This may be the year that we see a major metro newspaper file for bankruptcy. According to the Newsosaur blog, newspaper shares have slid $23 billion in 6 months.
These stocks are so cheap that it’s a perfect opportunity for an angel investor - a technology guru, perhaps - to buy these companies and take them private. The days of 25 percent profit margins in the newspaper industry are long gone and aren’t coming back.
Paging Craig Newmark…
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: newspapers, stocks
Okay, so layoffs stink.
But in St. Louis, there’s an interesting experiment by former Post-Dispatch staffers, taking a page from folks in Chicago.
…the Platform’s been given offices at the local public TV station, KETC, whose CEO, Jack Galmiche, says: “We’re creating a new model between a public television station and an online daily news source.” Adds Freivogel: “We’ll go down the road of doing things together and seeing where it leads.” Staffers will appear on camera, bringing the site to the attention of the public—at least the sliver of the public that watches public television.
When talk in mainstream journalism is of death spirals, “to be in the midst of something being born is fantastic,” says Freivogel. Twenty years ago you all might have decided to start another paper, I say. “But it costs so much to do that,” she replies. “Here the cost of getting in the game is pretty modest”—about $26,000 to set up shop, she estimates.
If you have $26,000 you wouldn’t mind parting with, please email saveourpress.org. 
Seriously.
Categories: Business
Tagged: newspapers, Post-Dispatch, Beacon
In February, a blog suggested the trend for top US newspaper websites was one of decline. The picture gets fuzzier now that the March numbers are in on “time spent per visitor” on newspaper websites. Some call this the “stickiness” factor. It’s another way of measuring web traffic besides the number of visitors (”unique audience”). It’s not necessarily quality versus quantity, but that’s one way to think about the difference between the two metrics.
You’d think with all the presidential hoopla, especially the furious competition between the two Democratic hopefuls, that national newspaper outlets providing blanket coverage would do well on this measure. And some did. The Politico almost tripled the average time spent per visitor in March compared to a year earlier.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also gained, but The Washington Post, USA Today and Los Angeles Times lost ground. Can’t say if it’s related to coverage of the presidential race or not, but it’s one theory. Keep in mind that The Politico has a dedicated core of news junkies, whereas the readers of the other sites are more heterogeneous in interests.
Among the major metro papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Houston Chronicle saw the biggest gains in time per visitor. Most major metros saw declines in time spent, including a huge drop for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Editor & Publisher published the March 2008 and March 2007 data from Nielsen NetRatings. I’ve culled the figures for the biggest gainers and losers. Time spent is noted in hours:minutes:seconds. First column of figures is for March 2008, second is March 2007.
| Gainers | ||
| The Politico | 0:15:11 | 0:05:52 |
| Houston Chronicle | 0:28:41 | 0:19:48 |
| Seattle Post-Intelligencer | 0:11:18 | 0:06:07 |
| Wall Street Journal | 0:14:49 | 0:11:18 |
| New York Times | 0:37:14 | 0:33:48 |
| Losers | ||
| Atlanta Journal Constitution | 0:11:23 | 0:28:45 |
| USA Today | 0:11:26 | 0:17:50 |
| Boston Globe | 0:11:40 | 0:16:23 |
| San Francisco Chronicle | 0:10:13 | 0:14:41 |
| Chicago Tribune | 0:07:16 | 0:11:06 |
Data for The Seattle Times wasn’t included in the E&P report. I’ve sent an email to the journal to find out why. The San Jose Mercury News was left off the top newspaper websites list in the February data, so this seems to have something to do with a cut-off for making the top 30 by some metric.
But the overall decrease in time spent at newspaper websites is part of a broader trend in declining time spent at web portals in general as RSS and other widgets allow users to pull content to them. In other words, the whole damn iceberg is breaking up.
Categories: Business
Tagged: newspapers, Nielsen, stickiness, time spent, web traffic
It’s not surprising, but the hard numbers are in…
WASHINGTON — After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the latest American Society of Newspapers Editors’ annual census (http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=6936) leads with a bombshell. Fulltime professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year, a drop of 4.4% to a total of 52,600.
