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By Bill, on January 15th, 2010
(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)
Straws in the wind, or a sea change blowing in?
- This past quarter at the New York Times (and my own newspaper and many, many others) circulation surpassed advertising as the dominant revenue source for newspaper operations.
- Advertising revenue for US newspapers showed double digit declines for the 8th consecutive quarter.
- A brand-new Portuguese national daily newspaper is attracting attention – and readers – with a design philosophy that places readers and their daily needs first. Paid circulation jumped by 50 percent within five months of launch.
- But further north, the London Evening Standard – which had a 50p cover price and a circulation in the 250,000 range – announced it was going free and would become a giveaway. They expect circulation to settle in the 600,000 range.
- And lastly, the Dallas Morning News has placed their sports and entertainment editors under general managers who report to the vp of sales and advertising. Down comes the wall.
What’s going on?
I don’t have to tell you that our industry is in the midst of a very, very, messy transition.
Take forty years of declining market share and a decades-old slide in circulation on the one hand, toss in the flight of classified and employment advertising to the web on the other, and then add a nearly world-wide recession into the mix and you have the makings of very rough ride.
It’s causing publishers everywhere to ask some hard questions about who are they really serving, advertisers or readers? Can you truly serve both?
It would seem, from the examples above, that different publishers are arriving at different answers to that question.
I heard a CBC podcast recently, a recording of the 2009 Dalton Camp lecture given by Kenneth Whyte, founding editor of the National Post and author of The Uncrowned King, a look at William Randolph Hearst’s remarkable foray into the New York newspaper business at the end of the 19th century.
In his talk, Whyte pointed out that back in Hearst’s time, when he took on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, newspapers were funded by readers – they lived and died on their circulation revenue, on the pennies and nickels of a vast and fickle readership.
Newspapers did not cloak themselves in objectivity, but rather wore their partisanship proudly.
They fought for their readers daily, chasing scoops and pushing out extra editions in a frantic effort to catch the readers eye. If they succeeded it was because they gave voice to their reader’s fears and foibles, because they championed them and cared for them.
Because they served them.
The rise of mass market advertising, however, supplanted this model with newspapers that strove, not to grab readers by the throat, or to be their voice, but rather to speak blandly to the greatest number of readers, so they could deliver the largest possible market for their advertisers.
Whyte appeared to be saying that the ‘modern’ journalist’s embracing of objectivity is nothing more than making a virtue of a vice.
The dismantling of the advertising driven model – or at least the version we’ve been familiar with for the past several decades – is leading us closer to that earlier model, when newspapers had to serve readers first in order to earn their pennies.
The web – with it’s chaotic jumble of voices, proudly partisan and deeply fractured – sounds in many ways like the New York amid the newspaper wars of the 1890’s. So I don’t know if it’s ironic or sad that virtually every web start-up of the past decade has turned not to their ‘readers’ for their revenue, but to advertisers.
Worth Reading
2009 Dalton Camp Lecture – You can still listen to the CBC podcast at:
Is ‘i’ the future of journalism? The blog of the World’s Editors Forum takes a look at I, the new Portuguese daily newspaper
By Bill, on December 3rd, 2009
(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the Canadian Newspaper Association’s paper, The Publisher)
“Schmuck!”
The red-faced man was sitting high in his SUV, leaning out his window, pointing with one hand, and calling across to us. He was entering the parking lot, we were leaving it. A kind of backwards irony.
 Can the print monster be beaten? He works in pre-press, in imaging; we work on a team that’s rolling out a new, centralized content management system across the whole chain. We’re not too popular this day.
“You schmuck! They’re going to lay off 40 of us, plus another 100 in the newsroom – thanks a lot! Schmuck!” He was half joking, but there was an ugly edge to his voice, and no wonder.
The Toronto Star – the largest daily newspaper in Canada – had just announced that it was considering outsourcing all of it’s print production: copy editing, page building, image services, and pre-press (Printing had already been ‘in-sourced’ to a subsidiary.) The restructuring would trash one out of every three jobs in The Star newsroom.
The new CMS wasn’t the cause of this outsourcing, but it sure will make it easier. So we’re the schmucks. As we drove away, I thought about it.
A newsroom without copy editors? Without page builders?
At last!
I don’t mean to sound joyful at the carnage that’s coming. A decade ago, I was laid off myself in the first-ever round of layoffs at the Toronto Sun, on my birthday, no less; a brutal, life-altering event and one I would never wish on anyone.
But.
But — this has to happen.
Here’s the thing: it turns out you can axe fully one-third of the jobs in the newsroom, hand that work to centralized or even outside agencies, and it will have only minimal impact on your circulation and readership.
Think about that for a second: fully one-third of the newsroom pushed out the door – and life just goes on.
And if that can be done, it will be done – you’ll have no real choice. It’s a brutal, economic imperative.
CanWest and Quebecor have already demonstrated, you can produce large portions of your paper using stand-alone production centres – ones that cost a third or more less than in-house staff.
The truth is, the market now devalues a lot of the skills newspapers were happy to reward with nice fat middle-class lifestyles, or at least were happy to back when our franchises were protected by the multi-million dollar entry fees we call printing presses. Monopolies have a way of distorting things.
Copy editing, page layout and design, image processing, even photography and some forms of reporting -
these skills are either non-critical, or they can easily be replaced by some clever software, a decent spot of training, the judicious use of templates, and simply settling for less — or some combination of these.
That newspapers are embracing these solutions should not be surprising.
We live in an era, in an information-rich society, where news and information has become commoditized and it’s value is rapidly sinking towards zero. It’s increasingly hard to make people pay for their news.
Sadly, we also live in an era where the cost of advertising is also approach zero (because of an oversupply) — it’s hard to find people to pay for their advertising.
This isn’t about a recession; these changes are structural, not merely cyclical. And as such they demand rapid and decisive responses from owners and managers: we need to decide exactly what business we’re in – and it sure ain’t printing and shipping paper.
Seen in this light, the Star’s (still not finalized) move seems almost a belated recognition of the cold hard facts of our new economic model.
There is an economic imperative at play here – and while brutal, it’s cleansing and critical; it allow us to start over, to have a good hard look at what we’re doing.
For example, if you were going to build a newsroom from the ground up today, would you build one where 90% of your newsroom staff (to say nothing of your production team) were involved in something OTHER than the gathering and creation of local news?
Would you? Of course not.
But that lopsided ratio is evident at most daily newspapers in the country – a tiny handful of staff are directly involved in finding and creating local news each day, while the majority spend their days and nights re-packaging wire stories, sports stories that might as well be wire stories, and music, television and movie gossip.
Schmucks indeed.
Worth Reading
Clay Shirkey looks at what we’re asking reporters to work on these days
Jeff Jarvis states what may seem obvious from the outside: the future of journalism is entrepreneurial
Explode the Newsroom – it’s almost six years old now, but this post by Tim Porter still rings with wisdom: write fewer (better) stories; go weekly every day; structure by audience, not topic, and more.
By Bill, on October 17th, 2009
This week I teamed up with an old colleague, Steve Buist of the Hamilton Spectator, to spend a half day or so with editorial staff from the Metroland West community newspapers at their annual Editorial Training Day.
Steve spent an hour and a half offering a highly personalized tour of the web tools he relies on for his – need I say it? – award-winning investigative reporting, with a focus on online court and government documents and databases. Steve has garnered multiple National Newspaper Awards and nominations for his work on topics like the food we eat (A Pig’s Tale), the games we play (Beaten By the Odds) and a series of investigations targeting specific, er, interesting, local businesses and their owners, like Royal Crest Nursing homes, the Great Glasses retail chain and the Grand River Enterprises tobacco empire. Here’s a copy of his slide deck, complete with live links to the web resources he talked about:
For my part I focussed on a discussion about tools community newspapers could use to engage with and reflect the lives of the digital natives in their towns and villages. Newspaper readership among 18-34 year olds is pathetic – and getting more so by the minute. Newspapers used to comfort themselves with the notion that, not to worry, this group would begin to subscribe to and read newspapers as soon as they set down their own roots in the community, as soon as they got married, bought a house and began cutting their own grass.
It hasn’t worked out that way, of course.
I suggested that they and their staffs needed to figure out how to “go where their readers live” online and find ways to engage them there. I focussed on three simple online tools to use: Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, offering cautionary tales about being useful, meeting needs and understanding the online culture before you barge in and start promoting yourself. I also pointed them to some good examples of work their colleagues were already doing in this field, notably New Hamburg Independent’s Facebook fan page and Gord Bowes’ Mountain News twitter account.
We had some energetic discussions about how to use Twitter, what might be the expected ROI (return on investment) for spending that time online, and that old chestnut – quality: i.e. how do you ensure readers photos will be good enough to publish.
Sigh.
Still, about 1/3 the room was already on Twitter (although only a couple were using it professionally) and most everyone was interested in trying out some of the ideas we discussed.
Here’s the slides from my presentation with links to some useful tools (especially for Twitter).
Bill
By Bill, on October 5th, 2009
I originally developed this web writing checklist for my Writing for the Web class in WebU, but am reposting it here today because I’m giving a short seminar on this topic here at the Star. Additionally, one of the best resources for Writing for the Web has to be Jacob Nilson’s collection of posts on [...]
By Bill, on October 3rd, 2009
It’s Wordstock time again. It’s probably Canada’s longest-running annual professional development day for journalists and I got a chance to host two workshops – a panel on place blogging with David Topping of Toronto.ist and Tim Shore of Blog.To and the perennial Top Tools workshop.
I felt pretty ambivalent about the Top Tools piece – I [...]
By Bill, on March 29th, 2009
(Cross posted from ShiftLock, my tech column in the CNA paper, The Publisher)
How much are you spending on your online news site?
Whatever the number – $50,000 or $5,000,000 – think of that number for a second and then answer this question: if someone gave you (insert your big fat number here) to launch and run [...]
By Bill, on December 1st, 2008
(Hint – there’s only one correct answer and it’s got more than 2 letters)
(Cross-posted from Shift Lock, my column in The Publisher)
This past fall thousands of football fans in a dozen U.S. cities sat down to take part in new twist on a familiar ritual — Friday Night Lights, the much-hyped high school gridiron battles [...]
By Bill, on November 3rd, 2008
I took a day away from building our massive, bloody, code-spewing, chain-spanning, content management system to get back to teaching last week and spent some time with the Metroland Editors at their annual “off-site” in Markahm, just outside of Toronto.
I sat in on several sessions and taught one: Citizen Journalism and Community Engagement, the latest [...]
By Bill, on October 1st, 2008
(cross-posted from Shift Lock, my column in The Publisher)
Imagine a simple, free, tool that lets ordinary people broadcast — instantly, to the entire wired world — what they had for lunch, which bus they’re waiting for, or how much they regret having chosen the purple sweater to go with the red skirt this morning.
Imagine thousands [...]
By Bill, on September 21st, 2008
There was a big turnout for Wordstock, the annual journalism conference held at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism in Toronto this past weekend, an encouraging sign in troubled times. Attendees seemed about evenly split between working, full-time journalists, and freelancers, and students. After a morning keynote (which I was lucky enough to deliver) the day [...]
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