Category Archives: Innovation

07.21.08
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Name calling isn’t going to get us anywhere

The discussion on how to save newspapers – or I would say newspaper-style reporting regardless of the platform – is getting bogged down in mutual recriminations and some good old-fashioned name-calling. Journalists are blaming management, saying that ‘they’ didn’t change quickly enough as if journalists bear no responsibility in the slow pace of change in the industry. ‘Curmudgeons’ and ‘dinosaurs‘ are fighting with ‘young journalists‘, digital enthusiasts and digital pioneers.

I agree with John Zhu that “stereotypes, labels, and close-mindedness” don’t produce a constructive debate. We know that we need get past this and get to work building a multi-platform business that will support quality journalism. However, I started hearing John’s argument in various forms about a year ago which run along the lines that digital pioneers can be as close-minded as the ‘curmudgeons’ that they rail against. A journalism professor put it to me that digital pioneers had been part of a start-up culture and now were resisting integration as much as the ‘curmudgeons’ were resisting a digital future.

I think something more complicated is going on, and I feel a false sense of objectivity and balance in John’s post. I think it obscures the political conflict taking place in newspapers as they struggle towards integration. As Steve Yelvington said to me last year, the people with the most digital experience have the least political capital in their organisations. As I’ve argued, real integration can’t be about traditional editors just folding digital divisions into their empires. That’s not to say that digital editors should be atop the org chart either. Multiple-platform journalism requires a different editorial organisation, and that is bound to create political conflict. Some of the conflict spilling out onto journalism blogs reflects these wrenching changes that news organisations are going through. You can see it in the recent ‘axing’ of three digital executives at the San-Diego Union Tribune.

Also, although John spends more time and slightly more emphasis on comments directed towards ‘curmudgeons’, I would say that the abuse that he saw hurled toward Jessica da Silva by veteran journalists isn’t isolated to comments on blogs. The commenter Robert Knilands (aka Wenalway) may seem your run-of-the-mill troll, but he expresses a virulent form of prejudice too frequently directed towards online and young journalists by some – and I stress, only some – print journalists. Robert Knilands says:

It can’t survive, though, as long as young journos are getting opportunities they are unqualified for and posting ignorant blog entries. All that does is destroy the present and the future.

We’re not going to get anywhere by eating our young. But seriously, I’ve heard this myself through the years in various forms implicit and explicit. I recently had a senior figure in British journalism ask me whether I was a production person or a ‘techie’ as if I couldn’t be both technically proficient and a competent journalist. If the ‘dinosaur’ label is used in anger, it has a context and a history. Sometimes it is used in the form of return of fire, not just a snipe coming out of nowhere.

Having said that, I agree with John. Name-calling only delays achieving the change that we need to prevent more newspapers from failing.

My best work has come in collaboration with print, radio and television journalists, and we collaborated well because we approached the work from a position of mutual respect. Let’s bury the hatchet and move on to the future together.

07.20.08
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What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?

In the daily flood of links that stream by me via RSS or Twitter, I noticed a post by Mark Schaver, the computer-assisted reporting director of the Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, in which he challenged the view of newspaper executives as short-sighted and out-of-touch. He pointed to a couple of projects in the US, Videotex and Knight-Ridder’s early investment in Netscape (then Mosaic). Mark said that calling news execs short-sighted and lacking in vision is overly simplistic.

What I am saying is that powerful economic forces, forces that are vastly more complicated than the simplistic drivel about newspaper curmudgeons and their resistance to change, are behind the news industry’s malaise today.

I agree with him. It is overly simplistic.

However, Videotex is a fine example of a disastrous technical project driven by the newspaper industry. The system was too slow, cost too much and didn’t provide anything that couldn’t be found easier in some other form. As often happens in the US, the FCC failed (or refused) to set a standard, hoping that the market would sort it out, and NTSC – the North American television standard – on which some of these projects were run provided too low of resolution to read text on televisions unlike the Ceefax system on the higher resolution PAL video standard in the UK. Maybe it was ahead of its time, and it’s definitely before my time. But I’ve never heard anyone in the industry hold up Videotex as an example of how to do a technical project.

Knight-Ridder was forward looking. They grasped a lot of the innovations early, partially because of their presence in San Jose. They even moved their headquarters from Miami to San Jose to plug into the new media revolution. In 1990, Robert Ingle, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News wrote a memo that sounds eerily similar to the strategy that most newspapers are following now:

Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising.

Knight-Ridder were part of the New Century Network, which was supposed to position the newspaper industry for the 21st Century. But there is a but. As BussinessWeek reported of the Network on its closure in 1998:

In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ”New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America’s Newspapers” awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating. ”They built a business and nobody came,” says David Morgan, president of the online ad agency Real Media Inc.

The reception was the first public humiliation for New Century Network, but only one in a series of blunders that culminated in the company’s abrupt shutdown on Mar. 10 (1998). Created in 1995 to unite newspapers against Microsoft Corp. and other competitors girding to woo electronically advertisers and readers, New Century Network came to embody everything that could go wrong when old-line newspapers converge with new media.

Knight-Ridder should have been leaders in how to do it right. As Matt Marshall wrote in 2006 as Knight-Ridder was on the eve of ceasing to exist:

The real irony of this situation is that for 15 years KRI was, by far, the most innovative newspaper company in the country, including its early experiments in teletext and having the first online newspaper (the Mercury News on AOL in the mid 90s).

But as Matt says in the title of his post, sometimes innovation is not enough. Newspapers continued to be newspapers, just online, as he and most of us have said over the last decade. It is proving for some newspapers a fatal mistake, although one that many of us saw years ago. And I’d agree with Matt that it’s easier to imagine a new entrant making the changes necessary to survive in this new world rather than an established newspaper.

As my friend and former colleague Alf Hermida points out from Readership Institute data, people do not have the same connection with their local newspaper websites that they do (or possibly did) with their local newspapers.

