, and their frustration that their expertise is ignored by executives who “know better.”

So I leave with a question: How do we get more newspaper publishers and executives to loosen the reins, and rein in the arrogance? Or do we just have to wait for them to retire or die?

My May Editor & Publisher Online column was published today — “Getting Money from Readers Who Won’t Pay for Online News” — and it’s mostly getting positive reviews so far. I make the case against daily newspapers’ shift toward charging for local news on their websites, and suggest an alternative: newspaper.com paid memberships that work with the paper’s advertisers and offer significant value, so it’s not just a “tin cup,” “please support local journalism” strategy.

As I note in the column, this is one option being considered by the New York Times. Also, today I heard from a couple other newspaper folks who say they’re either discussing or working on such a membership program.

Over on the Media Nation blog, Dan Kennedy mentioned my column, and one of his commenters suggested:

“Outing’s assessment No. 3 needs a touch of adjustment. The REAL monetary value of a newspaper is in its subscriber/readership base, and the access to that base that it can provide. This is what advertisers pay for. Content is the benefit that the subscriber/reader gets for allowing the publisher into their lives. …

“Those who cut content risk the alienation of the very constituency that enables them to charge the advertising rates on which their very survival depends.”

That brings up a point I missed in the column: A high-value membership program could attract paying members who don’t use the core product (newspaper and/or website). Here’s my response to the commenter:

“Hmmm. What I advocated in my column (the part you refer to as No. 3) is that a ‘membership program’ become a new addition to a newspaper company’s ad program that would be appealing to advertisers and enticing enough that consumers would clamor to pay for the benefits in great enough numbers that they support the newspaper’s reporting. It’s similar to commercials supporting ABC World News Tonight, or ads supporting the free alternative weekly in your town, but the newspaper membership doesn’t require you to read the paper’s website content.

“You make a good point. Perhaps the editorial content shouldn’t be completely detached from the revenue source, so that people don’t just buy the membership because of all the great deals but then don’t read the news, which then hurts the newspaper website’s ad revenues. So yes, perhaps a ‘touch of adjustment’ is in order.

“I often like to flip things on their heads to get a different perspective. One possibility might be to have a base membership price (say $20/month), but offer discounts based on the member’s pageviews during the previous month. … Or let them take a news quiz at the end of each week and if they score above a set level, they get $5 off that month. … Sounds a bit crazy, but we’re not only interested in making money to support news gathering; we’re also interested in an informed public and a better functioning democracy.

“I’d most like to see newspaper publishers get more creative. ‘Let’s put up a pay wall’ demonstrates the lack of creativity and innovation at the highest levels of the industry.”

In this Denver Post story about parent company MediaNews Group’s new plan to charge for online news content, there’s an informal online poll. The results aren’t pretty for MNG.

I’m quoted as the dissenting voice in this piece by reporter Andy Vuong, but it’s a tiny clip and he leaves out most of my arguments against the MNG plan. I suppose it’s tough for a journalist to report in a balanced manner on your own company’s new grand plan. But this is mostly puff for an ill-advised business strategy that, in my humble opinion, will turn out to be a disaster.

An alert listener of Colorado Public Radio heard my interview last week on the “Colorado Matters” program, and noted that I erred in citing ProPublica, the independent investigative reporting website, as “ProPublica.com.” Well, I can’t very well fix my recorded radio voice to the correct ProPublica.org, but I’ll at least note it here.

But ProPublica also gets a bit of blame. “.org” sites frequently get misquoted as “.com” sites, so it would make sense for the site to have acquired “ProPublica.com” and then redirected it to ProPublica.org. A domain search reveals that someone else owns ProPublica.com, and going to that URL just turns up a “not found” error.

If ProPublica.org gets the opportunity to buy the ProPublica.com domain, it should. Then little mistakes like mine won’t really matter.

But I’ll cite it correctly next time.

If you’ve been to a media conference lately, you know that it’s increasingly common for audience members to be posting to Twitter during speeches and panels. At the Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas recently, during a panel I was chairing, not only were some audience members tweeting about the panel, so was one of the panelists when she wasn’t speaking!

Yesterday I was on a long car ride with a buddy who’s interested in educational technology, and we were bouncing around ideas, including how to leverage social tools online and using mobile devices. I don’t know if some educators haven’t already tried this, but here’s an experiment we devised using Twitter:

• Pick a day when your class has a guest speaker.
• Ask all the students to take notes by posting to Twitter (laptop or cell phone).
• Each tweet-note should have common hashtag (e.g., #123notes).
• Because of Twitter’s 140-character limit (including the hashtag), students will be forced to boil down the speaker’s points to their essence.
• And, of course, clue in your speaker so he/she knows why the students are glued to their phones and laptops!