Categories: Business
Tagged: employment, newspapers
The MediaShift Idea Lab is a great site for the discussion on how community news could be reinvented to meet the needs of the 21st century. Paul Grabowitz, the assistant dean and director of the new media program at the UC-Berkeley j-school recently posted some thoughts I found hopeful and refreshing. Here’s an excerpt I especially liked:
It’s not the ideal of great journalism that people reject, but something about the way we produce and package it that’s broken. That’s something on which the public and now perhaps most journalists both seem to agree.
What could a new journalism product look like that might appeal to people and be true to the ideals of informing the public about important issues and nurturing democracy?
It would be a product focused on connecting, something others on this blog have mentioned.
Empty the newsrooms for a week or a month, and have reporters and editors - and even ad sales people - connect with people in the community and talk with them about their lives and what they say they want and need.
Then use all the tools of digital technology to connect people with the information that best meets those needs, whether it’s a database or a map mashup, a guide to local businesses or a space for sharing content.
Then nurture online communities and social networks to connect people to each other and to us, and uncover new connections.
And finally connect those topics and conversations with the larger public policy issues that underlie all of that, but often in subtle ways.
So great journalism wouldn’t be served up as a sermon. Instead investigative articles and in-depth contextual stories would be the end product of a new, bottom-up relationship with the public.
And that might be a product on which a new business model can be built, by selling it to advertisers who want to go where audiences go or selling it to readers who value what we are offering them. And it might be something nonprofits could support, not to preserve the past but to serve democracy and the public interest with a product in which the public is interested.
I agree with what Grabowitz has written. I hope some news entrepreneurs don’t look at the “give ‘em what they want” philosophy as an excuse for pumping bizarre, titillating news stories from far and near. These stories happen. But how we play them can say a lot about who we are. To its credit, seattletimes.com didn’t play up a story about a man who died after having sex with a horse; the blogosphere found it, however, and it became the number-one story on the entire website for 2006. (And the story has bred a movie.)
While I agree with the “give ‘em what they want” philosophy as Grabowitz has laid it out, I wonder whether it will contribute to the continued shrinking of foreign news coverage. Focus groups routinely show that Americans place a low priority on international news coverage. And yet, most of our pressing issues in the news today are tightly linked with what’s happening overseas. Americans need to know what people in the Middle East are saying about us and why. We need to know how our trade policies affect businesses here and in other countries. We can’t just rely on the Brits or the Canadians or journalists from other nations to tell us what’s going on. This is where responsible news media satisfy their obligation to be acting in the public interest and filling a need that isn’t profitable, but important to our right to know.
I suspect that we need to be doing a better job of packaging stories from abroad for our readers — and be willing to partner with other news organizations if necessary to fund compelling enterprise about issues that affect an entire region. One of the best stories I’ve ever read was part of a 1998 series in The Oregonian called “The French Fry Connection” that explained the globalization of the economy by tracing back a french fry’s journey from the potato fields. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
As always, there’s a balancing act that I think responsible news media try to maintain between the customer-service model and the public-interest model. The pendulum is swinging toward the customer-service model.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: newspapers, social networks, mashups, media lab
The New Yorker headline says it all:
Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper
I’ve been wanting to make a documentary on this crisis for about a year now. Anyone interested in sharing their story on camera?
The New Yorker piece seems anticlimatic, given we’ve been reading and hearing about this for years. But here’s one chunk that jumped out at me:
Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”
And later…
At the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti explains, the editors “stand behind our front page” and do their best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.
…This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports from New Orleans that some people there were “eating corpses to survive.” When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere.
It’s amazing that only one in five Americans believe what they read in print. And yet it’s the blogs that take what newspapers find and chew it like cud, spinning it, stretching it and breaking it down until it meets their needs.
Categories: Journalism
Tagged: bloggers, democracy, Huffington Post, New Yorker, newspapers
Events last week delivered a swift kick in the pants in case I was feeling more confident about newspapers’ fiscal health.
