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Kevin: James Robinson at The Guardian has a good summary of an OECD report looking at newspaper circulation trends around the world. The US and the UK top the table in terms of circulation declines, with 30% and 25% declines respectively since 2007. A few things that stand out in the survey is that US newspapers had an extremely high exposure to the advertising market. On average 87% of their revenue came from advertising. It helps explains why the recession has hit US newspapers so hard. It's a good summary, and the report itself is worth reading as well.
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Kevin: Laura Oliver looks at Rue89, pro-am news website launched in 2007. They expect to break even in the fourth quarter of this year. They have recently launched a monthly print magazine. They said it the site will become profitable regardless of the success of the print product. It was interesting to see how little sentimentality they had toward the magazine. "If it's a success, it will accelerate our development; if not, we'll stop it before it becomes a burden," said Pierre Haski. There isn't much detail on what has allowed them to move to profitability other than experimentation with online advertising formats.
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Kevin: David Cohn of Spot.Us talks about a new way that they have increased engagement from users and funding for journalism projects on the site. He calls it "community centred advertising". Bill Mitchell of Poynter described the system as this: "In some ways, it seems like a no-brainer: Encourage consumer engagement with advertising by giving users a stake in deciding how the revenue gets spent … Spot.Us itself is an experiment in transparency and control of money for news. This is just a matter of applying it to advertising."
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Kevin: I actually think that the headline is incorrect. Journalism isn't dead. Audiences are continuing their shift online. Jason Stverak says that newspaper websites seeing traffic at an all time high rebuts "studies that have shown traditional newspapers are no longer a thriving business model". How? If the newspapers were converting those large online audiences to revenue effectively, that observation might stand up, but the only economic bright spot is that advertising is returning after the recession and the deep cuts are allowing papers to return to profitability. I will agree that local newspapers drawing traffic from cable TV giants like CNN and MSNBC is good news from papers.
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Kevin: The Times of London is offering tickets to Toy Story 3 and the chance to win a weekend at the Grosvenor Hotel in Dorset to entice people to pay for news online in its new paid content strategy. It's a step up from free DVDs to shift papers.
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Kevin: From the World Editors Forum blog. Carole Wurzelbacher writes: "The University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute has recently announced the inauguration of WellCommons, a site designed to improve community communication about health issues." The site allows users to determine the credibility of the article with a sources section.
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Kevin: Rachel McAthy at Journalism.co.uk has a good roundup of the 12 projects that won funding in the Knight Foundations News Challenge 2010. The 12 projects split the $2.74 in funding. They were all local projects of some description. Some like the one from Stamen Designs were meant to ease the production of local visualisations and many of the others were some variation on a theme of aggregating local information. The grants were relatively small, most in the hundreds of thousands of dollars category. However, that's about what it takes to run a small digital project team for a year.
Journalism’s future: ‘Silver bullets are the talisman of the desperate’
I will admit that it’s a bit cheeky quoting myself, but as I was watching the flow of posts and conversation on journalism blogs today, and specifically in response to Adam Tinworth’s excellent post Complexity is the New Reality, I wound up Tweeting “Silver bullets are the talisman of the desperate”. Adam was commenting on a good rant by Paul Bradshaw titled Let’s stop this ‘Curation is King’ crap right now.
…if curation is king in online journalism I guess I missed the coronation. Curation is a usurper, here to distract us from the bloody mess we’re in with the message ‘Business as usual’.
The future of journalism and publishing will not be curation, aggregation, the iPad OR mobile. It will be a strategic mix of these things and more depending on the market and the audience. As Adam says:
There is no easy answer, otherwise we’d have found it after over a decade. Complexity is the new reality. Clichés are just a crutch.
Clichés are much worse than that. Seemingly easy answers too often win internal debates, especially as Paul points out, some of these messages convey that ‘business as usual’ is an acceptable course of action.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about multi-facted digital strategies that are generating growth for both the print and the digital for forward-thinking publications like the Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. The first comment on that post was “one word – iPAD!” The commenter isn’t alone: Mathias Döpfner, the head of German power publisher Axel Springer had this recommendation for his colleagues in the corner office:
Sit down once a day and pray to thank Steve Jobs that he is saving the publishing industry.