Here’s why this could be a beneficial classroom experiment:

• Any individual student taking notes or just listening to a speaker will retain only a percentage of what’s been presented. Some will pick up and remember more than others.
• With all the students taking Twitter notes, the resulting stream of tweets (in my example, http://twitter.com/#123notes) will document more of the speaker’s ideas and thoughts than any one student could record on his/her own.
• Students can review the tweet stream later to get a better understanding of what was said — reading about points that might have gone over their heads, or that they missed in a moment of lost concentration.
• Those who missed the class can still get a pretty good idea of what was presented.
• Students can even tweet among themselves (using the hashtag) so there’s a side-channel conversation going on.

I think this is a technique that could actually enhance the amount of information retained by a room of students listening to a speaker. Has anyone tried this? If not, how about it?

I have a new, complimentary subscription to Field & Stream magazine (print edition). Why is that? Since I don’t fish or hunt, or have any interest whatsoever in reading about either, publisher Bonnier is wasting money by granting me an unasked-for 1-year subscription.

I’m thinking this started with my paid subscriptions to a couple printed cycling and mountain biking magazines, which apparently generated an unasked-for complimentary subscription to Outside magazine. I was fine with that, since I enjoy Outside, though I won’t pay to renew when my 1-year free trial ends (assuming it does). So my guess is that as an Outside “subscriber,” it was assumed I must also be into fishing and hunting.

This must signal signs of desperation among magazine publishers. But receiving my “free gift” annoyed me, thinking about the wasted paper and downed trees represented by a print product I don’t want. At least when I get an unasked-for online subscription (which happens occasionally), I can easily unsubscribe with a click or two and no birds lose their homes.

Now I’m curious what magazine will turn up in my mailbox unannounced next. If mountain biking leads to assumption that I like the outdoors, and that leads to another assumption that I must enjoy fishing and hunting, then what’s coming next? Perhaps Soldier of Fortune?

Yeah, I’ve been playing hooky quite a bit lately. In the previous couple weeks I’ve mountain biked 4 days on Utah’s famed White Rim Trail, then succumbed to an invitation from a friend to drive to southwestern Colorado and ride some great trails near Cortez and Durango for 2 days. (Fellow mountain bikers: You have got to check out the Phil’s World trail system which is near the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park. Stellar!) It’s a “benefit” of being temporarily underemployed to take time off, but my legs are feeling tired.

While I was away, Colorado Public Radio current affairs program “Colorado Matters” aired a 13-minute interview with me by host Ryan Warner. Here’s the archived version if you care to listen to the discussion about the future of news in an era when the newspaper industry is falling apart.

Newspapers’ Digital Future

So on Wednesday, Amazon will be introducing a larger Kindle e-reading device. I’ll be away from the Internet on my mountain bike in southwestern Colorado so will probably miss the announcement. But I can’t help but ponder the significance of the advancement of the portable e-reader.

While I do believe that Kindles (medium and large) and other e-readers will grow in popularity, I still can’t get too excited about them. Now, if a Kindle device ran the Mac operating system, was a serious replacement for my Macbook, and of course had a color screen, then I’d really take it seriously.

But for now, I can’t imagine wanting to add another device to carry around with me.

Here’s my personal history with extra devices (it’s short). Years ago I bought a Palm Pilot clone, called a Handspring. It was cool at first, and was one of my many attempts to find a to-do and calendar system that worked for me. Trouble was, I seldom took it out with me; I simply wasn’t comfortable carrying a cell phone AND a Handspring PDA in my pockets. The Handspring gathered dust for years; it’s probably in a box somewhere in my office.

I suspect many people will have the same experience with the Kindle, including the new one. Sure, there will be Kindle aficionados who are never without their e-reader. (I have a friend who fits that description.) But I don’t see the Kindle as a device that you’ll always want to carry with you.

For me, the iPhone changed my life, and for the first time in my life I have an organization system that I regularly use and is always with me. Between Google Calendar and Remember the Milk on the iPhone, I’m now more organized than I’ve ever been. The reason is simple enough: My iPhone is always with me (even on a mountain bike ride miles away from cell service).

The larger screen of the new Kindle may be appealing to newspaper and magazine publishers, and it well could be a boon for them. But if I had a $1 million development budget, I’d allot a small portion of it to publishing to Kindle and e-readers, and spend most on developing apps for delivering content and services to smart phones.

In my view, the small size of the phone’s screen is far outweighed by another positive factor: The phone is nearly always with me. Want to get your news content to me any time I’m awake? Get it to me on my iPhone.