10.18.12
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Whither hyperlocal? Still in search of sustainability

During this period of disruption and transition, we journalists wring our hands about any number of things, and I suppose the thing I do genuinely worry about is local news. I’m not alone, and it’s spawned a huge number of hyperlocal experiments. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, most of these experiments have failed to develop into sustainable models for the future. At SXSW in the US, they had a panel looking called the “Hyperlocal Hoax: Where’s the Holy Grail?” The intro to the panel said:

Over the last decade, so called “Hyperlocal” websites, apps and services have been “the next big thing.” Now quick: Name one super-successful company in that space. Now name ten in the graveyard.

The effort to find the model continues and so does the frustration at the elusiveness of one. Here in the UK, where I sit, Marc Reeves asked: Why have Birmingham’s hyperlocal bloggers failed to deliver? The motivation was similar to other projects:

The democratic deficit left behind as papers and TV retreated from the territory marked ‘holding power to account’ could be filled – it was hoped – by a growing band of independent, socially active and civic-minded citizens who could use their digital skills to create news and information services for their neighbourhoods.

But five years later, “(m)any of the early sites have withered on the vine” and “most of the true hyperlocal, neighbourhood, blogs seem to run out of steam”. Reeves still has hope that as local media in the UK also continue to whither that “the opportunity for hyperlocals will surely get larger”. 

These blogging projects were definitely on the smaller end of the hyperlocal spectrum, but even larger networks are struggling. In an interview for Street Fight Mag, US hyperlocal project EveryBlock president Brian Addison probably put it best:

We’re operating in a space that excites a lot of people but there’s so much dust that needs to be settled. There’s so much uncertainty around sustainable business models and who’s going to emerge as a leader…

For those not familiar with EveryBlock, it is data-driven aggregator of local information.in several large cities across the US. One of the earliest journo-programmers Adrian Holovaty led its creation using Knight Foundation funding, and team then sold it to MSNBC.com in 2009. 

When asked whether the aggregator would be moving into original content, Addison said:

My strong hunch would be no, largely because I think the economics of that model are broken. That’s pretty easy to see.

What is working? 

First I think it’s important to draw some distinctions between the issues with local media in the US and UK. The markets are very different. The regional (local) media has been much harder hit in the UK than in the US. In the UK, the national media has suffered cuts, but we still haven’t seen the closures, the shifts from daily to weekly and the deep cuts that the regional and local media has. 

In the US, big city metros have been hit hardest while local media, mid-size and smaller newspapers are faring better. US digital advertising analyst Gordon Borrell predicted that newspaper advertising would actually increase next year, 2013. However, the prediction of growth was largely down to growth by small papers.  At Street Fight Mag, Alex Salkever said:

Which is why I actually think Borrell is onto something. We all know that small papers have suffered far less than major metros in the advertising bloodbath. And talk to anyone in a small town and these papers continue to have tremendous relevance.

Salkever thought that it wasn’t just the relevance to local audiences that is helping these small newspapers but also their more direct relationship to advertisers. 

That’s what is working and what isn’t in terms of traditional media, but what about this new breed of local news providers? In the US, J-Lab funded more than 55 ‘New Voice’  hyperlocal projects beginning in 2005. In 2010, it was time to take stock and look at what worked and what didn’t work. What didn’t work? 

One of our biggest learning curves is this: It doesn’t pay to train whole classes of ‘citizen’ journalists. While you’ll be doing wonders for advancing digital media skills in your community, you won’t end up with a reliable corps of contributors for your news site. Ordinary citizens, armed with good intentions, are just too busy.

Citizen journalism turns out to be a high-churn, high-touch enterprise – one that requires a full-time community manager.

In some ways, this is probably why the hyperlocal blogs in Birmingham didn’t work. Feeding a blog is hard work, which I know only too well. The study has 10 takeaways, and I’l leave you to follow the link above to check them all out. They highlighted that:

• “Engagement, not just content, is key.”
• The passion of the founders was key to success.
• “Community news sites are not a business yet. Income from grants, ads, events and other things falls short, in most cases, of paying staff salaries and operating expenses.”

