SteveOuting.com » Media

A golden age for news start-ups? The impact of another newspaper bankruptcy

Steve Outing — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:44:56 +0000

I can’t say I’m surprised that Denver-based MediaNews Group (well, technically its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc.) has said that it will file for bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal has a report on the latest newspaper-industry dour development, pointing out that the Hearst Corp. has $400 million in equity and debt tied to MediaNews, “and the investment will be wiped out by the bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.”

MediaNews is likely to survive, but not without some unfortunate consequences for its newspapers. From the WSJ article:

“(MediaNews Group CEO Dean) Singleton also said cleaning up the company’s debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation, which some people in the industry say would help publishers stay afloat by creating stronger, more efficiently run groups of papers. Others are less sanguine about the benefits of consolidation.

“People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews’ paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc.”

In other words, yet another newspaper-company bankruptcy means that more muscle will be cut from newsrooms (the fat’s already gone) and communities will be more poorly served in the consolidation that’s necessary for industry survival.

We’ve seen plenty of awful things happen to newsrooms, and now we’re seeing things like copy editors being considered for elimination to save money. (E.g., Star Tribune.)

The newsroom cuts keep coming, and as newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy owned largely by the banks that held their debt, a return to strong staffing levels and higher quality is unlikely anytime soon. (And why would advertisers return to that?)

So, it looks to me like now is a great time to be in journalism!

I’ve said that a few times recently when speaking to groups of college journalism students, and while I’ve gotten some nods of agreement, I’ve seen more heads shaking and puzzled expressions. But here’s what I mean:

Newspapers across the land are declining in quality, and lacking in coverage of their communities. A retired university journalism department head just today wrote this to me in a private e-mail about his local paper, owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S.:

“Today’s [newspaper name redacted] is a bulletin board of one-paragraph meeting and event announcements, with canned features from other [corporate parent redacted] papers, local columns by city and county functionaries, booster pieces by c-of-c officials, religious claptrap by evangelists, columns on how and why to clean up your garage, pet care, etc. People who want to announce weddings and funerals are charged by the column inch, and the practice of depth reporting is a distant memory.”

I don’t see a way out of this for local and regional newspapers owned by large media companies. Do you? So newspapers will likely continue to decline, while simultaneously, new digital news entities (for- and non-profit) will continue to increase in quality. After all, the newcomers don’t have massive debt to worry about or expensive presses to maintain; digital publishing is cheap in comparison.

And, of course, many of the new news entities emerging are run by the talented journalists laid off by the once-great newspaper companies. So new news providers’ quality will continue to improve.

The problem for all the new-comers to the (reinvented) news game is the lack of a clear business model to support quality journalism in sufficient quantity. But I’m more confident that they can figure that out than I am in the newspaper industry figuring out the digital business model while also handling the collapse of their legacy business.

“New” news media rises as the old falls. MediaNews Group’s troubles are only the latest to open up more opportunities for the new news eco-system to develop.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, if you can stomach the chaotic environment. It’s a lousy time to own an established news media business if you’re still in love with its outdated business model.

At last, I can complain about E&P’s website!

Steve Outing — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:19:56 +0000

Throughout much of my nearly 15-year gig as a freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online, I’ve cringed at its website. Now that E&P is shutting down (though with some hope of a last-minute save) and my “Stop The Presses!” column has ended its run, I’m free to stop the self-censorship.

Actually, I don’t really need to say that much, since (now former) E&P editor Greg Mitchell acknowledged the obvious in an interview published yesterday:

“At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“‘For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,’ Mitchell said. ‘As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.’”

Thank you, Greg!

For me, not a month has gone by over the last, oh, 5 years or more that, following publication of my monthly column, I didn’t get reader e-mails complaining about not being able to leave a public comment responding to what I’d written. I often resorted to using this, my personal blog, as the place for E&P readers to leave feedback or have a public discussion.

The worst were my (many) columns advocating that news websites be more interactive and participatory. Readers couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out the irony, though of course they had to do it either in a “letter to the editor” sent to EditorandPublisher.com, or to my personal e-mail address (or sometimes with a phone call).

That said, that’s a hit only on E&P’s penny-pinching overlords, not the E&P staff. My column tenure lasted through several editors before Mitchell, and each faced the same problem. Whenever I repeated my request that comments be added to my column, I got the same frustrated response: We want to do it but we can’t get corporate to allow it!