We’ve heard over and over the soothing mantra from our leaders that our overall readership — print and web — is the best it’s ever been and growing, even though print circulation is dropping. Well, online advertising revenue is slowing down and in some cases dropping.
All I know is that if newspapers can’t offset their loss of print revenue with gains in online revenue, we’re screwed. And right now, it looks like we’re screwed.
Tangent: I love The Wall Street Journal’s The Numbers Guy blog. The author, Carl Bialik, is a columnist who writes about how numbers are misused in the news. His blog is an effective prod to lazy journalists and a counterweight to the marketing machines that spin statistics and data for their own advantage.
So he pounced on The Newspaper Association of America on Valentine’s Day, picking apart its feel-good press release that 2007 was “a banner year” for U.S. newspaper web sites, reaching a monthly average of 60 million American adults.
Bialik asked the critical question, “Did newspaper web sites increase their market share of adults’ total time on the web?” We all know that adults are spending more time on the web, uploading to YouTube, downloading from iTunes, and offloading their spleen onto a blog. So we would expect the number of adults visiting newspaper web sites to increase as they spend more time online. The key is whether their minutes viewing newspaper web sites grew faster than their total minutes on the web.
To answer the question, Bialik asked Nielsen Online for the monthly average unique Internet audience, Web page views, pages per person and time per person for each year from 2004 to 2007. He then calculated monthly averages for newspaper sites for each year using NAA’s numbers.
The market size has been fairly stable: The number of American adults online each month has barely grown — from 150 million in 2004 to 159 million in 2007, according to Nielsen Online.
U.S. newspaper Web sites have increased their market share about 38 percent over the four-year period, Bialik found, or nearly 10 percent annually. That’s the good news.
But because American adults spent more time on the web and viewed more web pages in 2007 compared with 2004, newspapers’ performance wasn’t all that impressive, Bialik reported. “The average Web user loaded 51 percent more Web pages in 2007 than three years earlier, and spent 23 percent more time online. The equivalent increases for newspaper Web sites were just 24 percent and 20 percent, respectively. So newspapers were losing share of the average reader’s total Web activity.”
This doesn’t seem unusual, though. American adults are growing more sophisticated in their Web adventures.
Like a freshman in college, Joe Q. Public may not have had the confidence on the Web in 2004 to go beyond reading his favorite newspaper online. Four years later, he’s the Big Man On Campus, comfortable with its alleys, stairwells and backdoors. When he goes on the Web, he has a richer online experience in mind. Maybe he starts with the newspaper’s web site, but he also checks e-mail, reads a blog or two, posts to his own blog, checks the restaurant review where he’s meeting a client for lunch, and wanders around a three-dimensional virtual world called Second Life.
I don’t see how newspapers can increase their share of people’s time unless they add modules to their web sites that give people certain functions and services they now have to go elsewhere to find. Newspaper web sites, it seems, need to think of themselves more as “department stores” than simply “newsstands,” and be constantly innovating to keep their audience engaged.
Otherwise, Joe Q. Public may head for the exits.
Which newspaper web sites do you like coming back to several times a day, and why? (”It’s my job” isn’t the answer I’m looking for.) Post your comments!!
Categories: Business
Tagged: Bialik, Crosscut, metrics, newspapers, Nielsen, Seattle Times
DEAR BLOGOSPHERE,
Do you care about the news?
Do you care about democracy?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to either question, then you should care about the health and independence of your local newspaper.
We are witnessing the slow death of newspapers in America, and with them, public-service journalism.
Public-service journalism is finished if current trends continue. Yes, I know the newspaper publishes an online edition, but that strategy hasn’t been enough to stop its slide.
Our press is built on strong metro newspapers. Local television and radio take their cues from newspapers. National newspapers rely on metro newspapers for trends, local sources and investigations of local and state institutions.
The entire news ecosystem begins to collapse when metro newspapers go into decline. Corrupt public officials and corporations win.
Join me in brainstorming about whether anything can be done to save our press.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Journalism, news media, newspapers, press
Save our Press