That’s the problem. Senior leaders in the industry aren’t looking for strategies, they are looking for a saviour. They want some supernatural – or in lieu of that, legislative – power to turn back the clock, put the genie back in the bottle, tax the internet and go back to the good old days when money just fell from the sky into their coffers. News flash: It’s too late. The good old days aren’t coming back. Anyone who tells you that you can continue doing what you’ve always done and that the solution is easy is lying. They care more about their current position than they do the future of journalism.
links for 2010-06-16
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Kevin: A news aggregator contacts Dow Jones asking them how to pay for and licence their content. The aggregator was told that no such licence was available. Furthermore, "We would not allow our content to be used in this form. Please do not archive, spider, link or otherwise mention or use any content from any Dow Jones International publications on your website. We hereby confirm that we do not allow the use of our IP on your site." The company has contradicted this statement since. What's the story? One would think that they would think about accepting money. Maybe not. It's pretty easy to see why the news industry is in trouble.
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Kevin: Gina Chen has an excellent post on the Nieman Journalism lab blog looking at insights into news consumption patterns based from a recent Pew Research Center study. The study looked at news stories in the mainstream press and news that gained traction on blogs, Twitter and YouTube. "But the important point is that the loyalty isn’t to the platform, the application, the delivery system, or the brand. The loyalty is to the need for the information." Excellent post and excellent discussion after the post.
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Kevin: George Brock, former editor for The Times and now head of journalism at City University London, has some great observations from a conference he spoke at recently in Germany. "German publishers – and they’re hardly alone – can register with their heads talks which stress unpredictability of the changes driven by new media; but in their hearts they yearn for the familiar." He says that the most successful platforms and editorial products on the web rely on "friction-free simplicity". Contrast that with the a quarterly lifestyle magazine recently launched by the group Axel Springer, The Iconist, that takes 40 minutes just to download. Hardly frictionless.
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Kevin: Folio has an excellent overview of The Atlantic magazine's efforts to reverse a circulation and revenue decline that began in the 1960s. They made an effort to create a solid brand, which is useful although I argue that the brand is the experience. Brand building without delivery is wasted effort. The more compelling elements to me are how he set up a digital-first strategy as an internal insurgency. He wanted to disrupt his own business and 'unlock (print's) grip on traditional revenue sources'. They also increased events and marketing services. Good business sense, good content, good branding with a focus on talent mean that they are shifting to profit.
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Kevin: My friend and former colleague Jemima Kiss has an excellent overview of what Apple's acquisition of the Siri, a very clever mobile service that reminds me of Tom Baker's intelligent agent in Hyperland. Jemima sees this as a big play into search by Apple. It's a bundle of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (voice recognition) and web search algorithms. Apple could be moving to challenge Google in mobile search, and with both companies having mobile ad networks, this could be an interesting bit of competition. As Jemima says, watch this space.
Betrayed again: NME Radio goes the way of Xfm
In 2007, Xfm ditched its daytime DJs, then axed all the remaining DJs in a shift to a fully automated playlist solution. I had been a loyal Xfm listener since day one in the mid-90s. I had listened on FM, via satellite TV when I left London and was out of signal range, online when I was abroad and then on DAB when Kevin bought me one for Christmas.
When Xfm fired all its DJs I felt betrayed, hurt and disappointed. A station I has supported for years had got rid of the very people who made it special. At the time I said:
The loss of real human DJs – people who care, people who are passionate, funny, interesting, exciting, cute, intelligent, informed, connected – will diminish listeners’ feelings of loyalty to the station. People react most favourably to other people. We like it when a human answers the phone instead of a machine. We prefer to be treated as individuals, not en masse. We want to have conversations with people we like and care about, people that we feel some sort of fellowship with. We don’t connect with people who pop up with an intrusive message for their own little social circle, we simply aren’t wired to care all that much about strangers.
In 2008, NME Radio began. By then I knew Iain Baker, who had been one of my favourite DJs on Xfm, personally and was excited to hear that NME Radio had hired him. Iain is a great DJ with a taste in music that matches mine and a warm, friendly manner that makes him a joy to listen to.