For me, the ultimate irony — and there’s a lesson here, I think — is that when I switched this blog to the popular Wordpress open-source content management system (CMS) years ago, my personal website was in many ways more sophisticated and flexible than E&P’s! If I wanted a new feature, I just found a free Wordpress plug-in and added new functionality in a few minutes. E&P’s poor editors had to beg corporate IT for any new features to be added, which either took weeks or months, or never happened (like adding user comments).

Open-source platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, and others are now remarkably advanced. You have to wonder why companies like E&P owner Nielsen (and VNU before that) would cripple themselves using a proprietary CMS.

OK, I’ve got that off my chest. I’ll end with high praise for the editorial work of E&P’s staff over the years. E&P was around for 125 years, and deservedly so. I’m proud to have been associated with the E&P brand, and leave with great respect for everyone in the now-shuttered New York City office.

You can still find them on the new (temporary?) blog, E&P In Exile.

Oh, and feel free to leave a comment below.

3 links that explain Editor & Publisher’s demise

Steve Outing — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:57:45 +0000

(Disclaimer: I worked as a contract or freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online from 1995 till this week, covering for the site and sometimes E&P magazine the intersection of newspapers and the digital revolution. I do not have inside information about why Nielsen Co. shuttered E&P, and the words below are strictly my opinion.)

The demise of Editor & Publisher (the now-monthly magazine and companion website) can be quickly understood from the following three links:

John Temple: Rest in peace, E&P: Killed by an aggregator

“It’s easy to underestimate the power of aggregation. But the truth, in my view, is that Romenesko replaced Editor & Publisher long ago as the place where journalists turned to find out what was going on in their world. It’s not limited by one medium or industry. It’s timely. And it’s deep. The magazine couldn’t compete. And it’s not just Romenesko. There are many sites and blogs to turn to today to learn what’s going on in journalism. Which is why E&P couldn’t survive as a viable business.”

The former editor and publisher of the defunct Rocky Mountain News hits the nail on the head. E&P still operated like a traditional trade-magazine publisher, just using a different medium (the web) for daily coverage and cutting back on print (from weekly down to monthly in its later years). To this day, it was weak on user participation and aggregation from other sources, even though its traditional news coverage was strong and well respected. E&P probably should have hired Jim Romenesko years ago rather than let the Poynter Institute lure him.
Steven Berlin Johnson: “Old Growth Media and the Future of News“
This is a transcript of a speech presented in early 2009. It’s long, but it is the best description I know of about why traditional trade publishers are doomed unless they properly adapt to the new digital media environment. Johnson uses the example of the old Macintosh magazines, pre-web, and how they were marginalized by the growth of Mac insider websites, e-newsletters, and blogs over the years.

What started out in technology journalism, Johnson explains, eventually will spread to many other sectors of news. It already has in some areas such as sports and politics. For industry news, the same dynamic will strike in niche after niche. Johnson’s message also points to the importance in the business press of aggregation and curation.
A tweet by Vin Crosbie yesterday

“Root of E&P mag’s death was Steve Outing’s start of Online-News listserv in ‘93, creating ability to report industry news faster than print.”

News media consultant and now university educator Crosbie is referring to an e-mail discussion list that I started either at the end of 1993 or early in 1994. Online-News and its companion discussion list Online-Newspapers grew to be significant and lively gathering places of news professionals and innovators looking to leverage the Internet to bring news into the online age. The information shared by a large group of passionate and knowledgeable news innovators was often the kind of stuff not found in traditional media trade publications.

Crosbie is perhaps stretching things to directly link E&P’s demise in 2009 to the start of an industry listserv in 1994, but his point is valid.

Are we watching a Tribune train wreck in progress?

Steve Outing — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:38:18 +0000

I’ve gone back and forth in my mind about the chances of the beleaguered Tribune Co. in the Sam Zell era. On the one hand, I’ve applauded his (occasionally profane) approach of shaking things up and imploring the Tribune staff to think out of the box and start seriously innovating. There can be little argument that that’s what the newspaper industry needs.

But then this week Zell’s “chief innovation officer,” radio guy Lee Abrams, sent out a wake-up call memo to the company’s newspaper division, which was made public on Romenesko. Parts of it were (my opinion) laughable, and already parodies of the memo have turned up on Romenesko.

No doubt Abrams has a difficult job, but he really blew it with such doozies as, “Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news.” That alone probably caused every newspaper person in the company to not take him seriously.