In the UK, Nesta released a report last year, Here and Now, UK hyperlocal media today (PDF), authored by Damian Radcliffe. The report was incredibly useful in that it tackled the big challenges that local media is facing, both for traditional news organisations and new forms of hyperlocal media. He tackled the issues of sustainability and scalability head-on. He said:

Fundamental questions remain about the financial sustainability of the sector, and whether hyperlocal media can benefit from the spread of technology or will get lost in an increasingly noisy digital space.

To sum up the report, he said that there is “no silver bullet for making hyperlocal work”. 

I’d love to end this post with some pithy prescription for success, but that’s just not where we’re at with the disruption of local media and the development of new models. If there was one model that I think needs more exploration is is an idea that Ken Sands told me a few years back. Ken is the editor of Bloomberg Government now, but almost a decade ago, he was the head of web operations in Spokane Washington. He launched an early blogging network at a newspaper. He suggested that a winning combination was place and passion, the intersection of location and focused subjects. I am sure that one of the many people working on hyperlocal projects is already on it. 

09.11.12
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Ada Lovelace Day 2012 fundraiser and events

Ada Lovelace Day, the international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering & maths that I launched in 2009, has gone from strength to strength in the last three years. I’ve been amazed at how much support it’s garnered and how much enthusiasm there is for it.

This year, it has become really clear to me that there’s a lot more that I could do with Ada Lovelace Day, if only we had a bit of cash to pay for it. Since its inception, Ada Lovelace Day has been run entirely by volunteers and by partnering with organisations like the Women’s Engineering Society, Association for UK Interactive Entertainment, London Games Festival and BCS Women. We have managed a huge amount through the kindness and generosity of our volunteers and partners, but there is more we could do.

I now want to create a formal charitable organisation to support women in STEM, not just on one day of the year, but all year round. Some of our goals include creating educational materials about iconic women, providing media training, and building a directory of expert speakers. The fundraiser uses the ‘keep what you earn’ model so all money donated will go towards helping women in STEM.

So if you have a moment, please take a look at our fundraiser and donate what you can.

We also have a couple of events that you might be interested in:

Ada Lovelace Day Live! Featuring the WES Karen Burt Award
Last year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live! event, held with BCSWomen, was such an amazing success that we decided to do it again on 16 October at the IET in London! We are collaborating with the Women’s Engineering Society who will be presenting the prestigious Karen Burt Memorial Award to a newly chartered woman engineer at the event. Performers include:

All hosted by inimitable songstress and one third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen Arney!

It will be an fantastic evening of science, technology, comedy and song, featuring all manner of wonders, from marine biology and particle physics to the secrets of fridges and performance robots. We would love to see you there if you can make it!

Tickets are £10 and available from WES.

XX Game Jam
ALD is delighted to have partnered with the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment and the London Games Festival to put on the XX Game Jam, an all-female games hackday where teams will compete to produce the best computer game in just 24 hours. Held on the 26th and 27th October, it’s the first all-women* event of its type.

We’re looking for programmers, producers, artists, designers, sound designers or composers, who would like to try their hand making a game! Direct experience of game development is not required.

Sign up for free!

* We believe the terms ‘XX’ and ‘woman’ are self-defining, so anyone who self-identifies as female is welcome.

There are more events being organised independently by grassroots Ada Lovelace Day supporters both in the UK and (coming soon) around the world. So come along and get involved!!

09.11.12
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Digital first: We need to inspire change not just fear

Last week, the Journal Register Company announced their second bankruptcy in three years and I said on Twitter that I worried that digital first, as a strategy rather than the name of JRC’s parent company, was losing any positive connotation for journalists.

Like a similar comment I made about Advance/Newhouse Newspapers digital first strategy in cutting its print production days, my thoughts on the matter have a lot more nuance than I can possibly convey in 140 characters, and I tried to clarify.

Digital first has been my default position since 1996 when I landed my first job as an online editor. My concern really is about the connotations that are building up around digital first as a strategy and what that means for news organisations as they try to implement change strategies. In announcing their shifts to digital first, Advance (where I worked for one year in the 1990s) and Fairfax in Australia (where I have a number of friends) also announced deep, deep editorial cuts to try to get ahead of the declines in print revenue and the lower revenue base of their digital operations. In a lot of ways, they are simply facing the reality before them. But whilst as a digital journalist I am pleased that the industry is moving in a digital direction, I’m never happy to see fellow journalists lose their jobs or face uncertainty when it comes to their pensions.