Obviously, something isn’t quite working when it comes to newspapers, ‘new’ media’ and innovation. As Mark Schaver is correct to point out, this is probably not for lack of trying at some newspapers. I know that a lot of journalists are exhausted and frustrated by reorganisations, restructurings and new strategies. I ask the following question not pretending that I have all of the answers but because I’d really like to hear people’s experience: What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?

Two years ago, Steve Yelvington wrote a post after hearing someone refer to “NCN nostalgia”, NCN being New Century Network. He said a few things that might speak to my question:

  • “But there was something else at work: technology was evolving faster than anyone’s business vision.”
  • “The notion that a we-tell-you news cartel would be relevant in a conversational universe may already be obsolete.”

The newspaper industry hasn’t adapted to the pace of news online or the pace of technological change. More than that, I think Steve is right that business vision hasn’t kept pace with technology. In the wake of the newspapers ‘are worth fighting for‘ discussion kicked off by Jessica DaSilva, Pulitzer winner John McQuaid said:

Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords.

Newspapers have only recently woken up that the real competitive threat isn’t from other newspapers or print media, not even from TV but from new digital businesses that might not have even existed a few years ago. Even though Robert Ingle and others saw the competitive threat 18 years ago, there has not been a sense of urgency until the last 18 to 24 months.

However, unlike John McQuaid, I would argue the over-cautious nature of journalism change is not just about boardroom conservatism. Print newsrooms are some of the most conservative places you’ll find. Journalists are paid sceptics (some might say cynics), and they approach their own business with that mix of scepticism and cynicism.

Some things have changed since Robert Ingle wrote his prescient memo on his Apple ][ in 1990. In the 1990s, tech was expensive, and I heard a lot of journalists argue that the internet was a money sink not a money maker. There was some truth to that, but very few disruptive technologies have a clear business model at the beginning. Did Google have a magical money-spinning idea with search? No, not until AdSense. But now, smart technology buys and clever use of open-source technologies can bring the cost of failure down to almost the petty cash level. Just look under the hood of Google’s massive data centres and you’ll find lots of commodity hardware lashed together with a lot of open-source technologies.

The newspaper industry also still seems to be thinking in industrial terms. Too many of the strategies I see are huge, heavy, expensive strategies instead of light-weight, nimble and low cost digital strategies. By the time the strategies are in place, the state of the art and, more importantly, audiences have already moved on. More importantly, you can attack the business model problem from two fronts. You can find new ways to make money, but you can also find new ways to make high-quality, compelling content with less money and not just with less staff.

Things are changing. A few newspaper companies are making the investments in flexible, scalable technology to prepare them for the future. They are getting serious about developing new income streams. They are freeing their content and taking it to where the audience is instead of forcing the audience to come to destination sites. But for some newspapers, it’s too late.

What would you do and what are you doing to ramp up the pace of change at your company?

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07.01.08
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Newsknitter: Knitting together the daily news agenda

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Ebru Kurbak / Mahir M. Yavuz: Newsknitter

It’s another day where I’m looking for ways to visualise huge bits of information for a project that I’m working on, and I stumbled upon the Newsknitter project.

News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data. ….

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater.

It’s the brainchild of Turkish artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz. From the Generator.x website and conference:

The Newsknitter web site does not indicate whether custom garments will eventually be for sale, even though it would seem an obvious extension of the project. Too bad the daily news typically makes for a grim way to commemorate one’s birthday or other significant date.

It reminds me of CNN headline T-shirts, but this is much, much cooler. With such products easier to make, it’s odd that news organisations aren’t thinking more about interesting products based on their information. Oh well, back to looking for data visualisations.

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06.12.08
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Information is only scarce if you live in a bubble

Just back from a week with Suw and our families at my home in the US, and I’ve had some space and time to think about things in a more considered way that I usually have time to in London. Via FriendFeed and a room there on Digital Journalism set up by Adam Tinworth, I stumbled upon an interesting post by Kristine Lowe asking whether you would rather marry a blogger or a journalist. The post has kicked off a fascinating discussion raising a number of issues in journalism. Craig McGinty had this pithy observation:

There are still many journalists who live in the land of scarcity, where information is something to be controlled, unaware that 99% of the time it’s like water and many others are drinking from the same trough.

Journalists are under the misguided belief that information is scarce because they often live in informational silos of their own making. They only read “serious” journalism from other publications and seem to have completely missed the information explosion of the last 20 years with multi-channel television and the internet. It’s only down to their narrow professional focus that they miss the fundamental fact that most people are trying to cope with a dizzying choice for information.

Journalists have only belatedly woken up to this reality as their jobs are threatened, and the institutional response seems to have got bogged down in arguments about quality, fact versus opinion and a fundamentalist construction of what is news. For too many journalists, anything outside of a narrow, overly institutional definition of news is banal and unworthy of coverage. And just as Clyde Bentley of the University of Missouri says that most journalists are poor judges of banality, I’m increasingly of the view that they are also poor judges of fact versus opinion. For many journalists, “opinion” is pejorative shorthand for “something not written by a journalist”.

Once one realises that information scarcity isn’t the issue but attention is the new scarce resource, then the role of journalist as gatekeeper is irrelevant. The question then shifts to: What is the value that journalists add to this sea of information? The answer cannot simply be to add more information. The answer also can’t be that the journalist is simply a better or cleverer writer. Look at information choices, and quality and cleverness often don’t cut through the noise. What is the value that a journalist adds? Answer that question and maybe we can move beyond the rut that discussions about journalism are stuck in and develop a business model to support journalism and journalists.

(Want to see value added journalism? See the Des Moines Register excellent package on a tornado that devastated the town of Parkersburg on 25 May, 2008.)

05.15.08
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Future of News: The Medium’s New Message

  • Markus Prior, assistant professor of politics and public affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University
  • JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the social media group.
  • Ed Tenner, historian and author

Again, this is a rush transcript. I will correct as time allows.

Markus Prior will be talking about the changes in information technology and the implications for news and democracy. The audience for network news in the US has dropped in share from 75 to 38 in 2004, and the Nielsen ratings has fallen from 38 to 18 from 1980 to 2005. There was a decline beginning in the mid-80s to the present of about 50%. Pundits and academics look at this slide and draw two conclusions.

  1. Television news consumption is down.
  2. Americans are worse off. They are less engaged.

Both conclusions are wrong but oft repeated. They say that Americans are not interested in the news and cynical about news and the political process. There was this golden age and the ‘greatest generation’ and that is over.

However, political interest has not trended down. People are not necessarily more cynical. Trust has declined a little bit. These individual level explanations have relatively to do with this decline. In the first part of the decline, we lived in a very different world. The more convincing explanation of this decline have to do with changes in the environment.

At the beginning of this decline, the network news had a captive audience. There were fewer options in media than there are today. The big explanation in this decline is that there is so much else there. The surprise is how high the network news audience was. It was because it was the only show in town. They came home to relax. Turned on the TV, and news was all that was on.

Markus then looked at consumption level of television news. Sunday show watching and evening network news have declined a little bit, but cable news has increased in weekly hours per household in television viewing. Television news is still alive. It just looks different than in the past. It is hard to get a sense of what the news audience is. Print circulation is down but online news reading is up. We don’t quite know the trends that are relevant.

There is something that we do know. Fewer Americans are contributing to the total than in the past. For some, news consumption has gone up. How do what understand the difference that this would make in politics. Let’s forget about measuring news exposure and instead ask people what they like. In the low choice environment, preferences don’t matter, but today, preferences are very important. News junkies are more intelligent than those who prefer entertainment but only if they have access to new media. He explains that in this Washington Post article:

Greater access to media, ironically, has reduced the share of Americans who are politically informed. The most significant effect of more media choice is not the wider dissemination of political news but mounting inequality in political involvement. Some people follow news more closely than in the past, but many others avoid it altogether.

There is increasing inequality in political involvement. Americans are using the access to greater access to information in different ways. News consumption, political knowledge and turnout can vary even in the absence of preference change.

Is this good or bad? You could argue that most people are better off. But are they using these new opportunities that hurt their personal interest? The answer depends.

Let me conclude, the good news is that there is a chunk of people – maybe 15-20% you can call news junkies – can become more knowledgeable and use that information. To the extent that more and more people play a role in keeping elected officials to account, that is good. This might actually work. The pessimistic scenario is that the news junkies, those who do the monitoring may, in fact, not be very representative of the rest of the population. News junkies look demographically like the people who prefer entertainment. News junkies tend to be slightly older. There are no gender, racial or ethnic or income difference. There is one difference. News junkies tend to be more partisan.

I don’t know if we’re closer to optimistic or pessimistic view, but the easy answers are too easy.

JD Lasica

The thrust of my talk is how the news media need to re-invent themselves for the digital age. He used to work at the Sacramento Bee and then went to work for Microsoft. I can’t tell you the difference between working in newspapers and working in the tech industry could not be more extreme. There has been more change in the past five years in media than in the past 50 years. He showed his five-year-old, and he said that they relate to media in totally different ways. I wrote in my book Darknet, you have to look at the people who are coming of age now and you are looking at the future.

He uses his son as a lab rat as to how he relates to the media. It’s totally different in terms of game play and how he uses TiVo.

News is everywhere and on demand. Before people got their news from a few sources: Network news and newspapers. Now, the news media has become more fragmented. If you’re a web publisher, you don’t only have to worry about website but RSS, networked digital TV, traditional cable and electronic newspapers.

He played a video about alternative media sources that did a rapid fire example of all of the media that is happening online. And he said that we don’t see this on newspaper websites.

We are seeing a mass movement of niche media. Blogging, amateur video (YouTube is three years old, and 85m people are watching 4.3bn YouTube videos a month), citizen journalism. In video world, people are creating webisodes, screencasts, stop motion photography and mash-ups.

He suggested going out into the internet archive and Creative Commons licenced video to create videos. He suggested that people could do this in your community. He gave a list of media tools.

There is a new model of peer-produced news. He showed Live in Baghdad, but they are about to close because they don’t have funding. They capture first person stories. (I was just wondering if this isn’t a model of new digital free lancing.) You can now form these new ad-hoc collaborative groups to create video that is really amazing and compelling.

Where is all this heading?

  • Continued trivilisation of news by traditional media. I’ve been increasingly upset by trivialisation during this election cycle. I think there will continue to be a race to the bottom.
  • I am going to predict that half of all daily newspapers will disappear in 15 years. What’s going to take the place of this journalism?
  • We’re seeing increased fragmentation of media sphere.
  • I think social media will be a big part of how traditional media can play a part to re-engage with their audiences.
  • We’re going to see more opinion journalism, niche and hyper-local news
  • There is a more of a threat to legacy business models.
  • Journalism as a career path is more challenging.

On the flight over here, I was reading time magazine. Joe Klein said:

The media tend to look into the rear-view mirror and see the future.

We need to take media executives to Silicon Valley and immerse them in start-up culture. We need to create innovation labs and skunkworks. We need to collect that work and put it under public domain licence. We need to look at geo-tagging, map mash-ups. Your readers live in their communities. There are ways that people intersect in their communities. There are interesting ways to use those social graphs. Dare to fail. Everybody fails but all they do is start over again. They are more willing to experiment. News is a process and a service, not a finished product. We’re going to have to re-examine “professional journalism” precepts especially objectivity and exclusivity. Smaller and more nimble news operations will be necessary.

Note: JD Lasica has done an interview with Ed Felten, one of the hosts of the conference and also a security expert who has done a lot of work to reform electronic voting.

