Why Most Newspapers Will Fail

Josh Sternberg, Confessions of a Newspaper Ad Exec

Why are newspapers slow to embrace digital change?

By their very own design, they are built for an extremely top-down decision-making process and tremendously inefficient for today’s marketplace from all facets. You wouldn’t believe how resistant to change newsroom roles are — change that should have happened years ago. Time is running out, and they don’t get that. There still is a blind and bold arrogance – and that’s a bad combo. Embracing and succeeding today for newspapers represents a seismic change or shift in how they do everything. This sort of change is also expensive: accounting systems, content-management systems for editorial, multiple forms of paid research and ad tech for sales and marketing. Also, add in all training for all departments on new systems – it’s a huge endeavor.

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Are newspapers really in a death spiral?

Outside of a handful of truly digital-first newspapers, yes, for several reasons. Because newspapers are hemorrhaging, there is a terrible urgency that is building to find the next biggest thing — a sort of “Hail Mary” solution. What they’re failing to realize is that the best publishers out there aren’t relying on just one thing to survive or thrive. Instead, it’s a game of yards and first downs (data, collaboration, new products and digital investment) vs. the deep pass. Third-party relationships aren’t really being leveraged properly. From creating content to understanding your own data, these companies enable you to have contemporary conversations. Another big issue is the dwindling ability to attract qualified digital talent in all departments — editorial, marketing, sales.

Why won’t paywalls work for newspapers?

Creating quality content to justify paywalls or paid subscriptions is costly – newsrooms are cutting long-form journalists and are struggling to find the right balance of long-form plus quick, short pieces. Very few newspapers really give a reason to pay. Also, there is a terrible misunderstanding about what paid subscriptions or paywalls are for the publisher. In some cases, it is a way to replace, mitigate or recapture free-falling paid circulation numbers. This is tragic because for most newspapers, paid circulation has never represented more than 20 to 30 percent of the company’s total revenue (the other 70 to 80 percent is advertising). So how on earth would you ever accomplish that now?

Some will make the transition, but I think Sternbergs’ characterization shows that newspapers are stuck in a pre-digital timewarp, and transitioning to a postnormal, fast-and-loose model of journalism — which matches the economy we are in — is an imperative that most will not heed.

Source: digiday.com

8 May 2013 18 Permalink

Why Most Newspapers Will Fail: Deep Inertia

Newspapers as a a whole are not making a transition to the new media landscape:

A Harsh Reality for Newspapers - Brain Stelter via NY Times

Last year, researchers at the Project for Excellence in Journalism persuaded six companies that own 121 newspapers to share private data about the financial performance of many of their papers. And the findings were grim.

On average, for every new dollar the newspapers were earning in new digital advertising revenue, they were losing $7 in print advertising revenue. The papers seemed not to be diversifying their revenue streams or coming up with innovative products at a fast enough clip.

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“Only 40 percent of papers say targeted advertising is a major part of their sales efforts,” the report states. “Most papers are not putting major effort into selling ‘smart’ or customized digital ads, the category expected to soon dominate local advertising.”

I don’t think that the NY Times — where I read this story — is pushing personalized ads to me. If they were, I wouldn’t be seeing Fashion Week all over the page.

5 March 2012 21 Permalink

Where’s The Bottom For Newspapers?

Here’s a big story, and the meta-story behind it:

The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph, Derek Thompson via The Atlantic

Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011.

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Don’t just blame the bloggers. For decades, newspapers relied on a simple cross-subsidy to pay for their coverage. You can’t make much money advertising against A1 stories like bombings in Afghanistan and school shootings and deficit reduction. Those stories are the door through which readers walk to find stories that can take the ads: the car section, the style section, the travel section, and the classifieds. But ad dollars started flowing to websites that gave people their car, style, travel, or classifieds directly. So did the readers. And down went print.

The decline is stunning. “Last year’s ad revenues of about $21 billion were less than half of the $46 billion spent just four years ago in 2007, and less than one-third of the $64 billion spent in 2000,” Mark Perry writes. In the next few years — and hopefully, in the next few decades (I like print!) — we’ll see papers and magazines continue to invest in their websites and find advertising and pricing models that support journalism independently. Otherwise, one hopes that rich people continue to be fond of paying for the production of great writing on bundles of ink and paper.