This is worrying to me, not because I am trying to deny the business reality that faces these organisations but because I worry that unless managed well, this will make it even more difficult for these organisations to institute much needed digital transformation. Advance and the Newhouses handled the process particularly poorly, allowing employees to find out about their future from the New York Times. Their communications have been appallingly bad and they were on the backfoot for weeks after the announcement of the print cuts in New Orleans.

I’ve seen firsthand how difficult it is to change the culture of an organisation from a print focus to a digital focus. You can get the business right and still fail if the culture of an organisation doesn’t move with it. My concern is that as digital first strategies acquire the baggage of redundancies and cuts that it will make this cultural change even more difficult to execute.

Post-industrial disruption

The reality is that there are going to be a lot fewer traditional journalism jobs in the future in the West than in they past. Like Mathew Ingram, I believe that journalism is one of the last 20th century industries to experience post-industrial disruption. The bottom line is that newspapers used to be the most effective way for advertisers to reach a lot of people with their commercial messages and, after competition granted local monopolies to a single newspaper in most American cities, that granted them a de facto licence to charge monopoly rents. Now, new digital advertising platforms, search and social, deliver advertising to larger audiences for lower costs. That’s the reality that we have to adapt to.

How do we get to where we need to be as an industry? First off, it’s important to be realistic about where we are in the process. Newspaper advertising revenue peaked in 2005 in the US but has been halved since then. We’re probably at the end of the beginning of the transformation for newspaper journalism. I agree with Mathew Ingram, this transformation is going to take a while, years and probably a couple of decades.

During this transition, how do we inspire change and not just fear? Kylie Davis on News Ltd (Australia) had some good observations at the International Newsmedia Marketing Association. (If you’re not reading INMA, start. They are doing some great work in realistically meeting the business challenges of journalism.) Davis came away from a recent conference with this great bit of insight: “People don’t fear change, they fear loss.” With respect to the challenges that she is facing at News Ltd, she said:

As we work through major change projects back at News Ltd., thinking about this quote has helped me keep all the pushback and drama in perspective. It has helped me to hear — in what seems to be the never-ending process of communication — what is truly motivating people to resist: their fear. And it’s not their fear of change, but that they will lose something they truly love and value about their jobs or about their personal sense of security.

Yes, there is a lot of pushback and drama, and everyone knows it. This transition was always going to be challenging, and now, the real pain of it is clear. This encapsulates the concerns I expressed on Twitter. To shift newspapers from a print-focused editorial and business model to a multi-platform, digitally-led model, as Davis says, we need to address the fear and find strategies to move on. She has some great advice on how to do that. Go read the entire post, it’s worth it, but I do love her penultimate paragraph:

It’s now time to demonstrate how the key things we value — such as quality journalism, great coverage, fighting for the underdog, and holding institutions to account — can and will be captured and upheld in our new business models.

Yes, the change is real, but we can and will carry our shared values as journalists into the future. Let’s work together to face and overcome the fear (and bitterness) and build a future for journalism that honours its values.

09.09.12
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Digital advertising does pay, just not for newspapers, yet

Last week, WAN-IFRA said what many of us in digital journalism have known for a while, that we’re losing the battle for attention. They said that digital news audiences lack the same “intensity” of print audiences. Put simply, digital audiences are less loyal and spend less time with each digital news source. WAN-IFRA CEO Christoph Riess has put the problem this way:

We are not losing readers, we are losing readership. Our industry challenge is engagement. Because someone is a subscriber does not make him a loyalist.

Several people in the industry have been trying to raise the alarm for years now. Two years ago, Ken Doctor pointed out that audiences were spending 7 hours a month on Facebook versus 20 minutes a month on the New York Times or 8-12 minutes on the average US newspaper site. US digital journalism pioneer Steve Yelvington has been talking about this for years, speaking about the problem with audience frequency. As Steve said earlier this year:

Forget all the newspaper industry puffery about how we’re reaching more people than ever. Frequency and time spent are the important metrics.