I don’t know Abrams, but I question why a radio guru is put into the roll of reinventing the company’s newspapers. It’s not that a newspaper person must be the person to head up an innovation on the newspaper side of the company. But someone from a likewise-suffering industry, radio, seems like an odd choice. Yes, Abrams came most recently from satellite radio company XM; but I consider that to be a less innovative than such music innovations as Pandora, or the iPod, for that matter.

Zell might have made a wiser choice by bringing in a big-picture innovator, not tied to the newspaper industry but also not influenced by old and outdated media sectors. A futurist like Paul Saffo is the type of person Tribune probably needs; or grab a star analyst and forward thinker like Josh Bernoff or Charlene Li.

Yet another reason I’m suddenly sour on Tribune’s chances is having looked at the preview of Tribune’s Orlando Sentinel print edition redesign, to be released this Sunday. I’ll write up some thoughts on that one later.

Do not give up, dammit!

Steve Outing — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:20:35 +0000

This bears repeating and spreading around. It’s a quote from Jay Rosen (NYU, Pressthink) that appeared on his Facebook status today:

“News people who wonder why their industry gets creamed by Google and Yahoo are the same news people who dismiss an idea after it fails once.”

He may be referring to the trashing that Rob Curley’s LoudonExtra hyper-local site for the Washington Post is getting from some quarters. (And if he’s not, he could be!) Yes, “hyper-local” journalism hasn’t worked out yet. (Remember Backfence.com?) But considering that local is what most newspapers have to cling to in an era when national and international news is a free and easily found commodity, they best not give up on figuring out how “local-local” can succeed.

This reminds me of my most recent failure, the Enthusiast Group (2006-07), which aimed to build interactive social communities around enthusiast sports. Just this week I learned that Dave Morgan (founder of Real Media, Tacoda), one of the smartest and most successful media people I know, is becoming chairman of a tennis venture that sounds similar to what we were attempting at EG.

I won’t be surprised if Morgan and his new colleagues figure out to turn passionate enthusiast communities into a viable business. He’s a way smart businessman (Tacoda sold to AOL for $275 million) and I’m willing to bet he’ll find the secret sauce that we didn’t. I suspect many traditional media companies will look at EG’s failure and say, “Don’t want to go there!”

News companies, especially, really need to inject some entrepreneurial folks into their operations. Entrepreneurs fail, learn from it, and move on. They don’t give up.

A smart and low-cost way to cover niches

Steve Outing — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:30:35 +0000

Please take a look at my latest column for Editor & Publisher Online, posted today: “How to Create Killer Niche Web Sites Without Hiring.” I think the two initiatives I’ve profiled are truly significant innovations that can move the news industry forward.

For lack of a better term, Examiner.com’s Examiners program and the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader initiative might be described as “Citizen Journalism 2.0.” Thought Leader’s developer also uses the term “By Invitation 2.0.”

The key point is to leverage citizen media and blogging intelligently by integrating it with traditional journalism practices like (what a shock!) editing and gatekeeping. I’d like to hear your opinions on these innovations.

Time to give up and retire?

Steve Outing — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:43:09 +0000

How depressing. Did you see this Rick Edmonds post at Poynter.org? “Far-out Ideas? We Have No Far-out Ideas.”

He reports on the Capital Conference newspaper convention in Washington, D.C. last week, where Anthony Moor (a smart and innovative guy now at the Dallas Morning News) asked some publishers on-stage: Can you each give an example of one of the most far-out ideas you have heard recently for editorial and/or business? Not necessarily one that you would do, just that you have heard about?

The question was, according to Edmonds, answered with initial silence and then some pretty lame, not very innovative answers. Edmonds: “So after countless references in this conference (as in last year’s) to transformational change and an excellent panel the day before featuring CEOs from other industries who have pulled off huge makeovers, it comes down to this: The publishers can’t think of anything transformational and are into incrementalism instead?”

I read this after spending time yesterday answering criticisms of my last Editor & Publisher Online column, in which I announced that I was suspending my print-edition subscription and warning newspaper publishers to expect a wave of people behind me doing the same thing. A bunch of newspaper editors and publishers berated me; it felt like I was in 1998 again, not 2008.

Geez, perhaps it’s time for some of those folks to retire and hand over the reins to a younger generation of managers who probably could answer Moor’s question in a heartbeat.