Ed Tenner

We just heard about rear view mirrors, and I’m afraid as an historian, that’s what I’m about. I’d like to look at the attempts in the 1990s of attempts to view future on the web.

In 1995, I spoke at a meeting for Annenberg Washington programme. The opening speech was given by Edwin Diamond, and he gave the internet boom to the space reporting he once did. The boom in space reporting was down to the ample advertising from the aerospace industry. The current boom in the 1990s was also driven by hope that there would of advertising revenue of reporting on it. The real question of newspapers and news magazines. How did they get it so wrong? They were very optimistic at the time. If you look at circulation and advertising in the late 90s, they seemed to be right. What happened to the profits?

I’m not a specialist in web advertising. I’d like to give a few reflections on what might have happened to that. In field I work, book publishing, the web hasn’t had an impact. There have been fewer innovations than people expected.

I view this as a revelation not a revolution. The crisis of middle class magazines preceded the crisis in newspapers.

One trend I see is the de-centralisation of authority. I see growing economic inequality, but there has been a softening in respect for many professions and including the profession of journalism. There once were personalities in the media who had respect and awe and were common bases of discussion. Today’s commentators have fan bases but not the kind of broad cultural authority that network news anchors once had. The legacy of the question authority bumper stickers in the 1960s. It even has happened in the medical profession. Doctors used to be the gold standard of respect, but now people are taking medicine into their own hands such as alternative medicine and homeopathy. He talked about the fall of Arthur Andersen. Many great authoritative institutions have weakened themselves.

Journalism was late the movement towards professionalism. Missouri School of Journalism was founded in 1908. Medill School founded in 1921. It’s not just the erosion of respect for authority but also people taking things into their own hands. Professional standards do sometimes give people the impetus to live up to those standards. We do lose something with that.

In the middle of the century, there was less of an effort to make a distinction between high and low culture. There was an irreverent mixture of things. Later in the century, people in the city made an effort to elevate high school (my words, not Mr Tenner’s). In the post-war affluence, there has been inversion in the cultural norms and even age. The young drive ad campaigns in an effort to reach young consumers.

What can we draw from these trends? A lot of changes are needed. But let’s look at comparative advantage. Newspaper and other print media have to focus on those services that they can do better than other information sources: On the audiences they can server and the advertisers to reach them. The other approach could be described as the outside-in. Sometimes the best ideas come from people outside of the traditional background.

One great hope for the press is that online revenue could rise to offset decline in print revenues. A hundred years ago, you could open up newspapers and magazines and find fears of excessive reading. Book and newspaper reading was corrupting society. It was distracting young people from productive careers. It was harming eyesight. But what goes go can also come up again.

Q: There was a question about political polarisation.

A: Markus Prior: News junkies are more partisan, but you are losing the moderating influence of those who don’t participate. However, I believe that the red/blue divide is overblown. The people who care less are tuning out.

News consuming is done by fewer Americans. Fewer Americans are consuming more news.

Q: One of the symptoms of our discussion is tied to delivery platform of TV. He gave the example of video being consumed on other platforms such as YouTube. But the news and information might be consumed on other platforms.

A: Difficult to answer that question. Basically, he had to narrow things down to find a relevant question to answer. (That is a brutal paraphrase.)

Q: Is this just re-purposing content on new platform? Is it really about blowing up your website?

A: Most of interesting experiments coming outside of traditional media world. Digg. TechCrunch.

Q: Impact of new media on candidates.

A: JD Lasica: Barack Obama has social networking ability on his site. If you remember his speech after the Rev Wright blow up on religious tolerance, the reporters who followed this speech asked where are the sound bites. Obama decided to treat the audience like grown-ups. More than three or four million people watched this on YouTube instead of having to rely on traditional filter of media. Postive development, and it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Ed Tenner: Aspect of campaign that has fascinated me, unintentional soundbite. People run these sound bites as a loop. I wonder if people will be focused on not giving opposition sound bites that can be used this way. Obama’s famous ‘bitter’ remark was leaked by blogger favourable to him in a meeting that was supposed to be off the record.

Q: They say that politics is theatre for ugly people. Writers strike in Hollywood so people wanted to be entertained.

A: Markus Prior: Most important fact why so many more young people care and why debates attracted more audiences is why so exciting, for the first time in primary election two candidates so evenly matched that this can go on for so long.

Q: How do writers get paid?

Panelists said that paid writing is not going away.

JD Lasica: Anyone in your 20s considering going into journalism, I say: We need you. You also have to realise that you won’t be at same news organisation for 20 years. You’ll have to be nimble. You might want to start a niche blog. I make some money with my blog, but I make more money in speaking and consulting.

Mark Davis from the San Diego Union-Tribune said that journalists need to learn how to do video in some form and be able to tell a story in some way.

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05.15.08
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Future of News: Data Mining, Visualization and Interactivity

I felt that it would be inconsiderate to the other panelists to live blog my own panel, but here is my presentation. And here are some links that I used in creating the presentation.

I’ll add some more after the panel is done including some links to Matt Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs and David Blei with the Department of Computer Science at Princeton.

Matt showed some excellent visualisations of the connections between bloggers as well as some very fascinating graphs showing the blog buzz about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the clear inflection point in January after his win in the Iowa caucuses. Fascinating stuff.
David showed some excellent examples of the automated analysis of of text such as a magazine’s archive, the Huffington Post and the political blogs Daily Kos and RedState. I think there is an opportunity here for news organisations to use these techniques to do some data-mining of their own archives, both for their readers and themselves.
It was a great panel, and we had a great discussion with the audience. Thanks to everyone involved.

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05.14.08
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Future of News: Economics of News

  • Gordon Crovitz, recently retired publisher, Wall Street Journal
  • Mark Davis, vice president of strategy, San Diego Union-Tribune
  • Eric Alterman, distinguished professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, professor of journalism, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Caveat as before. This is a rush transcript.

Gordon Crovitz. When David told me that this panel was the economics of news, I wondered if this was a yes/no question. We’re 10 years into the digital revolution, and in a deadline driven business, we’re just asking this question.

He told a story. His young son threw sand into the waves for 20 minutes, hoping that that waves would change. They didn’t. Reminds him of news executives. Three things affecting news, not in good ways.

  • Technology changing news consumption.
  • Technology driving new business models but not address high fixed costs of old model such as paying journalists to create content.
  • Changes moving at rapid but unpredictable pace.

The newspaper had a business model that hadn’t changed for three generations. In Silicon Valley, the first law of technology is that we over-estimate change in the short term but under-estimate it in the long term. He pointed to web 1.0 and said that after the crash, many executives breathed a sigh a relief that they had dodged the change. They didn’t realise that the web continued to evolve and consumer behaviour continue to change even after the crash.

He talked about the laying of an undersea cable. It allowed Queen Victoria to send a message instaneously to President Buchanan of the United States. It caused riots in New York.

The Wall Street Journal’s mission wanted to get information of markets to people information about the markets with a level of professionalism.

Why are newspapers in trouble?

Twenty years ago, if you lived in Chicago and you wanted information, you could read Chicago Tribune or the Sun Times. They were great bundles of news. It was delivered to you once a day. Now, you can get better information.

If I were half my age, I wonder if I would read my newspaper on a daily basis. My local newspaper focuses on information from the day before, when we’ve all seen that news on the web or through our Blackberry. Newspaper editors are still stuck telling us news from the day before. We have seen 30-40% decline in readership, and the advertising revenue is even worse reading. There are now people paying to read the Wall Street Journal online than pay to read the paper version of the New York Times.

The advertising is the big problem. Targetable media like online has made non-targetable media like newspapers and magazines very uneconomic. That does not favour mass media like newspapers and magazines. That is married to the fact that technology drives consumer choice and consumer behaviour. Most news companies are totally unprepared to think of new forms of distribution when they have grown up in an analogue world. Circulation revenues do not cover much of the news costs.

I am optimistic that a business that has been so slow in adapting will find a way. We’re in about third or four inning (about half way through) marketers finding the most efficient ways to market. Online revenues are pennies or quarters on the dollar of what we got in print. We’re not at a low point in terms of print advertising, but we’re no where near a high point in online ad growth.

There will be a lot of experimentation. In the end, the business model starts with the high fixed costs of journalism that creates the content that creates the brand. News publishers one way or another will have to figure this out.

Mark Davis

Once a quarter at the San Diego Tribune, we have a meeting of managers. CEO says times are tough, but we’ll make it through. CFO says that times are really tough, you can’t buy anymore pencils.

Statistics of daily readership, in the last five days have you looked at a newspaper?) 1964, 81%, 2007, 48%.

Daily Circulation: 1964, 60m, 2006, 52m.

Population in 1964, 192m, now 400m. Advertising, 49bn, total advertising, down 13%.

Mice in the front door, elephants out the back. Or pennies on the dollar. Monthly uniques, 10 times our print circulation, but revenue one-tenth of print. Online advertising growth has slowed. We upselled advertising from print to online, but we never sold online only. We can sell to smaller advertisers but are losing market share as others such as Google sell to small guys. They don’t want to talk to sales rep. Google is all self-servce. Newspapers need to be self-serve.

In recessions in the past, newspaper advertising bounce back after three years, but it hasn’t since the 2001 slow down. We’re in a sectoral downturn not a cyclical downturn. I want to debunk a myth about margins. The question in 2008, isn’t whether our margins will be 20% but whether they will be positive or negative.

I want to be the glass is half full, five areas of strategic focus:

  1. Revenue – online ad networks such as Yahoo Newspaper consortium. The next generation will have geo-targeting and behavioural targeting.
  2. Organisation – newsrooms are re-organising, integration, bringing together online and offline newsrooms. Re-organised by market segments.
  3. Relevance – quite honestly most of this workshop is about relevance. When you start to look at local news organisations, local becomes really important. You have to begin – difficult for traditional newsrooms – you have to think about what the audience wants. You have to think about utility. Do they want to find a movie? Do they want to find out about local government?
  4. Community – We cannot create community but we can enable it. In San Diego, communities around Padres (baseball team), Chargers (American football team) and surfing.
  5. Distribution – Mobile. Not just WAP site. What do people want to do? TV, radio, RSS feeds. Devices we look at, mobile, computers and other devices. We don’t have to compete with TV.

Eric Alterman

He wrote about Bush administration’s war on the press. He wrote articles in The Nation. He couldn’t get them to pay notice because they were struggling with digital revolution. He saw that they had fat margins, and if they had this beneficence, they had a public responsibility. Even when they were pulling in these margins, their stocks were in free fall.

When Knight-Ridder put up for sale, McClatchy was the only bidder. They paid several billions dollars, and now McClatchy has lost 82% of its stock value.

Why with these incredible margins, why were these newspapers being punished. He wrote a New Yorker article to look at this. Advertising numbers are troubling, but trust numbers are even more troubling. He teaches young people, and they don’t read newspapers.

Average age of newspaper reader in US is 56 and growing. If it was a television programme, it would only have hemorrhoid commercials. These are not people that advertisers want to reach. This has many implications.

Newspapers are losing online because they are not the best vehicles to reach people. I care about the future of the news business because I care about the news upon which our democracy depends. It is hard to see in this world where the support for that kind of journalism. It’s hard to see an obvious market.

Until 35, my career didn’t make any sense. I went back and forth between academia and magazine journalism. I didn’t really fit. He got a doctorate in history. Then the internet was rising. He had this talent to reach a small number of people in a number of ways. He has two professorships. He writes a media column in The Nation. He writes a daily weblog for Media Matters. It was originally begun on MSNBC. He has written a bunch of books. He has about seven jobs, and he thinks he’s speaking to roughly about the same people in all seven jobs.

On some platforms, they pay. On some, they don’t. I have an idea of what is different about each platform. I have this little talent about giving my views on things I care about. I have this one little talent. When I started, there were just about three dozen, but now there are a few thousand.

Some break news, but most just give you an intelligent context to understand the world around you. There is a tiny audience for that relative to the cost of producing. Every one of these news producing or information producing entities is under siege and no one knows where the bottom is.

Molly Ivins said that the newspaper industry solution to the problems facing it is to commit suicide.

He pitched this article to the New Yorker, and he was focusing on the Huffington Post. Huff Post is up to 12m unique readers per month. It’s the eighth or ninth most read news site in the US. He found very little value added to content from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian. He went back to publications that he had criticised about their coverage in the lead up to the war in Iraq, and he found value there despite his criticism.

I found that there just isn’t the support for the kind of journalism. 1200 reporters at the New York Times. 800-900 reporters at the Washington Post. I would be surprised with advertising going the way it is even at 50%. If we don’t have that news, we will be more open to propaganda and manipulation. I think we’ll move to an elite model where people pay a lot for information like The Ecnomist, where the vast majority will be open to manipulation.

Enormously disturbing that not only is there not support this kind of journalism but he worries that this will erode democracy. (This is a very rough paraphrase of what he said.) He believes that all university students should be required to buy a subscription to a newspaper as part of their education.

Q: Writer for tech policy site. He wonders if news won’t be organised geographically but along other ways such as specialist coverage areas.

A: Gordon Corvitz. He believes that a lot of journalism will go this way. There will be specialised, high revenue areas of coverage. But I fear that this will lead to the world that Eric fears. Information will be very valuable to people but in increasingly specialised, narrow niches. That is not the most efficient system.

Mark Davis: To me what you are describing are communities, both geographical communities but also communities of interest. That is potentially where we will succeed.

Eric Alternman: I have problems with that. When you think of New York Times story on Pentagon flacks and domestic wire-tapping and Saudi dating rituals, there is no business model that will support those stories. You need living and tech section to support those stories. If you take this away, there won’t be something to pay for those long form stories.

The 19th Century model of political parties having newspapers, which is like what you have in Europe, then you have no shared community. It creates a consciousness of citizenship. We are these communities of interest much more than we are geographical communities. We’ll have more fissures of understanding.

Q: Events and engagement have captured a small audience. Is that a profit centre for newspapers?

A: Gordon Crovtiz: In person events has been a booming part of the audience. the more time we spend in front of computers, the more we need contact carbon-based life form to carbon-based life form. The question is how many different areas you can do this with.

Mark Davis: Communities, we are feeling our way through this.

Eric Alterman: In world I live in, friends who do celebrity cruises. The Nation sent me on the National Review cruise. I wrote a piece that I am very proud of called The Heart of Whiteness.

Q: A lot of discussion has been about the cost of production but there is very little about the costs of consuming news online. The cost of buying computer very higher.

A: Eric Alterman: That’s not a media problem but a societal problem. Digital divide is much more geographic problem. You can get a computer for $300, which is less than it costs to the subscribe to the New York Times. About 75% consider themselves online now.

Q: What do you do about coverage of the under-privileged?

A: Mark Davis: When you’re in a business that is fighting for its survival, you’re not in a charitable mode. When you raise the issue of a new product, you always raise the chance of selling to that market segment. It’s a societal problem not a business issue.

Q: Several small or medium sized market have come under control of charitable organisation. Likely to spread.

A: Gordon Crovitz: It does allow families to be uneconomic. That structure can protect those papers for a time. I would be happier if there was a business model behind it.

Q: David Robinson: To what extent are people dissatisfied with news.

A: Mark Davis: If the audience really values this, then read it. I’m going to make a statement. Who are we to decide what people will read? If it’s important to me, then it should be important to all of you.

I don’t think that people are disinterested in news. Kids are informed. They know what is going on in the world. He was talking about a world story with his daughter. She was on Digg. She started there. She bounced around and read the story.

Gordon Crovitz: For a time, there is demand from people for professional media. If you believe that people need and value professionally created content from people who produce this with integrity. Most companies just exiting denial phase of this challenge, then there is optimism that people will figure out a business model.

Eric Alterman: The only way to be optimistic is say something like maybe global warming will be all right. Young people are not buying newspapers. Sorenstein Centre published study looked at how deep young people’s knowledge is from all of these stories and it was bad. They are getting very little information from The Daily Show.

You also have this issue of trust. Three times more people believe that 9/11 was an inside job than believe that the media is telling the truth. You add all these trends together, and I don’t see where this magic bullet will come from. Foundations and universities will have to play a much bigger role.

Q: Ethan Zuckerman said that news suffers not from a supply problem but a deman problem.

Eric Alterman: People don’t know what really high quality news is can’t demand it because they don’t know what it is. I think that everyone would live a richer life if they spent a half hour a day with the Guardian and an hour with The Economist. How in the world could you imagine Americans doing that? The problem has evolved into a crisis.

Mark Davis: I don’t know any manager who talks about demand of a product without talking about the product. How do we get this information out in a way that people want to consume it?

Q: I want Gordon Crovitz to respond to metro newspapers need to re-invent themselves. You have two front page stories that are from the Associated Press on Congress voting for a pay increase for military base and Mexican drug wars.

A: As we look online, we look to becoming a news and information portal. We think about the audience and what they want. We have to get over this link to this competitor. If you can become this portal to serve your audience locally.

Eric Alterman: Linking to competitors, traditional way to run newspapers not way to run digital business.

05.14.08
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Future of News: People formerly known as the audience

Dan Gillmor is going to whip through in 15 minutes what he normally takes an hour to do he says. It’s a whirlwind tour of media changes, which is why this is quite a few bullet points and links. Again, a rush transcript.

Media shift. He clicked from slides from cave paintings to a network graph.

The media has become democratised. Not in sense of voting but participation, production and access not just distribution. It is a read-write web. It turns the consumer into creator/collaborator. Collaboration where it really gets exciting. Dan clicked through other slides such as pictures of 7 July 2005 bombings in London, video of south Asian tsunami.

He touched on RSS. Tags. Wikis. Placeblogger. Communities.

Who is a journalist? I don’t care.
What is journalism? I care.

Think tank. NGOs. They have a point of view, but may also be like journalism. Corporate blogs are blurring journalism.

Basic principles of journalism:

  • thoroughnes
  • accuracy
  • fairness
  • independence
  • Add to this, transparency.

It’s an And NOT an Or world. It’s all rooted in changing from lecture to conversation, and we must learn to listen.

New York Times has blogs. Database journalism. He showed the Faces of the Fallen project at the Washington Post.

We’re not oracles but guides.

Hyperlinks are god’s gift to getting it right.

He pointed to the Tunisian Prison Map and the Pothole Map from Bakersfield.

Or what about the Tony Blair mash-up about when he would step down as British prime minister.

What will happen when it’s not just the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination but a world where people have high-def cameras and high speed data networks.

Principles for news consumers:

  • scepticism
  • judgement
  • research
  • techniques

Check out NewsTrust.

The Daily Us. We must move from mere popularity to reputation.

Advertising is being systematically de-coupled from journalism and he showed Craig’s List, eBay and Google.

The career ladder that Dan Gillmor got on as a journalist is gone. But it costs very little try things with digital tools. It’s only getting simpler and cheaper all the time. Highly targeted deep niche works, and he pointed out GigaOm. Not everything needs a business model such as Global Voices.

Things he’s thinking about hard. Where 2.0 and beyond. He showed mapping projects. GPS. Mobile.

There are enormous problems but this expanding, diversifying eco-system will change things in a good way, but the interim will be messy. With people formerly known as the audience involved, things will get better.

Steve Boriss, teacher, consultant and blogger

The audience isn’t going anywhere. I think we’re entering a golden age of news. He looked back at history. Back 500 years ago, news was spread by word of mouth. He said that it was like blogging but unplugged. The printing press brought a huge advance in knowledge, but it also gave government an unprecedented ability to control the news. The American Revolution set back the government control of news. Through the 19th Century, newspapers were a marketplace of ideas. But there were four advances that set the news business back, which are documented on his blog: The steam powered printing press, broadcasting, the AP and modern ‘scientific journalism’. His arguments all hinge on increased government control and fewer voices.

The internet undermines all of these ‘advances’ and return a multitude of voices. The internet has expanded the definition of news that has been left behind by the modern, professional definition of news. He said that audiences are going to news that have a direct impact on them such as metro, national and international news.

He doesn’t believe that audiences are switching from observers to participants. He believes that social media is over-sold. He is also sceptical of citizen journalism.

Media is Latin for in the middle. News sources have not been able to reach news audiences directly, but now they can. Journalists will have to prove their value as middle men.

Reihan Salam, sees himself as an audience member who has managed to get a gig in the media, as he puts it. People want deeper engagement with their audience, and he pointed to the lucrative business magazines are doing by having cruises with their writers. At university, he loved reader Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. He used to send him tips, and Andrew said that he should apply for an internship at the New Republic. He suggested that they start blogs, and initially there was some resistance.

Eric Alterman will be viewed as important. He took the attitude of his audience and not his professional class. He did this from a high level of sophistication. At the Atlantic where he works now, they are all wringing their hands.

He used to read the newspaper daily. He then read it online, and now he doesn’t. Now, he has a collection of RSS feeds that he scours and gets what he wants. You’ll have to offer a deeper immersive experience.

You’ll see a richer media environment but it will be through patronage, not advertising.

From the Q&A, the panel was asked about whether success was based on the number of voices. Dan made a really good point about the vast amount of information available now and that we’re still working on models to highlight the best material.

Q: Governments will want to control that. How do we guard against that?

A: Steve Boriss said that this is one of his pet concerns but he feels alone. His hits go down whenever he goes down on this. He says that he is concerned about net neutrality and government involvement. I want to keep the government out of the internet.

Q: What about aggregators (Drudge, Huffington Post, etc)? They don’t have our overhead. They won’t have anything to point at unless we get paid for it today.

A: Dan Gillmor, I have to jump on that. The problems of the business model is a decoupling of advertising from journalism, not an issue of aggregators pointing at your stuff.

Q: How do we in 10 years pay the huge costs of in-depth, investigation journalism?

A: Dan Gillmor: We might lose that for a while, and I’m not happy about that. There are options for public funding. (Pro Publica has been mentioned.) There are a number of things that are filling a part in that. We haven’t even explored the crowd-sourcing model.

Steve Boriss said that newspapers can become aggregators themselves.

05.07.08
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The Future of Newspapers

Steve Moore invited me to answer the question: What comes next? In my case, I was supposed to talk about the future of newspapers. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Head of Digital Publishing at Penguin, talked about the future of the book. And Matt Locke, of Channel 4, talked about the future of television.

Matt and Jeremy were brilliant. Jeremy is asking fundamental questions about what it means to be a publisher in the 21st Century, and Matt makes one of the best cases in the business to free your content to follow the audience. The day of building a website and expecting everyone to come to you is over.

It was a great morning, if for no other reason, I came up with a short way to explain what I really do. People always ask me how I edit the blogs at the Guardian, sometimes adding that wasn’t the point of blogs not to have an editor. That’s a fair question, and most of the Guardian blogs have desk or section editors who commission most of the content. What is it that I do then?

I use the tools that are disrupting our (the newpaper) business model to do journalism.

It’s really that simple, and that’s what I mean by leading by doing. How can we use these disruptive technologies to do improve journalism and expand our audience? If gains in technology have brought about faster, better and cheaper technology, why not use technology to beat the competition by being faster, use cheaper technology to undercut existing economics in our business and use technology to get stories and tell them in ways that weren’t possible before. These are my goals, and hopefully with a band of merry journalistic pirates we can spread the future more evenly where we work.

It is now clear to almost everyone that the business model that has supported newspapers is under threat and that newspapers must change. Newspapers in the US are facing a perfect storm of declining readership, declining ad sales and a sudden drop, some might say collapse, in real estate advertising tied to the sub-prime crisis. But it’s not just the US, lest people believe the cuts are down to the declining newspaper culture there. Le Monde is on strike over job cuts that could cut the newsroom by a quarter. Newsquest Glasgow is cutting 20 editorial positions due to “poor trading conditions“.

The State of the News Media 2008 report from the US put the situation in stark terms:

But more and more it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising

And the writers of the report asked how news organisations could develop a new business model while having to make painful cutbacks. The need for change is urgent, and while the last two years have seen major strides by some news organisations, the companies and, let’s be honest, many journalists were slow to adapt to the challenges of a now more than decade-long digital revolution.

What business model are we competing against? The TechCrunches of the world. As of last autumn, they had a full-time staff of eight. They have revenue’s of $240,000 a month, and in February, they had 2.6m ‘absolute unique visitors’, according to Google analytics.

News organisations need to take advantage of the very trends that are disrupting our business model. When I worked for the BBC, they bought a digital video editing system in that had a huge external cabinet, a Mac tower and Avid software. It was about eight years ago, and it cost $80,000, which was reasonable and cheaper than professional systems that came before. Shortly after I left the bureau in 2005, they replaced the system with a Mac laptop, a portable RAID array and Final Cut Pro for about $12,000. It was faster, had more storage and was portable.

1) News, not newspaper, companies

Preparing for the talk gave me an excuse to begin reading Newspaper Next 2.0 report, the second installment in the American Press Institute’s project to help newspapers get out ahead of the changes in the industry. Much of the work is based on Clayton Christensen‘s work and his books The Innovator’s Dilemma and the Innovator’s Solution. The authors conclude:

This raises a big question: Are we newspaper companies? If so – if we define our companies and our mission by our core product – these coming digital solutions look threatening, even catastrophic. A newspaper company will instinctively fight to preserve and defend its product and business model. At most, it will cram a few new offerings in around the edges of the old model, as long as they don’t threaten the core.

This is the typical defensive reaction of legacy organizations and industries in the face of disruptive innovation, described vividly by Clayton Christensen in his best-selling books The Innovator’s Dilemma1 and The Innovator’s Solution2. As his research in more than 60 industries showed, it’s also a formula for failure.

To avoid that outcome, this industry needs a major mindshift: It must stop defining itself by its technology. We are not newspaper companies. Rather, we have always been companies whose mission and business model was meeting the human needs for information, knowledge, solutions, social connection, choice-making, buying and selling that arise in a given locale.

This is obviously a business plan for local or regional newspapers and not national, or increasingly, international newspapers and sites. However, there are lessons here for newspapers regardless of the market.

2) Aggressively undercut your own business model before someone else does

Don’t do video on the web that pretends to be television and costs just as much to produce. Use Skype to do live podcast two-ways, or have journalists record their audio on their laptops and use Gmail to send the files. The Boulder Camera recently shut down its bespoke community software and shifted to Ning. (Amy Gahran quotes Matt Flood of Camera, who said, “the developer that built it is no longer with the company so we couldn’t fix anything or create anything new”. Familiar story? Can I hear an amen from how many people have been stuck in this situation?)

The difference between the late 1990s and now is that cost of editorial experimentation has dropped almost to zero in some cases. Creative use of freely available web tools can achieve most editorial goals, and it can be used as a guide for future development. Out of all of the things you could do, it will help you understand what you must do.

3) Good enough undercuts incumbents

I keep coming back to something that Steve Yelvington said at a citizen media workshop we were at last summer:

We need to think of making things that are good enough and not overshooting. We’re taking too long to create ‘perfect ‘ systems that don’t meet needs. We over-invest, over-plan and then we stick with the bad business plan until it all collapses. Come up with a good idea and field test. Fail forward and fail cheaply. Failure is not a bad thing if we learn from our mistakes and correct. Be patient to scale. Impatient for profits.

As journalists, we can meet this challenge. We can compete. We always have. We have competed against other journalists for exclusive stories. If new technologies are disrupting our business, we just need to use them to do some disrupting of our own.

05.07.08
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The Future of News: DIY visualisations

Next week, I’m headed to Princeton University to talk about the Future of News at the Center for Information Technology Policy. David Robinson has asked me to talk about data visualisation, which, along with a few projects at the day job, has given me an opportunity to think about and explore some areas of interest. During the conference, I’ll be blogging here and on the Guardian blogs, most likely a mix at Organ Grinder, our media blog, and also at our Technology blog.

I think one of the opportunities that we’re missing in journalism right now is that we’re not doing enough with freely available tools to experiment with editorial concepts. The plethora of free web tools allows us to see what works for journalists and just as importantly our audiences and communities. If we lower the cost of experimentation in terms of time and money as near as zero as possible, we can try something new almost every day. As I say, experiment. Learn. Apply lessons. Repeat.

Here’s something we can do today: Visualise the North Carolina and Indiana primary addresses of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It took me about 10 minutes to do both, and about 10 minutes to write this post. Innovation at the speed of news.

UPDATE: The embed code for this visualisation is pretty flakey or at least doesn’t play well with Strange Attractor’s CSS. It’s going to take a bit of work. Fail forward.

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