And the reality is dismal.

From a business standpoint, this has meant that while digital advertising spend has increased dramatically, news organisations’ share of that digital revenue still remains piteously low. As WAN-IFRA noted:

Overall digital advertising market rose from US$ 42 billion to US$76 billion from 2007 to 2011. Only 2.2 per cent of total newspaper advertising revenues in 2011 came from digital platforms.

What you will continue to hear over and over and over, from the likes of former Guardian editor Peter Preston, is that print still pays the bills. They will tell you that you can’t make money online. Preston cherry picks figures from the recent Journal Register bankruptcy filing in the US, pointing to that fact that print revenue is down 19% but still represents 50% of the group’s revenue. However, he conveniently leaves out that digital revenue at the news group is up 235% from 2009 to 2011. Yes, they probably started from a low base, but it is pretty impressive growth. Many news groups in the US have seen their digital revenue growth slow or stall this year, and at least the Journal Register team can point to 32.5% growth this year alone.   

The reality is that you can make money online but that newspapers are not competing effectively for digital advertising. As WAN-IFRA noted, “Search advertising accounts for 58 per cent of all digital advertising and 13 per cent of all advertising expenditure”. US news analyst Alan Mutter noted in April:

The share of the U.S. digital advertising market garnered by newspapers shrank to the lowest level in history in 2011, according to newly published data.

With the growth of digital formats like highly targeted search, mobile and social advertising vastly outpacing the ability of publishers to develop competitive new products, newspapers sold only 10.3% of the $31.7 billion in digital advertising purchased in 2011.

When the Newspaper Association of America first started counting online sales in 2003, newspaper websites carried 16.7% of all the digital advertising in the United States.

There is money to be made online, but newspapers aren’t the ones making it. That’s the problem and, unless newspapers focus on creating not just large audiences but loyal audiences, that problem won’t be solved. Newspapers also need to build up knowledge about those audiences to better serve them journalistically and to provide better targeted advertising.  Those are the challenges we need to meet, and we need to ignore the voices in journalism that say we can’t make money with digital. They have ruled the debate for far too long and have delayed us from meeting the real challenges of digital. 

08.12.12
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A data first digital strategy?

Every once and a while reading comments on a good blog is rewarded. I’m an avid reader of Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur. His recent post on Big Data is well worth reading.

To date, publishers have applied the same business model to everything from print and the web to the latest mobile and social platforms: Build the biggest possible audience.

This approach, unfortunately, is exactly at odds with the point of Big Data, whose goal is to connect individuals with information specifically tailored to them.

The quicker Big Data applications develop, the faster the large but un-targetable audiences traditionally delivered by newspapers will become an anachronism, thus limiting their utility to consumers and value for advertisers.

However, read the first comment from Pat Scanlon, the director of digital strategy and Business Development at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It shows a publisher actually embracing data, and no I don’t mean embracing data journalism. Scanlon outlines how some newspapers are embracing data to deliver better, more targeted content to audiences and better results for advertisers. He writes in his comment:

At the beginning of this year we adopted a “DataFirst” digital strategy. Being DataFirst means: “Collecting, analyzing, understanding and using data to create better customer (users, readers & advertisers) experiences – and improve our business insights.”

More and better data means we understand our customers better. If we understand our customers better, we can deliver more relevant content – both Editorial and Advertising.

If we deliver more relevant Editorial and Advertising… We will make more money via increased traffic, more effective advertising and being relevant in the lives of our customers.

If we make more money we will save journalism and be employed.

 Amen. This is one to watch and most likely to emulate. 

07.20.12
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US humourist skewers newspaper industry

Editor & Publisher interviewed US humourist and syndicated newspaper columnist Dave Berry after he won 2013 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement award, and the interview was excerpted on the blog Newspaper Death Watch. When asked why newspapers have cut down on their humour columns, Berry responded:

Newspapers have had a consistent problem over the past 30 to 40 years that whenever they are offered two options, they always pick the one that is more boring and less desirable to readers.