Responses to a pile of critics

Steve Outing — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:11:54 +0000

My April 1 Editor & Publisher Online column (not an April Fools joke) about ending my long-held subscription to my local newspaper’s print edition generated a fair bit of controversy in the form of letters to E&P. I apologize for not responding more promptly, but it’s been a crazy period for me. Belatedly, here are some of the letters received (previously published on Editorandpublisher.com), and my responses to them.

I accept Mastercard and Visa

I find it tragic that the crashing and burning of Steve Outing’s fabulous “new media” empire has left him unable even to afford a subscription to his local paper. We discussed poor Steve’s situation here at the Niagara Falls Reporter this afternoon and decided to take up a collection.

If you could please send along his home address, we will restore his newspaper service, at least until he can get back on his feet.

Mike Hudson
Editor, Niagara Falls Reporter

I enjoyed the humor, Mike. However, I did state that my decision to end my life-long print newspaper reading habit was not about money, other than the fact that the Daily Camera’s price increase put me over the edge and prodded me to do something I’d been ready to do for some time. In fact, the Daily Camera came back with an offer to get me back as a customer at the old price. An increasing number of current print subscribers will come to the same decision over time; I don’t think there’s any escaping that.

What if the newspaper dies?

As the editor of 28,500 circ. (and declining) daily in suburban Pittsburgh, I’m upset and disappointed with Mr. Outing.

He knows our industry still lives off of paying hard-copy customers and advertisers.

Ho-hum, he says, not a problem, just because “online revenues can’t yet match print’s.” Yet? Oh, wise advisor of newspapers and new media expert, when do you expect online revenue to remotely match print revenue? Next month? Next year? Ever?

If my newspaper dies, what happens? Will the Pittsburgh metros and surrounding small dailies suddenly ramp up coverage? Hell, no. They’ll sell the subscriptions they can and continue to ignore the region. Maybe — a big maybe — a weekly paper will (inadequately) replace us.

No, local news will come from our local Web sites. Based on the current ones, they’ll be run by people with no training in journalism with a limited understanding of what is news, how to write it and how to present it. Will they be able financially to hire staff? Rely on citizen-journalists (good luck finding them here)?

TV/radio? They only drive the 25 miles from downtown Pittsburgh now for fires, floods, fornication and sad stories about kitties and puppies.

Maybe local governments will pick up the ball, but those will be community newsletters full of all of the hap-hap-happy news pablum government deems should be known.

Nope, if we go away, there will be virtually no local news for the region. And then all of those former subscribers — like Mr. Outing — will sit around in ignorant despair and boo-hoo about the good old days when there was a local paper.

In the 1990s, our industry started its slow-drip suicide on the web. Thanks, Mr. Outing, for yet-another refill of the I.V. bag.

Jeff Domenick
Editor, Valley News Dispatch, Tarentum, Pennsylvania

The shift that Mr. Domenick writes about is an inescapable fact of life for newspapers. Clinging to newsprint as the audience increasingly switches to digital and online for news and information is a game no publisher can win. If newspapers don’t adapt, frankly, I have little doubt that new entities will arise to take up the slack. Smart people already are making plans to take advantage of the situation, as Dave Morgan pointed out recently in “Benefiting From the Impending Collapse of Big Media.” Says Morgan, “So, as these mighty trees of old media fall, I think that we will see many new-media-like businesses sprout up and flourish in areas where old media had been shielded with its suffocating size and reach.”

Yes, this is likely to be painful. However, there are good ideas out there for saving the newspaper industry from a dire fate. The American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 presents some strong recommendations for newspaper companies to transform themselves into “local information and connection utilities.” If I sat in Mr. Domenick’s chair, I’d be thinking about some of those ideas. (And I’m also involved in an initiative that’s aimed at saving newspaper classifieds and returning some of the lost revenues of this last few years. See ReinventingClassifieds.com.)

Beyond the news

I enjoyed your column on life without the print edition. I agree this world is headed there fast, and we probably should be a little concerned.

You see, once the print edition is left to fend for itself on a street corner or single copy newsstand the circulation department will be, the “Mail Room”, editorial staff will be reduced to cover just local mom and pop stories, and advertising will become a difficult place to hold a job. But is that it? No, once we get to the point where a building is no longer needed the printing will be outsourced, all news stories will be outsourced and most everything will be handled by the corporations flagship.

