I Read the News Today... Oh Boy

I Read the News Today... Oh Boy
the liberal media
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/alterman
By Eric Alterman

This article appeared in the August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Spend some time on the "future of news" conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you'll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter's invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in "perhaps the worst single trading day ever" for the newspaper business, "the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history." When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies' combined stock price in 2008 alone.

It's been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, "for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful." And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom--this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry's age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is "a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored--until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle."

For those who embrace the now omnipresent mantra that the staff will simply have to "do more with less," blogger Kevin Roderick of LA Observed notes, "Yes you can put out a good paper with 700 staffers--but not a better paper than the one paying customers are already fleeing."

Corporate responses have also included: asking an already dispirited staff to take a 10 percent pay cut (the Boston Globe); raising the newsstand price by 33 to 50 percent (Gannett, the Wall Street Journal); drastically reducing the newspaper's news/advertising ratio (all Tribune papers); turning the paper's Sunday magazine over to the business staff (the Los Angeles Times); reducing the physical size of the newspaper and cutting down on the news hole (everyone); buying out experienced, knowledgeable staff members and replacing them with underpaid novices (everyone); and closing foreign and national bureaus (almost everyone). Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers--or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic functions--is curious and depressing. It's curious because some of the smartest, most ambitious and most civic-minded people in America are deeply engaged with the problem. It is depressing because the only ones with the self-confidence to undertake radical measures appear to be completely off their respective rockers.

Take the example of the Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell. Leaving aside his penchant for potty-mouth rejoinders for those who question his judgment, Zell has done nothing to slow the slide in the company's fortunes and much to accelerate it. Scrambling like mad for cash to service the company's debt, Zell sold off the profitable Newsday and borrowed $300 million against future earnings, a clear sign of panic. To advise him on long-term strategy, he has appointed as "chief innovation officer" Lee Abrams, a man who was apparently surprised to learn that reports datelined "Baghdad" are actually produced by reporters in Baghdad. His suggestion: "photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids" to advertise this fact.

Writing on his blog, Abrams mused that newspapers were "TOO NPR," (caps in original), which he found "a bit elitist." He would rather have newspapers "study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station," which he defines as "being INTELLIGENT... not intellectual."

The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper--the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy--is going to have to come from somewhere else. Sure, the blogosphere makes some invaluable contributions and a few foundations are rising to the challenge of funding investigative journalism. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian recently suggested to me that universities might attach a small fee to their students' tuition--like an activities fee--to pay for the newspaper subscription of their choice. This would improve the newspapers' bottom line, give their advertisers access to a coveted demographic and, if successful, would inculcate in the students the habit of newspaper reading as they approach maturity as voting citizens. It's a great idea, and unlike most of what one hears at these conferences, it is on scale with the problem. Unfortunately, young people do not appear to want to pick up a newspaper, even for free. They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis.

I don't have a better idea, except to repeat, again, the following: the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy. It is far too important to be left in the hands of a bunch of clueless media moguls and their "chief innovation officers."

About Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and "Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York, and a history consultant to HBO Films.

Is readership rising or falling?

Is readership rising or falling?
By Simon Owens
http://bloggasm.com/is-newspaper-readership-rising-or-falling

Amid the countless stories detailing the blows the newspaper industry has taken in both advertising and circulation, one positive theme has remained constant: More people are reading newspapers than ever. Or, more specifically, more people are visiting newspaper websites. The New York Times, for instance, has a weekday circulation of just over a million. Its website - depending on which metrics you use - has somewhere close to 18 million separate people that visit it each month.
But according to a new study (pdf) released by the Readership Institute, a division of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, even this one glimmer of hope for the industry may be overblown.

To complete the study, the Readership Institute hired a polling firm to conduct over 3,000 phone interviews in 100 "impact" markets. The questions focused in on how much time and effort was spent reading a person's local daily paper, making sure to differentiate between the print and online edition.

Based on the answers, the study concluded that website "penetration" is relatively low, with only a fifth of the respondents saying they visited their local papers' websites within the past month. Approximately 62 percent of the respondents said they have never once accessed the newspaper's website.

Mary Nesbitt, managing director at the Readership Institute, told me in a phone interview today that the level of website penetration has remained relatively the same since 2003.

"The penetration within the average impact area is not as high as most would like it to be," Nesbitt said. "It has changed a little bit over the last few years, picking up a little bit. But there's still a big opportunity to grow and engage an online audience."