Personally, I attribute the modern failure of newspapers to English majors. We let our business be run by English majors, but since the model was a foolproof way of making money and the only place for Sears to buy and print a full-page ad, they could do whatever they wanted. This created the notion that whatever they were doing had huge market demand, and when the Internet came along, we found out that wasn’t necessarily the case.

That’s an incisive comment, not because English majors were running the business, but because we’ve had a shift from a time when newspapers had almost a licence to make money to a much more challenging environment. This shift from a pretty lazy business model to one where we had to be creative about how to sustain journalism is still playing out. To make enough money to support a news operation approaching the scale that we have now we’ll need to work smarter and harder to rebuild the business. I also think it would be realistic to cede that it’s probably not possible to retain the size of organisations that we currently have in the US and western Europe. What’s the optimal size to provide quality coverage for a community? I don’t know, but we’ve got a lot of work to do to find out. 

07.11.12
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Leveson: Freedom of expression and the press are different rights

Professor Chris Frost, the Head of Journalism at Liverpool John Moores University, has testified before the Leveson inquiry “in in his role as Chairman of the National Union of Journalists Ethics Council, alongside NUJ General Secretary, Michelle Stanistreet”, and I think he raised a point that is important not only with respect to the press corruption scandal in Britain but also in a lot of other debates that we’re currently having in terms of rights and responsibilities in democratic societies. I’ve heard a number of times recently people confuse freedom of the press with freedom of speech or of expression. These are different rights. 

Frost drew a distinction, and I think an important one, between freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Just as important in terms of making distinctions between these freedoms, he also speaks about limits with respect to these freedoms. 

Clearly other people have other freedoms which may come into conflict.  The obvious ones are reputation, privacy, fair trial and so on, all as mentioned in the Human Rights Act, and clearly journalists need to balance their – and indeed everybody needs to – balance their right to freedom of expression against those other rights.

This becomes particularly important for the media, which is in a particular position of power, so that whereas the kind of freedom of expression you and I enjoy when talking to other people can have a little more licence, when it’s driven by a media which is talking potentially to millions, there needs to be much more concern about the rights of others, such as privacy and so on.

The difference between the rights of the individual to expression and the rights of journalists as members of the press and media are different. The individual right of expression versus the institutional right of freedom of the press have a different relationship to the democratic process. I’ve made the point before that the press, the Fourth Estate, is an institution with power. It needs this power to hold other institutions and other holders of power to account. However, power corrupts, and in the case of the British tabloids, in particular, they not only became corrupt but also had a corrupting influence on public officials. When other institutions, whether they are in government or in the private sphere, we call for reform.

Recent attacks on the process of the Leveson inquiry by powerful interests of the press worry me. The British press is in need of reform, not to protect the powerful from being held to account but to protect ordinary British citizens whose reputations have been smeared and whose right to privacy has been trampled by an unaccountable tabloid press. Leveson is about stamping out corruption in an important democratic institution, the press. It is not an attack on freedom of speech. 

07.02.12
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NewspaperAlum: There is life after journalism

As I’ve often written here, I feel very blessed by how rich and rewarding my career has been after taking a buyout from the Guardian in 2010. I’ve travelled the world, working with journalism organisations and journalists to help them seize their digital future, and that prepared me for my current as the editor of Knowledge Bridge, a project of the Media Development Loan Fund, to help news organisations in emerging democracies make the transition to digital media. 

With all of the turmoil in the industry, I often speak with former colleagues and friends in the business who are facing their own decisions. For those who didn’t know what I was doing during my freelance years, I often simply replied, “I’m doing things to support my journalism habit.” My digital skills paid the bills, allowing me to accept the going rate for freelance journalism jobs. I still love journalism, and for most journalists, what we do is more than just a job. For many who practice it, it is an all-consuming passion, which makes it very difficult to transition to another profession. 

However, if you want some inspiration on what comes after journalism, check out the excellent blog, NewspaperAlum. The site says:

What you WON’T read about in this blog: Firings, layoffs, dwindling circulation figures, and embarrassing headlines. What you WILL read about in this blog: Reports on the whereabouts and activities of those who have left U.S. daily newspapers and have blazed a new path for themselves outside of the newsroom.