Just because we are naive to the “.Com” era, and we have an online product does not guarantee success in the future. Newspaper corporation will close their smaller newspapers and run those newspaper’s online editions from corporate, the same is true for the editorial and advertising. So what do you have left? A few print editions will survive, but there will be more than enough online news sites to view, which leads us to our next hurdle. Those of us that complain that the newspaper across town keeps taking our readers you haven’t seen anything yet. All online news agencies will be our competition and the one who spends the most money marketing their site will win.

The end result. More jobs will be lost in this industry than in the nation following 9-11.

I agree with you Steve, I can get the same information online anytime I want so why have the print edition delivered? You got me.

The funny thing about history is that it repeats itself, and years after the print edition is gone someone will come up with a brilliant idea for a printed news source and market it just right and we start again. For those of us that are still around when that happens we’ll be saying “newspaper are nothing new, we had them back in the nineties, big ones too.”

Question:. How do we keep the demise of newspapers from happening?

I was in an apartment complex the other day and I saw three newspapers still sitting on the porches of three apartment homes. I asked myself why? Was it because the papers were delivered late and the customer had already left for work? Or is it because there was nothing interesting in the paper to make the reader stop and pick it up?

Answer. Create an interest beyond the news.

Brian Philippsen
Mesa, Arizona

Mr. Phillippsen echoes my sentiments with “Create an interest beyond news.” That’s the thrust of Newspaper Next 2.0, which urges newspaper publishers to craft a strategy of serving the entire community with information and connection, not just serving existing subscribers. I touch on this issue of doing more in my newest column on Editor & Publisher Online, which is about utilizing an edited and vetted version of citizen media to create deep coverage of local niches, utilizing the strength of your professional journalists to create quality content at low cost. Such recommendations do not discount the importance of traditional news coverage, but offer ways to be more than “just a newspaper.”

Local content is still king

I have just read Steve Outing’s column “Life without the print edition” and he has become the new poster boy for why newspapers should not post all their original content online for free. Local editorial content is “king” and the reader will use whatever medium has the content they want. Even teenagers will read a newspaper if there is something of interest in it for them.

Bruce Wood
Champion Newspapers, Chino/Chino Hills, Calif.

I’m not a fan of the idea of newspapers hiding their content behind pay walls online. That’s self-defeating in a big way in a media environment where Google is so important to the average online user’s experience. There’s obviously value in original local reporting that cannot be found elsewhere. But to monetize it, I don’t think you’ll succeed by locking it away. Better would be to find ways to deliver and package it digitally where there’s a high enough convenience factor that it’s worth paying for. And deploy a distributed-web strategy, pushing your content out to wherever your potential readers are. Monetizing local news on a sole website (a newspaper’s) isn’t enough, so figure out how to get it wherever your readers hang out — driving them back to your website, and/or delivering accompanying sponsor messages along with the content wherever it goes (e.g., social networks where many of your readers — and non-readers — spend lots of time now).

Cancel his subscription

If this is the kind of articles and support you and your writers will give to our newspaper industry, I will be dropping my E&P subscription and blocking all of your emails. Mr. Outing, you need to change industry, try radio, it is free. Oh, wait, they get all their local news and info from our front page of the print edition, everyday.

How disappointing to read your ‘honest’ views on the newspaper business. Yes, why buy the cow when you can have the steak for free. Why doesn’t my satellite service allow me to unbundle all the crap they make me take? Why can’t I get the seven or eight channels that I really want and only pay for them, kind of like your thoughts on the comics? You know the answer just like we all do.

You totally failed to address all the preprints and peripheral information that comes in the newspaper on a weekly basis. Study after study (see NAA and E&P) indicates that an extremely high percentage of people that receive the newspaper do so for the preprints and advertisements. I see it in my own home with my wife and daughters. Sunday morning, I take my pile, she takes hers and we drink our coffee in peace.

Note directly to E&P, shame on you; for not thinking about what Steve spews on our industry.

Ken Clements
Advertising Director, Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho

I hope Mr. Clements doesn’t cancel his subscription, because in his position he needs to be aware of all manner of thinking about how the newspaper industry is going to survive in the coming years, and perhaps turn around around what looks to be years of negative growth ahead. While I certainly don’t expect everyone to agree with every idea that I “spew” in my column, I do hope that everyone is open-minded about options for going forward and wants to consider a wide range. E&P presents many views, including mine.