I finally had a replacement for the enfeebled Xfm. NME Radio was fun, full of great music played by great DJs. My radio listening needs were being fully met, even moreso when NME Radio moved on to Twitter so that I could interact with the DJs in a medium that I found convenient. (Although I must say that their use of social media in general was lacking and they could have done a lot more with it had they been bothered to find out how it can all work.)
But today I discovered, several days late due to having guests, that NME Radio have fired all their DJs and are pulling back to become an internet-only radio station. DX Media, who had licensed the NME brand, have decided not to renew that licence, thus leaving NME Radio as a shell of its former self. Says Brand Republic:
The live NME Radio station, launched under licence from IPC Media by Xfm founder Sammy Jacob’s DX Media, is to close after DX Media decided to terminate the arrangement.
NME Radio will stop broadcasting on national DAB and on digital television on Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat, but an automated service will continue online at nme.com/radio while IPC reviews the next stage of development.
Perhaps they weren’t doing well, one might think. Well, it’s true that there weren’t as many ads as you might have expected, but according to Brand Republic, audience size was increasing:
According to the latest Rajar audience-measurement figures for the first quarter of this year, NME Radio had an average of 226,000 listeners a week, up 16.5% year on year and 27.7% quarter on quarter.
Today (14 June), media agencies expressed disappointment about the decision, citing the gold award the station won in the best use of branded content category for its Skins Radio work for Channel 4, as evidence of the station’s progressive approach.
So it would seem that DX Media simply didn’t have the patience to wait for NME Radio to read critical mass, despite the fact that the signs were good. If anything, it looked lie NME Radio was well on the up. The Guardian says:
NME Radio went nationwide on digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio at the end of last year and also broadcast via Sky Digital, Virgin Media, and Freesat.
The station had an average weekly reach of 226,000 listeners in the first quarter of 2010, and just two months ago announced the signing of former Xfm DJ Alex Zane. It launched with a show presented by Ricky Gervais.
Once again, a great radio station has decided that the human voice is unnecessary or too expensive, and that us little sheeplings will continue to listen to an automated service that has all soul and personality of a brick. Well, I for one shan’t. If I want music without interruption, there’s Spotify, Last.fm, my iTunes folder, and a bazillion music blogs and podcasts that can keep me busy.
What I want is to be able to listen to Iain and his colleagues. Their voices gave shape to my day. Like the old town cryer calling “11 o’clock and all is well”, the sound of Iain’s voice was a reminder that I had better be getting on with my morning lest lunchtime creep up on me.
I feel betrayed by NME Radio. Hurt. Angry. I’ve been through the loss of my favourite radio station before when Xfm turned to shit, and this hurts even more because of it.
The strange thing is… just before Xfm lost the plot, it started broadcasting some really dodgy station idents that were repulsively puerile and insulting. They upset listener and DJ alike. I remember being quite shocked when I heard them or heard about them.
Only a few weeks ago, NME Radio started broadcasting dodgy station idents that I found repulsive and insulting. One featured a woman trying to ask her boyfriend to marry her, casting her as a needy, silly, unrealistic bimbo and him as an uncaring, selfish, emotionally unavailable twat more interested in his radio than the feelings of his girlfriend. That’s insulting to both men and women alike, frankly.
So now I’m lost. 6Music seems to be the place that refugees from Xfm and NME now go, but half their DJs bore me and the others drive me up the wall. I am again in the radio wilderness, searching for an indie alt rock home with charismatic and entertaining DJs to keep me company.
UPDATE 18 June 2010: I was pretty cross when I wrote this post. I think NME Radio’s fate reminded me so much of what happened at Xfm and opened up some old wounds. I’ve had an interesting conversation with someone closer to the action than myself, and reading this post back in the light of that additional information, it does sound a bit harsh.
Ultimately, DX Media and IPC were in a tough spot. Starting a new radio station just before the ad industry tanked and global recession set in was a piece of bad luck no one could have foreseen.
