I will admit that it’s a bit cheeky quoting myself, but as I was watching the flow of posts and conversation on journalism blogs today, and specifically in response to Adam Tinworth’s excellent post Complexity is the New Reality, I wound up Tweeting “Silver bullets are the talisman of the desperate”. Adam was commenting on a good rant by Paul Bradshaw titled Let’s stop this ‘Curation is King’ crap right now.
…if curation is king in online journalism I guess I missed the coronation. Curation is a usurper, here to distract us from the bloody mess we’re in with the message ‘Business as usual’.
The future of journalism and publishing will not be curation, aggregation, the iPad OR mobile. It will be a strategic mix of these things and more depending on the market and the audience. As Adam says:
There is no easy answer, otherwise we’d have found it after over a decade. Complexity is the new reality. Clichés are just a crutch.
Clichés are much worse than that. Seemingly easy answers too often win internal debates, especially as Paul points out, some of these messages convey that ‘business as usual’ is an acceptable course of action.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about multi-facted digital strategies that are generating growth for both the print and the digital for forward-thinking publications like the Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. The first comment on that post was “one word – iPAD!” The commenter isn’t alone: Mathias Döpfner, the head of German power publisher Axel Springer had this recommendation for his colleagues in the corner office:
Sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry.
That’s the problem. Senior leaders in the industry aren’t looking for strategies, they are looking for a saviour. They want some supernatural – or in lieu of that, legislative – power to turn back the clock, put the genie back in the bottle, tax the internet and go back to the good old days when money just fell from the sky into their coffers. News flash: It’s too late. The good old days aren’t coming back. Anyone who tells you that you can continue doing what you’ve always done and that the solution is easy is lying. They care more about their current position than they do the future of journalism.
In 2007, Xfm ditched its daytime DJs, then axed all the remaining DJs in a shift to a fully automated playlist solution. I had been a loyal Xfm listener since day one in the mid-90s. I had listened on FM, via satellite TV when I left London and was out of signal range, online when I was abroad and then on DAB when Kevin bought me one for Christmas.
When Xfm fired all its DJs I felt betrayed, hurt and disappointed. A station I has supported for years had got rid of the very people who made it special. At the time I said:
The loss of real human DJs – people who care, people who are passionate, funny, interesting, exciting, cute, intelligent, informed, connected – will diminish listeners’ feelings of loyalty to the station. People react most favourably to other people. We like it when a human answers the phone instead of a machine. We prefer to be treated as individuals, not en masse. We want to have conversations with people we like and care about, people that we feel some sort of fellowship with. We don’t connect with people who pop up with an intrusive message for their own little social circle, we simply aren’t wired to care all that much about strangers.
In 2008, NME Radio began. By then I knew Iain Baker, who had been one of my favourite DJs on Xfm, personally and was excited to hear that NME Radio had hired him. Iain is a great DJ with a taste in music that matches mine and a warm, friendly manner that makes him a joy to listen to.
I finally had a replacement for the enfeebled Xfm. NME Radio was fun, full of great music played by great DJs. My radio listening needs were being fully met, even moreso when NME Radio moved on to Twitter so that I could interact with the DJs in a medium that I found convenient. (Although I must say that their use of social media in general was lacking and they could have done a lot more with it had they been bothered to find out how it can all work.)
But today I discovered, several days late due to having guests, that NME Radio have fired all their DJs and are pulling back to become an internet-only radio station. DX Media, who had licensed the NME brand, have decided not to renew that licence, thus leaving NME Radio as a shell of its former self. Says Brand Republic:
The live NME Radio station, launched under licence from IPC Media by Xfm founder Sammy Jacob’s DX Media, is to close after DX Media decided to terminate the arrangement.
NME Radio will stop broadcasting on national DAB and on digital television on Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat, but an automated service will continue online at nme.com/radio while IPC reviews the next stage of development.
Perhaps they weren’t doing well, one might think. Well, it’s true that there weren’t as many ads as you might have expected, but according to Brand Republic, audience size was increasing:
According to the latest Rajar audience-measurement figures for the first quarter of this year, NME Radio had an average of 226,000 listeners a week, up 16.5% year on year and 27.7% quarter on quarter.
Today (14 June), media agencies expressed disappointment about the decision, citing the gold award the station won in the best use of branded content category for its Skins Radio work for Channel 4, as evidence of the station’s progressive approach.
So it would seem that DX Media simply didn’t have the patience to wait for NME Radio to read critical mass, despite the fact that the signs were good. If anything, it looked lie NME Radio was well on the up. The Guardian says:
NME Radio went nationwide on digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio at the end of last year and also broadcast via Sky Digital, Virgin Media, and Freesat.
The station had an average weekly reach of 226,000 listeners in the first quarter of 2010, and just two months ago announced the signing of former Xfm DJ Alex Zane. It launched with a show presented by Ricky Gervais.
Once again, a great radio station has decided that the human voice is unnecessary or too expensive, and that us little sheeplings will continue to listen to an automated service that has all soul and personality of a brick. Well, I for one shan’t. If I want music without interruption, there’s Spotify, Last.fm, my iTunes folder, and a bazillion music blogs and podcasts that can keep me busy.
What I want is to be able to listen to Iain and his colleagues. Their voices gave shape to my day. Like the old town cryer calling “11 o’clock and all is well”, the sound of Iain’s voice was a reminder that I had better be getting on with my morning lest lunchtime creep up on me.
I feel betrayed by NME Radio. Hurt. Angry. I’ve been through the loss of my favourite radio station before when Xfm turned to shit, and this hurts even more because of it.
The strange thing is… just before Xfm lost the plot, it started broadcasting some really dodgy station idents that were repulsively puerile and insulting. They upset listener and DJ alike. I remember being quite shocked when I heard them or heard about them.
Only a few weeks ago, NME Radio started broadcasting dodgy station idents that I found repulsive and insulting. One featured a woman trying to ask her boyfriend to marry her, casting her as a needy, silly, unrealistic bimbo and him as an uncaring, selfish, emotionally unavailable twat more interested in his radio than the feelings of his girlfriend. That’s insulting to both men and women alike, frankly.
So now I’m lost. 6Music seems to be the place that refugees from Xfm and NME now go, but half their DJs bore me and the others drive me up the wall. I am again in the radio wilderness, searching for an indie alt rock home with charismatic and entertaining DJs to keep me company.
UPDATE 18 June 2010: I was pretty cross when I wrote this post. I think NME Radio’s fate reminded me so much of what happened at Xfm and opened up some old wounds. I’ve had an interesting conversation with someone closer to the action than myself, and reading this post back in the light of that additional information, it does sound a bit harsh.
Ultimately, DX Media and IPC were in a tough spot. Starting a new radio station just before the ad industry tanked and global recession set in was a piece of bad luck no one could have foreseen.
I have no reason to doubt the intentions and capabilities of the people at DX Media and IPC who worked on NME Radio. I do still think they could have done better at social media, but these have been testing times for all businesses that rely on advertising. I hope IPC figure a way to continue NME Radio, and perhaps even find the budget to hire back some of the great talent they were forced to let go. Indeed, I shall continue to listen, as they do still have the best playlist in town, and perhaps by remaining loyal through testing times I might help the station survive. One can but hope.
If you walk into a newspaper newsroom, you will hear something said over and over: “You can’t make money online”. It’s closely followed by grumbles of how much the company spends on digital. These are held up as some incontrovertible truth, like carrots help you see better.
Just as ‘carrots help you see better’ was propaganda spread by the British Air Ministry to conceal the military secret of radar, the ‘truth’ that there is no money to be made online is nonsense. It’s unquestioned propaganda in newspaper newsrooms where there is an unnecessary, senseless and ultimately self-destructive battle to keep the newspaper focused on paper, a battle driven by advocates of the primacy of print.
I’m not calling for the presses to be shut off. Rather, I’m calling for innovation in both print and digital. This battle to preserve the past is preventing companies from creating print and digital products that serve 21st Century audiences. Companies that are clear-headed and audience-driven are developing multi-platform strategies that are reversing decades long decline in profits and print circulation while increasing the share of revenue from digital. Those newspapers who remain focused on print are missing that opportunity.
It’s true that print makes the bulk of newspaper revenue, usually around 80%. But in focussing on outdated print strategies newspapers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: By not investing in digital, they ensure that digital revenues remain small in comparison to print.
In the US, Outsell found that in the news segment, largely made up of newspapers, only 11% of their revenues were from digital. In comparison, B2B publishers made 36% of their revenues from digital. Outsell analyst Ken Doctor said, “Simply put, the news industry has so far failed to make the digital transition.”
Although 11% of revenue doesn’t seem a good return, they have to be viewed in context. Print revenues are declining as a decades-long circulation drops no longer make print advertising as attractive. Digital revenues have been increasing, sometimes even through the recession, but it is usually from a very low base.
Commercial departments will also often tell you that it’s just not possible to make money online. In many instances, news organisations have built up huge audiences online but have failed to translate that audience into revenue. They will even refuse to investigate the opportunities afforded by digital on the basis that it would require them to do something different.
Commercial departments who say it’s not possible to make money online need to shoulder their responsibility for their failure to help newspapers make the transition to digital. If the current commercial strategy isn’t working – and old print ad sales strategies are not working very well online – why not try a new one? As the adage goes, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.
There is hope, though. Folio has two great profiles of two publishers re-inventing themselves: The Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. Both profiles dive deep into details of the two different publications.
After rising losses, The Christian Science Monitor shifted from a daily newspaper to a web-first strategy with a weekly news magazine. One thing that stands out in the profile of the Monitor is how much audience research they have conducted and continue to conduct with more than 3,500 readers. They found out why people had stopped taking the newspaper: Cost, lack of time and a shift to getting headlines online. I really liked the way that publisher Jonathan Wells summed up how they re-thought their value proposition:
We had to think long and hard about it. Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’
One thing that jumped out at me was how willing they were to be nimble and to rethink not only how they worked digitally but also their print strategy. As they said, they were able to convert 93% of their print readers from the daily to weekly, and they’ve increased subscriptions by 63% since the shift. Increasing circulation going from 2009 to 2010 is something that most publishers would have killed for. They are not pursuing newsstand sales. They are focused on attracting the “right customers through controlled, targeted growth,” according to senior marketing director Susan Hackney.
They have also increased their page views by 49%, and they are looking to develop a line of digital products. This is all really smart, strategic and refreshing in an industry that seems to be mostly focused on squeezing the last bits of profit out of declining business models. That’s just a taster of an excellent article.
Folio also did an excellent profile of The Atlantic, which is managing to reverse a revenue decline that began in the 1960s. I often say that news organisations need to disrupt their business before someone else does. Atlantic Media president Justin Smith did just that, pushing for a digital-first strategy. From the Folio article:
(Smith) stressed that print is not dead, but taking this approach allowed the company to unlock its grip on traditional revenue sources. Importantly, the Web site’s overhaul was set up as an insurgency on the print brand. “If our mission was to kill the magazine, what would we do?” said Smith, who added that a digital competitor was going to do that anyway, so they did it themselves.
They are projecting that digital will account for 39% of their revenue in 2010. They not only shifted to digital first, but they also took a novel marketing approach, setting up their own marketing services division in an effort to differentiate themselves from ad networks. I’ll leave you to read the rest of the article, and I’ll give you one last reason to read the rest. After decades of decline, they looking at a profitable fourth quarter of 2010 and a multi-million profit in 2011.
To reposition themselves, these publications are looking for innovation from both print and digital but with a digital first strategy. The Monitor is using audience research to deliver products more relevant to their audiences, and they are thinking clearly about where they need to go and how nimble they need to be to achieve success.
We can rebuild businesses to support quality journalism, and here are two examples that show a few options for the way forward.