As for pre-prints (aka, inserts or circulars), Mr. Clements is right that they remain strong. I think that Sunday print newspaper readership can remain stronger than weekday due to consumers getting the Sunday paper for the ads. But I don’t think this situation will last forever.

Rearranging the deck chairs

If my hometown paper landed on my driveway every morning, I’d cancel it, too. If it was actually hitting your doorstep (a less satisfying image for the purposes of a column), you owe an apology to their circ director. Driveway delivery is a service error.

But that’s re-arranging deck chairs.

Even a guy who specializes in being from 40 miles away and owning a briefcase has an obligation to be blunt with his clients about the underlying assumptions.

To grossly oversimplify: the N2 Crew predict that, like the steel and automotive industries, newspapers will progressively abandon their lowest-profit products to their disruptive low-cost/low-quality competitors. To hear N2ers tell it, there is no escape and an honest newspaper consultant would tell owners to sell now…or finance those low-cost/low-quality competitors so that you wind up owning some part of the market even if you have to accept lower margins. As N2 gurus are fond of saying, only populations evolve. Individuals (that would be you and me) die off.

But the thing with Harvard Business School professors like N2’s Clay Christensen (Author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and other very good books) is to remember whom they work for. Harvard no longer produces captains of industry. It produces hedge fund managers. Although clever and well-trained, MBAs see the world through lenses that are, by definition, exquisitely narrow in their field of view, which is Wall Street. They are the people who created and sold the Collateralized Debt Obligation and other masterpieces of America’s finance-dominated economy.

They forget that the rest of America likes to go to work and produce something meaningful.

It’s exciting to peddle sizzle, but somewhere, someone has to be making steaks or the whole thing collapses, as Wall Street periodically learns. This is why I’m fascinated that you think charging for content is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot strategy. If the Boulder Camera stopped giving away its local content online for a week, what would all the whiz-bang aggregators you mention be sending to you? Day-old material scraped from the AP and a few squibs from the Denver papers and TV stations. The thing with plagiarism is you have to wait for a creative enterprise to make something worth stealing.

Again, I rearrange deck chairs, since the captains of the news industry seem determined to donate our lifeblood to our vanquishers.

But it would be refreshing to hear an E&P columnist whack owners under the chin for short-changing their marketing and training budgets lo these many years and to stand up for the most basic value proposition of all: fee for service.

Are the trainers of America’s hedge fund managers really the people to whom we should be turning for answers?

Probably not. While their insights are useful, we need to be listening to creative types, be they writers, designers or engineers. I think all of us foot-shooters understand that the world is changing. But “Give all your content for awhile until somebody has a cool idea” isn’t a strategy, it’s a capitulation.

Dean Miller
2008 Nieman Fellow, Harvard University

My house has a long driveway, so I never expected to find the paper on my porch. No hard feelings. (But that would have been nice on the snowy mornings we get here in Boulder, Colorado.)

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get how newspapers can charge for their news coverage when there are so many other choices. This has been tried many times by various newspapers in the online environment over the years that I’ve been covering this industry, and online users have not demonstrated that they’re willing to pay. Somebody prove me wrong. Good luck with that.

Look beyond what a newspaper has been historically. I think that’s where the money will be found to support the local reporting that is so important to us all.

Cities and suburbs

On my second tour of duty with the now defunct Cleveland Press in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, the paper suffered through a 129-day strike. During that time, major advertisers switched to a suburban chain called the Sun Newspapers. When the strike ended, many of them did not return to The Press because they realized suburbanites wanted ads of stores they patronized outside of inner city Cleveland. Having covered suburbs for The Press, I argued that the paper was too focused on an area suburbanites only came to was for their jobs. They did their shopping in the suburbs, which not only ringed the city but were burgeoning under the influx of people moving to them. I never won the argument.

Too many print papers today still do not realize this. They also do not realize that where once the papers could come out with special editions when breaking events warranted them, the electronic media are instantaneous. However, the explosion of various electronic media too often overwhelms viewers and listeners. Back half a century ago, when television was only in its infancy, I often would get calls in the city room complaining the callers saw or heard something on tv or radio but wanted a fuller explanation.

Yes, the younger generation most often depend on electronic media. Those of us who are part of the Rice Krispies Generation (when we get up in the morning, something goes snap, crackle, or pop) would prefer the paper product. But, it does not seem relevant anymore. Are print newspapers doomed? Maybe cut back, but there still is hope. It seems almost too obvious for print media moguls to understand what their products could do better than the electronic media. For one thing, they could cover the suburbs more in depth. When I worked for the Government as a public information officer at four different agencies, there might be just one reporter covering us. By us, I mean he/she usually never got into the many different departments within our agency where the real news never saw the light of day.

The writing certainly could be better because the talking heads of television are a bore. As the old saying goes, they seem to generate more heat than light. The March 30 edition of The New York Times had what I believe was a record number of corrections. I worked on two different copy desks where such mistakes never would have passed either the city desk to begin with, or our copy desk. When I read news copy, we were ordered to write the headline only out of the first three paragraphs. Try to find that rule observed today because the gist of news articles are buried in what we used to call “once upon a time” leads.

Lastly, I do read some papers online. But, when I go to the print version, I find a different product. If I still commuted to and from work, I think I would find it somewhat difficult to do The New York Times crossword puzzle on a laptop.

David H. Brown
Boynton Beach, Florida

To Mr. Brown’s last point, I’ll just point out that the Apple iPhone and the copycat phones coming down the pike put a credible Internet experience in the palm of your hand. I believe that it won’t be long before we see morning commuters reading and viewing the news on their cell phones, rather than printed newspapers, or laptops. And a friend just purchased an Amazon Kindle, which he’s using instead of the print edition for news. (And BTW, he’s paying a monthly fee for the news service.) Both of those more modern options won’t crowd the person sitting next to you as you turn the electronic page.

News from Joe’s Market

As a former newspaper editor, I was feeling Steve Outing’s pain in letting go of that daily bundle of dead trees. Until recently I subscribed to two newspapers, the Hartford Courant and the NY Times, and I’ve had the same discussions with my wife about whether to keep home delivery. It’s a huge expenditure, and when I recently looked at the annual cost, I quickly realized I can buy a decent laptop for less than that. I dumped the daily delivery of the Times, and I’m about to stop the Courant. Maybe I’ll keep the Sunday papers coming, because there’s no greater pleasure than spending the day with that traditional, though increasingly antiquated information home delivery system. Even so, with an active family, I find I have less time even for that.

Where Mr. Outing has it right is local news. Unfortunately, that is what takes the greatest hit when the layoffs come. I get less and less local news despite paying ever-increasing subscription fees. The question is how does newspaper management pay for local news gathering.

To answer that question, I go back to an incident that occurred in the early ‘80s when I was involved with an all-out effort to increase readership through zoning. At a Chamber of Commerce gathering a reader asked why we didn’t carry more local news. I was taken aback. We had expanded local operations and added reporters, filling untold column inches with local, local, local. What more local news could she possible want? What’s on sale at Joe’s Market.

You see, another casualty of newspaper downsizing is local ad sales staff. Far better to retain the more lucrative advertisers and devote resources there. And that means readers have fewer opportunities to find out what Joe’s has on sale. But imagine if you clicked on a story about your neighborhood and in Google style off to the side was a series of ads from businesses in that neighborhood. Click on Joe’s Market and there is what he has on sale. And like a Google ad, Joe’s pays only for clicks, which doesn’t require a whole lot of human effort, because it’s simply a link to Joe’s website. It takes local to a level you could not find anywhere else and just might be the only way newspapers survive. Otherwise, they become content aggregators, not originators, like just about any other website out there.

Richard Urban
Tolland, Connecticut

Bravo.

Laughable local feeds?

I just read Steve Outing’s April 1 Stop the Presses column, “Life Without the Print Edition.” I agree with Steve that strong local news coverage remains a strength of local newspapers in these challenging times. However, I find laughable his characterization of the “Boulder RSS feed” from Google and Topix, which simply aggregate news content created by newspaper reporters, as alternatives to the Boulder Camera’s local news. In most markets, the local newspaper is the only source of in-depth and watchdog journalism at the local level. If newspapers can’t find a way to draw revenue from the Web, they will no longer be able to pay their reporters and photographers, and the Web aggregators won’t have anything left to aggregate.

Also, it might be true that people will be willing to pay for the convenience of a customized report containing news about topics in which they are interested. That’s great if you happen to know those topics. Some of the time, you will need to know those topics before they ever become topics. But for the rest of us mortals, I find such a concept unsettling. Do we really want a society that only knows about things they think they care about? I didn’t know I was interested in veterans affairs before two very talented Washington Post reporters uncovered scandalous living conditions at Walter Reed Medical Hospital.

Jeff Parrott
Reporter, South Bend (Ind.) Tribune

I think the point that Mr. Parrott is missing is that a good “Boulder RSS feed” contains information from many sources, some non-traditional. Look in your community and you’ll likely find local bloggers writing about things that the local newspaper misses. There’s loads of local information being published on the web that’s of interest to micro-communities, but no one really is tapping that much yet. Taking the Newspaper Next 2.0 approach of the newspaper transformed into local information and connection utility, publishers should be looking at providing useful “feeds” that take everything that’s going on in their communities and filtering it for community members hungry for information that’s relevant to them. The mistake many newspaper publishers make is focusing too much on the content they produce, and not looking outside to see how they can leverage everything else that’s available on the Internet about their communities.

I’m really not talking about everyone getting a feed of just what they’re interested in. No one seriously thinks that’s a great idea.

Where will you go for news?

Just one question for Mr. Outing: Where will you go for your news when the newspapers die for lack of revenue? Online revenues will never equal the print model and cannot support the editorial and business staffs necessary to do a good job of reporting and disseminating the information. We are rapidly moving to a world where the news comes from citizen sources and blogs (basically the same thing). But those citizen sources and blogs rely on the news outlets. Without them, there’s nothing to blog about.

Ken Anderberg
Publisher/Editor, Communications News, Nokomis, Florida

My answer is somewhere above. If newspapers fail to adapt, others not burdened by high cost structure and eager to serve a need and make some money will arise. I think we’d all prefer to see newspapers adapt. That means letting go of the (slowing) print gravy train as focal point of your business and serving news consumers where they want to be — which certainly will be more challenging, there’s no doubt about that.

“Online revenues will never equal the print model” is not a statement I agree with. It’s true if newspapers decide to stay in the same business they are in now. It can be different if they reinvent themselves and take advantage of the opportunities available in the Internet world. Or are newspaper people just not as smart as those who started Google, Yahoo, eBay, Monster.com, MySpace, Facebook, et al?

ABC News couldn’t ignore the outcry

Steve Outing — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:34:09 +0000

The uproar over the performance of ABC News presidential debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday night was loud and furious. On ABCNews.com, as I write this there have been nearly 19,000 comments posted to the site — the vast majority of them, it appears, blasting the ABC personalities for focusing on political BS and ignoring actual issues.

With both mainstream columnists and the blogosphere criticizing them, Gibson really couldn’t ignore the controversy in tonight’s newscast. Frankly, I expected them to do the standard old-media thing and ignore the public outcry. To ABC News’ credit, Gibson introduced a report by correspondent David Wright that actually addressed the public outcry and criticism. So bravo for that.

I find this whole episode to be significant. No longer do we watch something on a major network that we think is awful and just yell at the TV. When it’s bad enough — as last night’s debate performance by the ABC moderators was — and enough people get angry, their voices will be heard. This is another in a long line of indicators demonstrating the weakening power of traditional media.

Gibson and Stephanopoulos must be feeling humbled tonight, though Gibson during tonight’s news show did his best to hide it and remain detached — even though he had become the news and was not just reporting it.

Don’t tell us about Kristen’s MySpace page, link to it

Steve Outing — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:38:53 +0000

It’s beginning to feel like we’re getting somewhere on the issue of mainstream news websites linking outside themselves. Yesterday in a story about Elliot Spitzer’s alleged call-girl hook-up, “Kristen” (aka, Ashley Youmans, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupré), the Times linked to her MySpace page. Hurray!

Linking offsite is a no-brainer for Internet native publishers. But it’s taken a while for mainstream publishers to come around. Perhaps the tide has turned?

There’s also the issue of linking to controversial websites. I noticed yesterday that a story in the Huffington Post about prostitution provided links to two of the biggest legal brothels in Nevada, the Kit Kat Guest Ranch and the Bunny Ranch. Both those websites feature partially nude photos of the ranches’ “girls.” I doubt that NYTimes.com would publish those links.

But I’ve long thought that if a link is particularly newsworthy, it should be made even if highly controversial. Online users only need click over to Google to find a controversial site in a few seconds anyway. I’d rather see news site provide the link, possibly with an intermediary warning page about what the viewer is about to see. Serve the readers; don’t make them jump through unnecessary hoops.