I have no reason to doubt the intentions and capabilities of the people at DX Media and IPC who worked on NME Radio. I do still think they could have done better at social media, but these have been testing times for all businesses that rely on advertising. I hope IPC figure a way to continue NME Radio, and perhaps even find the budget to hire back some of the great talent they were forced to let go. Indeed, I shall continue to listen, as they do still have the best playlist in town, and perhaps by remaining loyal through testing times I might help the station survive. One can but hope.
links for 2010-06-15
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Kevin: Delia Cabe has a good overview of magazine apps on the iPad. She's not impressed by Time or Newsweek. Her verdict on Time? "The preview consists of postage-size photos with short article titles. Nothing interests me enough to drop five bucks. Never mind. K Thx Bye."
From the reviews and also the apps that I've played with, they still seem a rather unintelligent, poorly thought out mix of multimedia and flat print – I say flat because many apps actually break the benefits of digital by merely having text as images. No links. No search. No thanks. I'll stick to Safari on websites. I like my digital truly digital.
Ending the self-fulfilling prophecy that digital content doesn’t make money
If you walk into a newspaper newsroom, you will hear something said over and over: “You can’t make money online”. It’s closely followed by grumbles of how much the company spends on digital. These are held up as some incontrovertible truth, like carrots help you see better.
Just as ‘carrots help you see better’ was propaganda spread by the British Air Ministry to conceal the military secret of radar, the ‘truth’ that there is no money to be made online is nonsense. It’s unquestioned propaganda in newspaper newsrooms where there is an unnecessary, senseless and ultimately self-destructive battle to keep the newspaper focused on paper, a battle driven by advocates of the primacy of print.
I’m not calling for the presses to be shut off. Rather, I’m calling for innovation in both print and digital. This battle to preserve the past is preventing companies from creating print and digital products that serve 21st Century audiences. Companies that are clear-headed and audience-driven are developing multi-platform strategies that are reversing decades long decline in profits and print circulation while increasing the share of revenue from digital. Those newspapers who remain focused on print are missing that opportunity.
It’s true that print makes the bulk of newspaper revenue, usually around 80%. But in focussing on outdated print strategies newspapers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: By not investing in digital, they ensure that digital revenues remain small in comparison to print.
In the US, Outsell found that in the news segment, largely made up of newspapers, only 11% of their revenues were from digital. In comparison, B2B publishers made 36% of their revenues from digital. Outsell analyst Ken Doctor said, “Simply put, the news industry has so far failed to make the digital transition.”
Although 11% of revenue doesn’t seem a good return, they have to be viewed in context. Print revenues are declining as a decades-long circulation drops no longer make print advertising as attractive. Digital revenues have been increasing, sometimes even through the recession, but it is usually from a very low base.
Commercial departments will also often tell you that it’s just not possible to make money online. In many instances, news organisations have built up huge audiences online but have failed to translate that audience into revenue. They will even refuse to investigate the opportunities afforded by digital on the basis that it would require them to do something different.
Commercial departments who say it’s not possible to make money online need to shoulder their responsibility for their failure to help newspapers make the transition to digital. If the current commercial strategy isn’t working – and old print ad sales strategies are not working very well online – why not try a new one? As the adage goes, if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.
There is hope, though. Folio has two great profiles of two publishers re-inventing themselves: The Christian Science Monitor and The Atlantic. Both profiles dive deep into details of the two different publications.
After rising losses, The Christian Science Monitor shifted from a daily newspaper to a web-first strategy with a weekly news magazine. One thing that stands out in the profile of the Monitor is how much audience research they have conducted and continue to conduct with more than 3,500 readers. They found out why people had stopped taking the newspaper: Cost, lack of time and a shift to getting headlines online. I really liked the way that publisher Jonathan Wells summed up how they re-thought their value proposition:
We had to think long and hard about it. Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’
One thing that jumped out at me was how willing they were to be nimble and to rethink not only how they worked digitally but also their print strategy. As they said, they were able to convert 93% of their print readers from the daily to weekly, and they’ve increased subscriptions by 63% since the shift. Increasing circulation going from 2009 to 2010 is something that most publishers would have killed for. They are not pursuing newsstand sales. They are focused on attracting the “right customers through controlled, targeted growth,” according to senior marketing director Susan Hackney.
They have also increased their page views by 49%, and they are looking to develop a line of digital products. This is all really smart, strategic and refreshing in an industry that seems to be mostly focused on squeezing the last bits of profit out of declining business models. That’s just a taster of an excellent article.
Folio also did an excellent profile of The Atlantic, which is managing to reverse a revenue decline that began in the 1960s. I often say that news organisations need to disrupt their business before someone else does. Atlantic Media president Justin Smith did just that, pushing for a digital-first strategy. From the Folio article:
(Smith) stressed that print is not dead, but taking this approach allowed the company to unlock its grip on traditional revenue sources. Importantly, the Web site’s overhaul was set up as an insurgency on the print brand. “If our mission was to kill the magazine, what would we do?” said Smith, who added that a digital competitor was going to do that anyway, so they did it themselves.
They are projecting that digital will account for 39% of their revenue in 2010. They not only shifted to digital first, but they also took a novel marketing approach, setting up their own marketing services division in an effort to differentiate themselves from ad networks. I’ll leave you to read the rest of the article, and I’ll give you one last reason to read the rest. After decades of decline, they looking at a profitable fourth quarter of 2010 and a multi-million profit in 2011.
To reposition themselves, these publications are looking for innovation from both print and digital but with a digital first strategy. The Monitor is using audience research to deliver products more relevant to their audiences, and they are thinking clearly about where they need to go and how nimble they need to be to achieve success.
We can rebuild businesses to support quality journalism, and here are two examples that show a few options for the way forward.
Value of Journalism: Different motivations for journalists
I’m at the Value of Journalism conference at LSE right now. I didn’t live blog the panels, but there were a few things that stood out for me and spurred some thoughts. There were discussions about paywalls, which I think largely reinforced my view that a very polarised, noisy media fracas obscured a much more nuanced reality in the paid content strategies of news organisations.
I did want to flag up the comments of Joanna Geary, a friend of mine, who spoke about her journey into journalism. UPDATE: Like many people, she stumbled into it. She told me afterwards that the move “was planned but knew it wasn’t perfect for what I wanted”. She says that on entering journalism she wasn’t a newspaper reader, and she definitely wasn’t someone who had specific loyalty to one newspaper. She is an information seeker. Now, she says that she regularly visits about five sites a day.
They are full of people I find interesting. They stimulate my thinking. Those are the sites that I visit the most.
This is very much the way that I consume information. I’m interested in subjects and topics, and as a networked journalist (the topic of this conference), I use personal networks and other tools to get as much information and gather as many sources about a subject that I can. As a journalist, I then try to sift, filter, highlight and verify. I also try to draw connections between these sources and bits of information. It’s very similar to traditional newsgathering, but the tools are different.
At conferences, I’m often asked about my news consumption patterns, and my standard response is: “My reading habits are voracious and promiscuous.” I find the idea quaint that I would choose a single news source for my information. Every source has it’s point of view, some more prominent than others. I feel the need to read several sources of information to get a complete view of a subject or topic.
I used to think that I was in the minority doing this, especially seeing as as a journalist, it’s part of my job to sift through a lot of information. However, this might represent a broader shift in news consumption. Gina Chen at the Nieman Lab at Harvard looked at a recent Pew Research Centre study in the US. (Caveat being that US studies aren’t necessarily applicable to all markets.) She interpreted the findings as:
But the important point is that the loyalty isn’t to the platform, the application, the delivery system, or the brand. The loyalty is to the need for the information.
That succinctly describes my relationship to news and information. I’m still not ready to generalise my news consumption patterns, but I do think that there are elements of my news consumption patterns that I share with digital audiences. I think that people are filtering information, consciously and unconsciously. Editorial choice and voice used to be the only filter for news, but I think that is changing. People have other tools that are proving to be better vehicles for relevance than the traditional news outlet and its manner of bundling information.
Teasing out Trust
Back to the conference which has the overarching theme of the Value of Journalism. It’s important to draw a distinction between societal value and economic sustainability. Speaking of teasing out issues, Joanna also drew a distinction between legality, accuracy and trust:
If it was illegal to be untrustworthy and wrong, a lot of journalists would be in jail.
Joanna also talked about her motivation for getting into journalism. I’m writing this part of the post a little after the panel, and I don’t want to put words into Jo’s mouth. However, it is safe to say that her motivations going in were different than the motivations that she found other journalists had. Jo said that she found that many journalists just wanted to write, to have influence and be recognised. Jo’s motivations were more based on a desire to inform. (I’ll check with Jo just to make sure that I’m not misquoting her. She did say to me after the panel that she is finding more people in journalism like her.)
Jo’s comments resonated with me. As I’ve said before, in my rather brief career thus far I’ve had the honour of working for international journalism organisations including the BBC and The Guardian. However, I got my start at a small newspaper in western Kansas, The Hays Daily News. When you’re writing for a newspaper that sells 14,000 copies to people spread across a few thousand square miles, one is aware of the limits of one’s influence.
Of course, we all want to be read or viewed. However, in terms of influence, it’s not really something that I’ve sought nor is it what gets me up in the morning. My goal is to provide people with information so that they can make decisions in a democratic society. I know that trust and credibility is the bedrock of what I do.
Engagement has been key to building trust in the journalism I do, and Jo spoke very eloquently about that during the panel. It is one of the reasons why I have been such an advocate of social media journalism. It is a chance to directly engage with our audiences and to build (or in some cases rebuild) our relationship with people.
links for 2010-06-10
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Kevin: Some good data from the US on how Americans are using the internet to get information about their communities. 22% of all adults (28% of US internet users) signed up to receive alerts about local issues. 20% of adults use digital tools to talk to their neighbours.
links for 2010-06-09
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Kevin: From PBS MediaShift, an interview with Jim Barnett who launched his own non-profit news service in 2005. "Today, there are many more, small and large. And now, other non-profits that do advocacy and education are exploring how they can use the tools of journalism to help fill the void."
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Kevin: Alan Mutter has some excellent advice for journalists looking to launch their own news sites. Alan is supportive, but realistic. Here is one bit of advice that stood out for me. "After talking to one enterprising journalist after another, I have found almost uniformly that they are making the mistake that has proven to be the downfall of many an entrepreneur: Instead of trying to build a business, they are trying to give themselves the job they always wanted."
Can anyone ‘do a Radiohead’?
Radiohead really shook things up a bit when they decided to let people pay whatever they wanted for their album, In Rainbows. Although others had used similar models before them, Radiohead were possibly the biggest band to try that tactic and they inspired many more people to experiment with innovative funding and payment models.
But one of the main criticisms of Radiohead’s experiment was that it could only work for bands or artists who already had a following as substantial as theirs. There can be no doubt that the bigger and more committed your fanbase, the more likely an experiment like that is to succeed. But still there remain doubts as to whether the crowdfunding model can work for lesser known creative projects.
One thing that is clear is that many people believe that it is possible, enough to create the infrastructure required to allow people to tap into their communities for support. Since Radiohead’s experiment, several crowdfunding websites have sprung up which make it easy to ask people to contribute financially to different types of project. ChipIn, Pledgie, IndiGoGo and Kickstarter all help people realise their fundraising goals, although no site can short circuit the hard promotional work that users need to do to get word out about their own project.
I have a personal interest in learning more about what’s required to make a crowdfunded project a success, not least because I currently have my own project running on Kickstarter. Argleton combines storytelling, bookbinding and a geolocation game and is currently 27% funded with 49 days to go.
I like to think that I have a pretty well developed network, having been blogging for the last eight years and being fairly prolific on Twitter almost since the beginning. But my network pales in comparison to someone like Robin Sloan, whose Kickstarter project inspired my own. Robin currently has 212,704 followers on Twitter, in comparison to my paltry 3,255. I would imagine that finding enough people to support a project if you have an even smaller network than mine would be very difficult indeed – supporters don’t grow on trees and they don’t magically find out about your project without your hard work and intervention.
And I think therein lies the key. As my friend Lorin said on IM yesterday,
The gift of shameless, classy, effective self-promotion is one of the best super powers going around. I wonder what one needs to be bitten by / exposed to / turned into to get that happening.
Like bands before them, authors are going to need to learn not just how to write but also how to effectively promote their own projects in order to reach enough people. Having a good idea never was enough – life always goes more smoothly for those with the right connections. Now it’s easier to make those connections, although it takes just as much time and commitment to achieve that as ever. Only time will tell if I have the connections necessary to make Argleton happen.