I don’t think there is any business model that will prop up print newspapers as we know them. As media is being exploded into a thousand bits, the 20th century model of newspaper journalism is increasingly obsolete. Something else will come along, some sort of networked journalism.

Consider the way I read about this graphic: I saw a piece in my Tumblr stream by Futureamb, quoting a fragment of a Business Insider piece by Henry Blodget, where Futureamb actually didn’t add even a comment, but was curator zero for me. I then looked at the Blodget piece: he had a few things to add, but wasn’t the originator of the graph. The trail led to Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, who was citing Mark Perry’s graphing of data from the Newspaper Association of America. Derek added real value, and an extra graph:

Wow! The Wall Street Journal is a singular institution since the majority of its subscribers are businesses, not individuals. All the other major US papers are falling like stones.

And now, I am adding my 2¢, which is likely how you are seeing this.

My point is that this trail of interactions is how we are increasingly experiencing the ‘news’, and it jumps from place to place, outside the boundaries of the newspapers officially publishing this bits of the ‘story’. Newspapers are built top-down — that’s how most businesses are oriented — but that’s doesn’t match the way that information transfer works in a networked world.

The social object — the information embedded in these graphs — is handed around, from curator to curator, each adding something, taking away, looking at it from a different angle. It’s additive and subtractive, kind of like Wikipedia, but distributed across a bunch of independent, cooperative posts instead of embodied in a consolidated Wikipedia entry.

We need new social technologies — a step past today’s curation tools — to support this new sprawling, liquid media world. That’s what how we’ll experience news in the near future.

I am betting that newspapers will fail to make a painless transition to a new business structure before hitting the bottom, and fracturing into a millions pieces. After that crash, some of those pieces might begin to create a new networked, post-journalism model of news organization, one that doesn’t have papers in it.

1 March 2012 13 Permalink

i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel

Interesting piece about a Lisbon-based online newspaper that is turning the design of papers upside down.

[via www.editorsweblog.org]

What i is doing differently

I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more. Traditionally, journalists have to fill a politics section even if there is nothing relevant going on in politics. We wanted to come up with something different.” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address, with five key words.

1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion.
2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page.
3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. “We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams,” Figueiredo said.
4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people’s private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited. More encompasses the fifth need that the paper wanted to address: sports, about 80% of which is focused on football - “this is very important in Portugal,” Figueiredo said.

I love it. The sections of the paper are Think, Know, Understand, and Feel.

23 November 2009 1 Permalink

Jack Shafer on The Future of Newspapers

Shafer argues that newspapers can’t survive by retreat: just cutting costs and trimming the stock quotes won’t win when bloggers are doing so much. Newspapers have to decide to excel in a way that bloggers can’t, or else:

[Not Just Another Column About Blogging - What newspaper history says about newspaper future By Jack Shafer]

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The newspaper guild (again, reporters, editors, publishers) can’t compete by adding a few blogs here, blogging up coverage over there, and setting up “comment” sections. If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don’t produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive.

But instead of improving their product by deploying technology bloggers can’t afford (yet), newspapers are devolving. Many are cutting staff. Daily newspapers are growing smaller and uglier, with no paper looking anywhere near as lovely as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World from the late 1800s. Comic strips have gotten so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read them. I’m fine with newspapers cutting back on stock tables, but they aren’t adding something new to the package. Most newspapers claim they’ve shrunk their dimensions to combat steep increases in newsprint prices, but that’s a lie.

What else do I want? I want a daily newspaper that looks as good as Vogue but smells like a cinnamon bun instead of perfume. I want smarter newspaper headlines. I want a Mike Royko in every daily newspaper. I want editorials signed by people, so I know who to yell at. I want newspapers to restore editorial cartoonists to their place of honor instead of eliminating them. To broaden the answer, I want the newsmagazines to give me a better reason to read them than remixes of the last four days’ news cycle, and I want them to look like Harry N. Abrams’ coffee-table books.

In fact, while newspapers are failing, magazines are still doing well, so his general thrust — turning upmarket on production — might be smart. A weekly, regional news magazine? That might be the future for The Washington Post, the LA Times, and other smaller players.

30 January 2006 Permalink