On this rainy Monday here in Britain, if you need a bit of inspiration for when you are coming to a fork in the professional road, take a stroll through these personal stories. It is an important reminder: There is life after journalism. 

06.09.12
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MailOnline’s Martin Clarke: “Ooh, look at the badger with the gun, everyone!”

Index on Censorship examines the question, posed by MailOnline editor Martin Clarke, How does the Leveson Enquiry deal with the internet? But it misses the point that Clarke’s focus on the internet is simply diversionary tactics, designed to draw attention away from press conduct and point the finger at, well, it seems, pretty much everyone who’s ever used a social tool.

Said Clarke in his evidence:

Underpinning any press regulator as a statutory body effectively gives the state the power to licence newspapers and penalise ones that either do not join the body or ignore its rules. The only way to force bloggers to sign up as well would be to give that statutory body the same power to shut down blogs. If licensing newspapers is a severe restriction on free speech, this would be positively North Korean and the subject of mass internet protest. But even if we could get a law through, is it enforceable? Are we really going to drag Guido Fawkes off to the tower like his famous namesake for not joining the PCC?

Trouble is, the Leveson Inquiry wasn’t called because of bloggers hacking phones or Twitter users flouting a superinjunction as an act of civil disobedience or the impact one Tweet from Stephen Fry can have. It was called because of widespread corruption within the media, the political body, and the police, amongst others. It’s about the press becoming so powerful it could actually bully the government, and corrupt public officials and police officers. If a proper investigation was done, and Motorman taken to its logical conclusion, there’s every possibility that corruption would be found elsewhere as well.

I don’t think Guido Fawkes, on the other hand, quite has the money to go round giving police officers tens of thousands of pounds in return for juicy bits of information. There’s no evidence that Twitter users were hacking into anyone’s phones and publishing salacious comments based on what they found. And whilst every now and again a Facebook user turns out to be a racist shit, there’s no evidence of press-related criminality there.

Clarke, like so many of the newspaper editors, proprietors, managers and journalists we’ve seen giving evidence is keen to draw the fire away from his own publication and refocus it on somewhere else, preferably somewhere complicated. The internet makes a great new target because it is complicated, and because a new press regulator is going to have to think very carefully about how to deal with it.

But on the question of corruption, bribery, proto-blackmail, influence, graft, fraud, misconduct and criminal activity, the internet and its users is for the most part irrelevant. If you can find me a blogger or a Twitterer or a Facebook user who is guilty of media corruption, then that becomes a problem for Leveson.

In the meantime, existing laws are being used to deal with those who Tweet rape victims names, racially abuse others on Facebook, or write libellous blog posts. So it’s not like the Internet is quite the wild west it used to be. Turns out, in fact, that however complicated jurisdiction may be, there is jurisdiction.

The Internet is, in short, not a badger and it does not have a gun. Sorry, Martin.

05.27.12
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Digital journalists: We need to build a digital ‘lifeboat’ for the burning platform

As Twitter users, we all find ourselves occasionally saying: This is a > 140 character discussion and, over Friday night, I found myself in one with Dan Pacheco, a fellow digital journalist in the US whom I know by reputation but have never met. I know of Dan through some of the great work that he did at Bakersfield California developing a very excellent social media platform, Bakomatic, and the online-to-print service, Printcasting now Bookbrewer.

We got into a discussion on Twitter about the recently announced cuts at the Times-Picayune  newspaper in New Orleans. Its parent company, Newhouse Newspapers, is cutting the print run from daily to three times a week and reportedly slashing up to one third of staff. Newhouse is reportedly rolling out a model that it tested in Ann Arbor, Michigan, (in part using a regional news site that I worked on for a year from 1997-98, MLive.com).

Dan asked on Twitter:

To which I responded:

First off, I want to clearly lay out where I’m coming from because I got the impression that Dan assumed I was coming from a print-focused position. I wasn’t. My working assumptions:

  • The present of content is digital, but most newspapers in the West squandered early opportunities to make a painless transition to digital.
  • Many, if not a majority, of newspapers won’t make it. Digital distribution erodes the advantage of geography, and digital economics simply won’t support the volume of newspapers we have now.
  • That said, we still know very little about what a purely digital local news business looks like. We only have a few examples and many are very small and focus on specific niche coverage.
  • There is a lot of work to be done to develop digital products and related revenue streams to support a local digital news offering at scale. It’s a worthy challenge, but we digital journalists, editors and sales teams have a lot of work to do.