As for the print edition of the newspaper, its core readership is showing a slow, steady decline. The Readership Institute developed a "Reader Behavior Score" to not only measure how often a person reads his local newspaper, but how much time is spent with it and the extent to which he reads it. The RBS is based on a seven-point scale, and this year the average score was 3.38, a drop from 3.55 in 2006.

Respondents that were ages 18 to 24 showed the sharpest decrease in readership, with a score of 2.40 (compared to 2.84 in 2006). Older readerships either stayed the same or actually showed significant increases.

So what accounts for the disparities between the website statistics boasted by most newspapers and the results of this study? Nesbitt wouldn't speculate much on this, but it's possible that many of those new readers are flowing in from outside the local impact area, either through search engines or links from other websites. Also, the study relied on the respondents to make off-the-cuff estimations of the time they spent reading newspapers, a fact that likely resulted in people making generalizations for reading habits that are often very complicated and sporadic. Readership has always been an incredibly complicated thing to measure, and even with the sophisticated analytic tools we have today to measure website traffic, there are still unresolved arguments over how to accurately gauge a website's readership.

But Nesbitt said one thing is likely certain: since the Readership Institute began conducting these surveys in 2000, readership is bleeding at a much slower pace than advertising and circulation revenue.

"What it tells us - contrary to what we read and see and hear - is that newspapers are not going to hell in a handcart," she said. "At least in terms of their audiences . . . They are read and used by a huge number of people on a regular basis. Truth be told that number has been declining slowly and what has been driving that is that frequency of reading has decreased."

And when I asked her whether there's any optimism for the industry that can be found from these studies, Nesbett was quick with one positive piece of spin.

"Something that's interesting is that even though website readership is very low, to me that says opportunity," she replied. "And the other thing is how the trust and credibility of the newspaper seems to be having a beneficial brand effect on the website as well. That's very positive to me."

But whether this brand will remain intact remains to be seen. The Newspaper Association of America reported recently that online newspaper advertising jumped 19 percent in 2007.

The flip side to that? Overall, total advertising revenue has dropped 12 percent from last year. Only time will tell whether newspapers online counterparts will ever catch up, or if this decade truly signifies the beginning of the end of the industry as we know it.

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Mass-Media Extinction Prediction 'On Target'

Michael Crichton, Vindicated
His 1993 prediction of mass-media extinction now looks on target.
By Jack Shafer
http://www.slate.com/id/2192382/
In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media-specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.
The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances-"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"-swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.
"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."
Had Crichton's prediction been on track, by 2002 the New York Times should have been half-fossilized. But the newspaper's vital signs were so positive that its parent company commissioned a 1,046-foot Modernist tower, which now stands in Midtown Manhattan. Other trends predicted by Crichton in 1993 hadn't materialized in 2002, either. Customized news turned out to be harder to create than hypothesize; news consumers weren't switching to unfiltered sources such as C-SPAN; and the mainstream media weren't on anyone's endangered species list.
When I interviewed Crichton in 2002 about his failed predictions for Slate, he was anything but defensive.
"I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I'm wrong; it's just too early," Crichton said via e-mail.
As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.
So with white flag in hand, I approached Crichton to chat him up once more. Magnanimous in victory, he said he had often thought about our 2002 discussion and was happy to revisit it. (Read the uncut e-mail interview in this sidebar.)
Although Crichton still subscribes to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, he dropped the Los Angeles Times a year ago-"with no discernable loss." He skims those two dailies but spends 95 percent of his "information-gathering time" on the Web.
He concedes with a shrug that the personalized infotopia he crystal-balled in 1993 has yet to arrive. When we talked in 2002, Crichton scoffed at the Web. Too slow. Its page metaphor, too limiting. Design, awful. Excessive hypertexting, too distracting. Noise-to-signal ratio, too high.
Today he's more positive about the medium. He notes with satisfaction that the Web has made it far easier for the inquisitive to find unmediated information, such as congressional hearings. It's much faster than it used to be, and more of its pages are professionally assembled. His general bitch is advertisements in the middle of stories, and he's irritated by animation and sounds in ads. "That, at least, can often be blocked by your browser," he says.
In 1993, Crichton predicted that future consumers would crave high-quality information instead of the junk they were being fed and that they'd be willing to pay for it. He's perplexed about that part of his prediction not panning out, but he has a few theories about why it hasn't.
"Senior scientists running labs don't read journals; they say the younger people will tell them about anything important that gets published-if they haven't heard about it beforehand anyway," he says. "So there may be other networks to transmit information, and it may be that 'media' was never as important as we who work in it imagine it was. That's an argument that says maybe nobody really needs a high-end service."
It will take a media visionary, he believes-somebody like Ted Turner-to create the high-quality information service he foresaw in his 1993 essay. In addition to building the service, the visionary will also have to convince news consumers that they need it.
Sounding like a press critic, Crichton criticizes much of the news fed to consumers as "repetitive, simplistic, and insulting" and produced on the cheap. Cable TV news is mostly "talking heads and food fights" and newspaper reporting mostly "rewritten press releases," he says.
Crichton suggests that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves "out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news." Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.
"Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what 'may' or 'might' or 'could' happen," he says. "Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content."
"The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, 'How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama's chances?' 'Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?' 'How will McCain overcome the age argument?' These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling," he says.
Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public's interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.
He tosses out a basket of questions he'd like to see the press tackle, some of which I've seen covered. "What happened at Bear Stearns?" got major play this week, after Crichton answered my questions, in a Wall Street Journal series. And I know I've seen "How much of the current price of gas can be attributed to the weak dollar?" answered a couple of times but can't remember where. (Answer: a lot.) But such Crichton questions as "Why have hedge funds evaded government regulation?" and what specific lifestyle changes will every American have to make "to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 percent?" would be great assignments for news desks.
"I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless," he says.

Death of Print? Not at News Corp in Britain

Death of Print? Not at News Corp in Britain
News International unveils 'biggest printing plant in the world'
By Patrick Smith

Journalists at News International's four national newspapers will face wide-ranging changes when the company moves all printing from its Wapping headquarters in April.

At a tour of the company's new £187 million Broxbourne plant in north London today, the company's senior management said that the latest in automated printing technology would give journalists later deadlines and editors greater freedom in redesigning pages.

News International claim the plant, just off the M25 near Enfield, is the biggest printing centre in the world. It is part of a £650m initiative including plants in Knowsley, near Liverpool, and Motherwell, near Glasgow.

The "triple-width" printing presses can produce tabloid and broadsheet newsprint simultaneously, meaning that many traditional editorial and printing deadlines could be scrapped.

Clive Milner, News International's group managing director, told Press Gazette: "It affects the process of journalism in a number of ways. It allows the editors to refresh and redesign the product and that's good news for readers.

"Our current products are in some cases constrained by the production, this is changed by Broxbourne."

The Sunday Times, which currently begins printing on Wednesdays, could now be printed entirely on Saturday, he said, putting sections like business into a "live" slot.

The Broxbourne plant is the size of 23 football pitches, it has 12 full-colour printing presses capable of printing 86,000 copies per hour - the equivalent of 330,000 tonnes of newsprint a year. Wapping managed 36,000 copies per hour.

Automated, pre-programmed computer technology - including laser-guided trucks and conveyor belts carrying rolls of paper around the vast factory floor - mean that printing staff are to be cut by two thirds making the company an estimated annual saving of £13m.

James Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp's Europe and Asia division, said the investment "should be ample answer to those who believe the business of journalism, in print, is a business for yesterday's readers, not tomorrow's."

He continued: "At News, we believe that print will continue to be a driving force, even as we expand in this connected age."

The Sun is already being printed at Broxbourne. The Daily and Sunday Telegraph will begin printing from Broxbourne late this year.

NI is currently looking for a new home for its editorial staff. A sale document for Wapping has been issued to potential buyers but no potential site has been mentioned by the company so far.

Newspapers and Buggywhips

Newspapers and Buggywhips
By Lawrence Henry
I grew up in a newspaper family. My grandfather ran a small town journal. My father headed up the advertising department of a chain of suburban weeklies and later published his own weekly paper in Florida. I have lived through the switchover from letterpress to offset printing, through the death of the evening daily (done in by TV news), through declining circulation, through price hikes in newsprint, and through the Internet.

I've set type, run printing presses, sold advertising, written stories, done page layouts, and edited sections. I cannot remember a time when newspapers weren't -- in some way -- going in the tank, failing, losing circulation, or losing money.

Yet we still have newspapers, and newspapers continue to be a force -- in the shaping of information and public opinion, and in the political life of the nation. They do so in spite of comically bad management, the near-total disregard of the usual high-profit demographic (the one that goes to the malls and the multiplexes), their sheer wrongheadedness in matters of public policy, and the alienation of their writers from the lives of everyday people.


IN ONE OF HIS books, humorist Dave Barry made fun of the usual way that newspapers try to turn around declining circulation. They look at their readership, they find out that younger people don't read the paper, and they decide to appeal to the readers they don't have -- or at least try. The paper's panjandrums determine to make their graphics kickier, to run more youth-oriented features, to cover entertainment, to make the product livelier and more fun.

Of course, the effort fails. The paper can't compete in the entertainment and fun market with TV, radio, and (for those of the younger set who read) specialty teen magazines. Instead, the newspaper prints less of what its dedicated readers want, and therefore loses more of its core audience. Five years later, says Barry, they do the same thing all over again.

Ironically, everybody used to read Dave Barry. If you could field a newspaper full of Dave Barrys, there would be no problem with the medium at all.


THE DECLINE AND FALL of newspapers mirrors a publishing failure in the past, that of general interest national magazines. Used to be everybody read Look, Life, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. Those giants of publishing collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s, and we have not seen anything like them again.

But magazines did not disappear. In the language of marketing, the large, vertically oriented national journals gave way to dozens of horizontally marketed specialty magazines. The 1970s saw the flowering of the city magazine: New York, Texas Monthly, San Francisco, Washingtonian, and so forth.

At the same time, new magazines sprang up to address specific niche audiences. At the time, I worked for a publisher's representative (an ad sales agency) that took pride in having sold the first credit card ad to Ms.

To the surprise of most of us in the magazine biz, Ms. is still around, witness a recent flap over the magazine's refusal to carry an ad from Israel. Eleanor Smeal, Reagan-era head of NOW (and, I presume, still unable to pronounce the "d" in "administration" or "admit"), edits the book.

The fragmenting of the magazine world presaged the development of "narrowcasting" in cable television. Now, everyone can find his or her special interest reflected in at least part of a cable channel. Pool and poker could never have succeeded in national media without a proliferation of channels. And to pursue the parallel further, viewership of the big networks has fallen much the same way that newspaper readership has.


JUST LIKE NETWORK TV, newspapers will survive. So savvy an entrepreneur as Rupert Murdoch would not have bought the Wall Street Journal unless he was sure he could make it into a "big, big-titted hit" (to quote the Robert Duvall character in Network).

Murdoch, opines Ed Lasky in the American Thinker, will make his product a profitable market leader by synergizing with other elements of his media empire, and by infusing capital and talent into the newspaper.

Murdoch is a special case, aiming, as he does, to make the Journal the pre-eminent newspaper in the U.S. For publishers of more modest means and aims, the motto going forward will be synergy and specialization. Some combination of the Internet and print, some certain target audience, some canny design and organization, all will point the way forward for the newspapers of the future.

Some may look like professional journals, some may resemble the rabble-rousing shout-sheets of the Colonial era, some may take off from hobbyist enthusiasms. The big dailies like the New York Times and the Washington Post will survive. At least a few of the biggies have to, if for no other reason than to provide content and direction for broadcast newsies -- who can't do their own reading and research.

The Future of News Is 'Small'

The Future of News Is 'Small'
by Max Kalehoff
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=67437


What will newspapers look like in 2020? That's the burning question a number of people have been tackling lately, including Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis, fellow Spin columnist Dave Morgan and Businessweek's Stephen Baker.

Jarvis says that: "By 2020, we had better hope that newspapers aren't just papers anymore but are valued members of larger networks that enable their communities to gather, share, and make sense of the news they need."

Morgan says that: "I very much doubt that folks in major metropolitan markets in the U.S. will wake up daily to the sound of print newspapers hitting their doorstep. The metro newspaper as we know it will not exist in large markets, and will probably not exist in the same way in many smaller markets as well. However, I do believe that there will be many large and very robust local news, information and advertising media products; probably, in fact, many, many more of them than we have today, particularly in large metro markets."


Finally, Baker says that: "Editors will go the way of the linotype machine. Increasingly, human editing will be viewed as an expense and a delay that few can afford. Algorithms, editing software and seach engines will handle much of the work. Communities will bounce around the stories and edit in their own way. In this sense, newspapers will become more like blogs...This represents a shift in power within journalism. Editors long ran things. Editing was management. It was upward mobility. More money. Reporters who didn't switch to editing by their '40s were often considered quirky, and lacking in ambition. That's no longer the case."

I agree with all three of them to a large degree -- and especially the unequivocal assertion that the Internet is driving this bus. But for whatever erosion takes place -- be it the physical paper, classified ads, editors or equity of old news brands -- I believe the importance of the individual reporter, or voice, will inversely rise. And it all comes down to trust and accessibility.

Don't get me wrong; big news companies are tremendously powerful. But big picture, trust in big institutions -- along with their brands -- is being challenged. People increasingly look to other people like themselves for information, recommendations, comfort, reassurance and guidance on how to live life. The erosion of trust and image in big institutions is inherent in corporations, government, advertising, religious bodies, and...the news business. (Two great resources on this topic are Edelman's Trust Barometer and Gallup's annual rating of the images of 25 business and industry sectors.)

I believe if we are in a long-term period of eroding trust in what's big and institutional, then we're bound to enter a period of intense consciousness and value over what's small. What's small is accessible, tangible and compatible with "us people."

When it comes to consuming what's newsworthy, the individual reporter and people brands will become more important. In fact, Jarvis, Morgan and Baker are all perfect examples of this phenomenon in my own news and information consumption. Just look at my blogroll, which I publish openly on my own blog.


I believe the investments and scale that big news brands achieve will remain important in 2020. However, they will need to reconcile with the eventual, dominant attribute we now call small.

Regardless, this period will bring tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurial, independent, innovative thinkers to shape what does become the news business. The big's monopoly on the ability to shape the future of the news business -- or push the status quo -- is declining rapidly.


What do you think?

Guilt Trip

OFF MESSAGE
Guilt Trip
By William Powers, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
http://nationaljournal.com/powers.htm#

There's a new twist in the ongoing drama of the poor beleaguered mainstream media. Rather than merely bemoaning the plight of traditional news outlets, some people are suggesting that users of the new media -- pretty much all of us -- should feel guilty for undermining the blue-chip operations that are struggling to stay alive.


Nothing will kill the great newspapers more quickly than turning them into charity cases.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Lou Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University, told the story of how, after a recent fly-fishing trip to a relatively untouristed corner of Greece called Epirus, he decided to start a website offering information about the region. Like many Web entrepreneurs, Ureneck signed up with Google's advertising program and, voila , the money started to roll in. Well, sort of. In its first week of business, Epirusfishing.com pulled in just $1.05. Still, money is money, and therein lies the guilt:

"I love newspapers and subscribe to three of them at home.... I believe that the work that they do collecting and analyzing news is an essential part of a healthy democracy," Ureneck wrote. "But those little Google ads that are popping on my website are chipping -- more like hacking -- away at newspapers by cutting into their revenue streams.... In a sense, I am contributing to problems of newspapers by jumping into Web publishing and accepting advertising."

In suggesting that he kept those ads from appearing in print and thereby helped to impoverish the outlets he loves, Ureneck is making a leap. As Boston-based media blogger Dan Kennedy put it, "Does Lou Ureneck really think the little guys whose ads have popped up on his website about fishing in Greece would otherwise be taking out ads in newspapers?"

Still, the column's core point, that ad dollars are migrating from old media to new, is inarguable and nothing new. What's remarkable is the remorse, and it may be spreading. In one of the most talked-about media books of the moment, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture," Andrew Keen strikes a similar note. Discussing the public's attachment to free media sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and Craigslist, he writes, "What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune." Later he specifically cites the way this practice is hurting old media: "Of course, every free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper."

Keen believes that amateur-produced content is destroying the best things about our culture, and he places the blame squarely on you and me: "We ... are being seduced by the empty promise of 'democratized' media. For the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information."

Again, the basic business dynamic is real, but the implied conclusion, that old media are dying as a result and we are the guilty assassins, is not. Digital outlets have stolen a lot of business away from traditional outlets, but the two are also converging and growing interdependent. Mainstream news outlets operate major Web portals (a fact Keen himself notes). Without newspapers and other traditional sources, Google News would have virtually no quality journalism -- the hard news and investigative work that are the media's most important products -- to offer. In an implicit acknowledgment of this fact, Google just inked a deal with the Associated Press in which it agreed to pay for AP content.

Nothing will kill the great newspapers more quickly than turning them into charity cases. And nobody should ever read a newspaper out of a dreary sense of civic obligation. Like great books, the best news shops have always drawn readers because they were feisty, well executed, and thrillingly alive to their own times. Their magnetism was rooted partly in the fact that they were optional, something you didn't technically need to get through the day, yet somehow couldn't live without.

When we take our eyeballs to a new media site, we are helping the old media more than hurting them, by showing them what works for us -- teaching them to be not weaker but stronger. Are they getting the message?


-- William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com.

Natural Selection

Natural Selection
By William Powers, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
http://nationaljournal.com/powers.htm#

The latest media moan, heard this week wherever two or more newspaper lovers were gathered, was about the suddenly smaller New York Times. As of several days ago, the great daily is one and a half inches skinnier side to side, the same size as other previously downsized broadsheets, including The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

All the evidence points to newspapers heading down the fast track toward extinction. But are we really looking at all of the evidence?


It was another excuse for media people everywhere to wonder aloud: Are newspapers dying? A headline on the Editor & Publisher website captured the mood. "Today, A Smaller 'NYT': Tomorrow, None at All?"

All the evidence points to newspapers heading down the fast track toward extinction. But are we really looking at all of the evidence? A piece in the newly svelte paper suggests that maybe the herd is thinking about the past, present, and future of newspapers a bit too, well, narrowly.

On the front of The Times' science section was a story about Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California (Davis), who has proposed a new solution to one of history's great puzzles: Why, beginning about 200 years ago, did some societies abandon centuries of subsistence farming and poverty -- starting the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, achieving "amazing affluence"?

As Times reporter Nicholas Wade cogently explained, Clark's core idea is a Darwinian one. In England, where industrialization began, poor people died in greater numbers than rich people and left behind fewer children. As the rich people's descendants multiplied, they filled various social and economic niches that the poor had previously filled. And as the descendants of the well-off fanned out, they took with them inherited traits and behaviors that had allowed their successful ancestors to thrive. Those abilities gave them the wherewithal to invent something new -- the hardworking, thrifty, upwardly mobile middle class. And the rest is history. At various points during the day that Wade's story was published, it was the most e-mailed piece on The Times' website.

This is just a theory, and it has nothing to do with newspapers per se, but bear with me. We know that people who habitually read newspapers are slowly dying off. And we know that the descendants of those people, younger folk, don't read newspapers nearly as much. Many view papers as a symbol of stodgy old ways of living and thinking. The Internet is where the action is. One might therefore hypothesize that human beings are evolving away from newspapers because we have discovered a new tool that is much more useful in the Darwinian struggle for success.

There's just one problem with that theory: The most successful people on the planet today, the equivalent of the rich people in the Clark study, still rely on the information that newspapers provide to rise and prosper. Up-to-date information is the coin of the realm, and it's rare to meet a successful person who doesn't follow the news. They may not get it from the hard-copy newspaper, but most online news originates in traditional newspapers and newspaper-related organs such as the Associated Press. In other words, the basic product the papers produce still helps the fittest to thrive.

We even have a recent case study of two separate human gene pools taking radically different approaches to the idea of newspapers. Rupert Murdoch, the 32nd-richest person in the richest nation on Earth, wanted to own a famous, and famously troubled, newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The Bancroft family, which had owned the paper for decades and made a mess of it, didn't want to own it any more.

As a group, the Bancrofts were not thriving in the Darwinian sense the way that the Murdochs were, not by a long shot. They couldn't figure out how to make this tool work for them. The Murdochs looked at the same tool and were certain they knew exactly what to do with it. They would use it to get even richer.

So what's more reliable: the behavior of the Murdochs, the Sam Zells, and the other Darwinian alpha types who still see competitive advantages in newspapers, or a bunch of sad-sack journalists who claim that their profession is dying? You do believe in evolution, don't you?

Hungry for younger readers, newspapers should embrace their voices

Hungry for younger readers, newspapers should embrace their voices
Declining newspaper readership, especially among the young, is forcing editors to reexamine their focus.
By Larry Atkins
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0726/p09s02-coop.html
Why is it that every time an issue concerning young people arises, the newspaper op-eds commenting on those issues are almost always written by people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s? Whether it's a columnist or a parent talking about their child's college graduation or how kids in the 1950s settled disputes with their fists instead of guns, it's a tired old paradigm.

If newspapers want to reach out to younger readers, they need to include their voices.

For the past few years, many people and publishers have lamented that young adults tend not to read newspapers.

A report released July 10 by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University showed that young people do not follow the news closely. Only 16 percent of 18- to 30-year-olds surveyed in the study said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.

Circulation is declining for most major American daily newspapers, including 8 percent for the Los Angeles Times, 6.7 percent for The Boston Globe, and 5.3 percent for the San Francisco Chronicle, according to the semiannual Audit Bureau of Circulations' Fall 2006 report.

The declines in newspaper readership are greatest among young adults and the younger segment of baby boomers, reports the Columbia Journalism Review.

Most young people tend to get their news from the Internet or television shows such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I teach journalism as an adjunct professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., and Temple University in Philadelphia. Each semester, when I go around the room to see where my students get their news, hardly anyone mentions daily newspapers.

In the past few years, some newspapers have attempted to reach out to this younger group. In November 2002, The Chicago Tribune started a special tabloid geared toward younger readers called RedEye, which has 280,000 daily readers. Newsday has a weekly "New Voices" feature, which encourages college, high school, and middle school students to submit op-eds. The Boston Globe just started a teen publication called Boston Teens in Print, or TiP, which is written by teens.

In Philadelphia, I notice that the two major newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, rarely print op-eds by young writers. On average, they seem to run two or three op-eds a year by people under 21. Even for issues concerning young people, the op-eds almost always are by people in their 40s and 50s. Nationally, almost every syndicated columnist is over 30.

When I started teaching the editorial writing class at Temple in 2003, I had low expectations. I expected the students' op-eds to have the depth and complexity of a saltine cracker. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of writing. I was exposed to subjects not covered much in the mainstream press, such as the tough job market for graduates, university admissions policies, heroin abuse in the suburbs, and voter apathy among college students.

Many of the papers gave fresh insights on local, national, and international issues. For each of my seven writing assignments, I would receive several articles that were good enough to run in major newspapers. During the semester, six of my students had their op-eds published. My experience convinced me that there are many talented young writers who should be harvested by newspaper editors.

If newspapers want younger people to read their papers, op-ed editors should actively reach out to college journalism programs and try to develop voices that have the perspective of younger people. One approach would be to have several editors of local college newspapers act as regular op-ed contributors.

Newspapers also need to focus more on issues that young people are concerned about. For instance, high school students are well-equipped to talk about student loans, school shootings, binge drinking, and substance abuse.

It's important to engage young people in newspaper reading since they will be the next thinkers, leaders, and voters. Also, there is a great difference between the quick information you can get on the Internet and television and the in-depth articles you read in the newspaper.

If newspapers can address relevant topics and include younger voices, it's possible that young people might conclude that newspapers aren't just for their parents and grandparents.

· Larry Atkins teaches journalism at Arcadia University and Temple University.

When Do You Stop The Presses?

When Do You Stop The Presses?
Why the San Francisco Chronicle is a candidate to exit print
BY Jon Fine
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_30/b4043029.htm


Play with me on this one: Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?

It's a question worth asking. This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads. At Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, according to a deposition given by James M. Asher, the company's chief legal and business development officer, losses of $330 million piled up between mid-2000 and September, 2006, better-or should I say worse?-than $1 million a week. During negotiations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's unions, the owning Block family disclosed that the paper lost $20 million in 2006. Late last year, The Boston Globe was headed for unprofitability as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And 2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: "If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I'd say you were smoking dope." Print newspapers require maintaining a costly status quo-paper, presses, trucks, and mail rooms-that, if only through rising gas prices, will only get more expensive.

WHEN, EXACTLY, do you junk something that no longer works? And which major paper should go first-not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months?

San Francisco Chronicle, I'm looking at you.

Killing printrequires acknowledging not just that the old mode is dead but also that the future means less revenue and shrunken staffs. This is why it makes sense soonest at a money-losing newspaper already grappling with those realities, and one in a major city that generates enough local ad dollars to support a sizable online business.

On paper, San Francisco is perfect: a Web-centric town, a cash-drain daily, and private ownership. Which does not mean this will happen. San Francisco is the ancestral home of the Hearst empire, the birthplace of William Randolph Hearst and the town where he ran his first paper. It could be hard for Hearst to consider the move on those grounds alone. (In Asher's deposition, though, he said Hearst briefly considered selling the Chronicle in 2005.)

There are attractions to the way things are today. The Chronicle claims 265,000 weekday subscribers and sells a year's worth of home delivery for $138. Even if you assume that discount offers bring the average subscription price to $90, that's still $23.9 million a year-not an ungodly sum, but one that nervous executives are probably loath to kiss off forever. (Distribution costs, of course, mean those dollars don't appear for free.) But what's more relevant, at least today, is that advertisers still pay more for ads in the newspaper than on the Web site. "Even if you double or triple it, the revenue [online] just isn't there yet," argues one top executive.

This is why the papers dream about getting consumers to pay for digital or online content. But water has had a hard time finding a way up that hill.

Executives might be better off wondering at what point the Globe's Boston.com or the Chronicle's sfgate.com-with unassailable market positions, excellent editorial, and massive traffic-will be worth more as a solo digital play than attached to a print newspaper. Or whether going all-in on digital might make their market's ad dollars flow there more quickly, especially if they're the only major paper in town. Or that a paper could buy tons of unsold local ad inventory from the likes of MySpace and Yahoo! , and then resell it profitably through its veteran sales force.

All of this requires big thinking-and spending enough to create networks of local sites and a giant local portal. And it will take a brave man or woman to pull the plug on the presses.

It almost takes a William Randolph Hearst.

For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia

Biggest Threat to Newspapers Is ... MySpace?

"Tilford Moots wuz over t' the' Henryville poor farm th' other day t' see an ole friend o' his thet used t' publish a newspaper thet pleased ever'buddy"
Kin Hubbard (American Humorist and Writer, 1868-1930)


Biggest Threat to Newspapers Is ... MySpace?
by Erik Sass
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=62480&Nid=31462&p=204904
IN ADDITION TO NEWS AGGREGATORS like Google and Yahoo, newspapers need to watch out for online competition from a less obvious source--social networks.
That's according to a global study of youth media behaviors commissioned by the World Association of Newspapers and performed by research firm D-Code. The study "Youth Media DNA" presented a decidedly mixed picture of newspapers' future prospects, based on young people's current usage patterns.

Many of the findings weren't particularly surprising--young participants said that new media (i.e., computers, mobile phones, the Internet, and MP3 players) takes up time that participants would have spent with traditional media. In a correlated finding, many participants said their interest in passive media is in decline.

More novel, however, was the finding that "the importance of the social network as a disseminator of news and information is on the rise." The survey elaborated: "Many participants in this phase listed 'discussion with friends' as a top source for news and information, sometimes ranking higher than TV or newspapers."

In this context, the best strategy for newspapers may be inserting themselves into the social networks, so their content will appear alongside--and perhaps become absorbed into--the online discussion and debate. The opportunities are there. Indeed, in mid-April, MySpace launched a news aggregator that draws on content from newspapers as well as other sources, and allows MySpace users to vote for the best stories.

But that arrangement brings up another problematic finding from the WAN global survey. Often, young people "do not realize they are reading online versions of newspapers." The culprits, according to WAN, are the very aggregators that might initially get newspaper content in front of young people.

Newspapers are struggling to remedy the problem--seeking ways to brand content so it can be both recognized by the reader and monetized by the newspaper.









Men Online More, But Still Influenced By Traditional Media
by Tameka Kee, Monday
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=62467&Nid=31462&p=204904
SOME 71% OF MEN AGES 18-34 spend more time online now than a year ago, according to Maxim's latest annual Man Study--but a resounding 74% still felt that putting an ad on TV would be the "most effective" way to get it seen by guys.
To commemorate its 10th anniversary, the men's magazine commissioned research agency Hall & Partners to do an in-depth study of U.S. men's media usage habits. The findings confirm that although men ages 18-34 have been characterized as "advertising averse," marketers can still target them with entertaining, multi-channel messages.

While 83% of men surveyed said they watch less than 5 hours of television per day, a clear majority (74%) would use TV as their primary distribution channel if they had to create an ad themselves. A little over half would target their demo with ads in magazines (56%) or on the Web (55%), and only 17% would choose radio.

For ad content, 48% of Maxim readers said they would use female models to target men, and 35% would strive to make their ads funny. But while sex appeal and humor were key, so was clearly defined product information--with almost 40% saying they'd "focus on the product."

"If advertising is cool and relevant, this demo will give it the same amount of attention that they give to any other form of content, and they'll even send it to their friends," said Rob Gregory, group publisher, Maxim.

For example, 30% of men surveyed said they "enjoyed using social networking sites," and 26% said they regularly "forwarded content to [their] friends online." The two factors combined illustrate the growing importance of community-based online activity among 18- to-34-year-old males, a bright spot for marketers seeking to leverage viral advertising.

"Advertisers are dealing with the most plugged-in generation in history," said Gregory, "but this shows that the traditional methods are still as viable as emerging media at reaching 18- to-34-year-old-men."

Still, the most successful brands have leveraged media companies like Maxim to target men using a mix of print, online, and even mobile content--highlighting "the increased viability of a 360-degree approach," said Gregory.