I wasn’t trying to say that newspapers should cling to print, rather that while print is a burning platform, there isn’t yet a digital lifeboat to take news organisations to safety. While digital advertising has boomed over the past decade, taking only a brief pause during the financial crisis to decline slightly, US newspapers have only  managed to grow their digital ad revenues slightly. Digital ad sales grew from $7.3bn to a staggering $31.7bn in the US between 2003 to 2011. But newspapers there have only grown their digital ad revenues from $1.2bn to $3.2bn, according to Alan Mutter. Newspapers actually capture a lower percentage of digital ads now than they did in 2003. Many US newspapers in the unenviable position of having a radically deteriorating print business and a still nascent digital business.

As I said on Twitter, I had just read news business analyst Ken Doctor’s assessment of the News Orleans strategy. He described it as “shock therapy” and a “forced march to digital”. As Ken points out, the hope is that the paper in New Orleans can retain the vast majority of their print revenue while also cutting some of their print related costs, although he is sceptical. They might retain 80 to 90% of their print advertisers but not 80 to 90% of their print advertising revenue by going to three days a week.

The newspaper will also most likely be consolidating some administrative costs so hopefully the operation will be more efficient in other ways as well. Printing three days instead of one makes some amount of business sense, but if you cut the print run to one day, would the loss of revenue wipe out some, or all, of the advantage of the print cost savings? Are any US newspapers actually in the position digitally to shift to one-day-a-week print without cutting staff not by a third but something even more drastic, maybe 70 to 80%?

Just like Ken, I wasn’t making a pro-print argument, I was making the observation that the paper and its parent company’s digital business isn’t well positioned for this transition. Ideally, they would have laid this groundwork years ago, but they, along with most newspapers, haven’t. Ken writes:

I’d call it a forced march because it doesn’t look like the Times-Picayune, or its new successor, the NOLA Media Group, is yet ready for the digital transformation. It has been making a digital transition, and there’s a big difference between the two. It doesn’t have a digital circulation strategy yet in place; though about a fifth of U.S. dailies do. Digital circulation is key to making this work, so that core print readers become more likely to transition with the enterprise — and keep paying their monthly subscription bills.

Like many newspaper groups, there are few good, easy answers for Newhouse Newspapers. Dan believes that the time for half moves is over, and I can understand that line of thinking. He said:

Yes, the culture of newspapers needs to be shaken up. It needed to be shaken up a decade ago but the industry thought it dodged a bullet with the dot.com crash, which it viewed as a fad that it was lucky not to have invested too much money in, and sat on its laurels. I agree that newspapers need to stop talking and move purposefully in the direction of digital, but I also agree with Ken Doctor that Advance’s approach looks like shock therapy than a strategic embrace of the future.

My big fear is that by cutting print runs from seven days a week to one would necessitate traumatic cuts to editorial staffing, leaving such a small editorial staff that it would have difficulty attracting sufficient digital revenue to sustain it, even in its leaner, digitally focused form. Everyone points to the pure digital Seattle Post-Intelligencer which went from a newsroom of 150 to 20. When you make cuts that deep, you lose good people and you lose capacity. Twenty people just can’t do the work of 150, no matter the efficiencies possible with digital tools.

Digital may be the future, but the vast majority of revenue still comes from print, and we need to see more innovation in both print and digital products that will reinvigorate income streams. It can’t be all about the shiny; it also has to be about financial sustainability. For example, mobile is a huge opportunity to reach audiences, but if Facebook’s revenue is threatened by the shift to mobile because it haemorrhages ad dollars, how will news organisations make  money from it?

All journalists, whether print or digital, should understand the news business and be constantly thinking of ways that they can add value, not just for their audiences but for the business. We need more innovation, more experimentation, and smarter thinking about how we fund news. This isn’t about the culture wars anymore, it’s about making the difficult transition to a digitally-focused, multi-platform future.

Here is the entire conversation that Dan and I had on Twitter for context: