Snakes on the Plains

BoSacks Speaks Out: I just love a good headline and because of that I had to send this out. It is also an interesting question about " Truth In Journelism" in this article. I leave it up to your good judgement. Is this a headline story? Is this any kind of story at all?

"After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled: "She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!""
Ava Gardner (American film Actress of the 1940s and 50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a cex symbol. 1922-1990)


Snakes on the Plains?
BY Allan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/


The morning got off to a nasty start for ophidiophobians in Oklahoma City when they opened Friday's newspaper to see a headline sprawled atop page one warning: "Big snakes could slither into state."

The problem with the alarming spread in The Oklahoman - replete with the headshot of a frightening-looking Burmese python - is that the danger of a snake invasion is really quite remote, as the newspaper's own story makes clear.

So, why did the Oklahoman play this non-story in the sensational fashion it did? I left a phone message for editor Ed Kelley and, so far, haven't heard back.

But I did have an interesting conversation with zoologist Gordon Rodda of the U.S. Geographic Survey, one of the scientists whose research formed the basis for the story. Here is what he said:

The USGS undertook a study of what climates in the United States theoretically could support the spread of a growing population of non-indigenous Burmese pythons that have taken up residence in the Florida Everglades. The areas warm and humid enough to support the non-poisonous constrictors could include Oklahoma, depending on how global warming shakes out over the next 100 years.
"But, if the implication in the newspaper story is that it is going to happen next Thursday, that's irresponsible," said Gordon. "It is a very dramatic way they portrayed it."

The particular irony of the Oklahoman's story is that it was so thoroughly reported by staffer Josh Rabe that no reasonable editor could have inadvertently misconstrued its significance.
In but one example, Josh quotes a local snake expert as saying it is "just absurd" to fear a Burmese python invasion in Oklahoma. "If you put one out in the front yard on a day like today," said snake breeder Bob Clark in a week when low temperatures were in the mid-20s, "you would have a snake-sickle by the end of the day."

To be sure, an onslaught of Burmese pythons would terrifying. The snakes can grow to lengths of 20 feet and become as fat as a telephone pole, says Gordon. Although the creatures are not poisonous, they instantly wrap themselves around their prey, squeezing the life out of the victim before gulping it down.

Although the snakes are capable of traveling as far 20 miles in a day, Gordon can't imagine them bellying all the way from Florida to Oklahoma City. "It is unlikely they would keep moving long enough in the same direction, given the randomness of their movements," he explains.
If the danger is negligible of telephone poll-sized Burmese pythons slithering 1,500 miles from the Everglades to Oklahoma City, then why would the newspaper have played the story in the way it did?

"With newspapers," says Gordon, "it's their business to make a big deal out of things."

Is it any wonder why four out of five people don't trust the media?

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

"All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence."

Wallace Stevens (American Poet whose work explores the interaction of reality and what man can make of reality in his mind. 1879-1955)


10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

Posted by Ryan Sholin
http://www.ryansholin.com/2007/06/02/10-obvious-things-about-the-future-of-newspapers-you-need-to-get-through-your-head/



1. It's not Google's fault. Get over it, professor. Blaming search engines is like blaming the library. "Oh no, please don't let readers actually find stories from my newspaper and then click through to my site to read them, anything but that!" Forget it.


2. It's not Craig's fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they're looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.



3. Your major metro newspaper could probably use some staff cuts. If you're not writing about local news, your paper's readers are probably getting what you do from somewhere else. Get over it. CNN and ESPN are not new, and nytimes.com wasn't far behind. Write local. There are plenty of cooks and painters and poets in your neighborhood. Go out and meet them.



4. It's time to stop handwringing and start training. If your editors are still writing navelgazers about the cataclysmic changes in the business instead of starting training programs to teach some new tricks to you and that guy in the cubicle next door, that's a problem. Stop whining and move on.



5. You don't get to charge people for archives and you certainly don't want to charge people for daily news content. Pulling your copy behind walls where it can't be seen by readers on the wider Web. Search rules. Don't hide from it.



6. Reporters need to do more than write. The new world calls for a new skillset, and you and Mr. Notebook need to make some new friends, like Mr. Microphone and Mr. Point & Shoot.



7. Bloggers aren't an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They're your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a "Web blog" in your stories.



8. You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter - these aren't the competition, these are your new carriers. Learn how to deliver your content across every new technology that comes into view on the horizon, and be there when new devices go into mass production.



9. J-schools can either play a critical role in training the next generation of journalists, or they can fade into irrelevancy. Teach multimedia, interactivity and data, or watch your students become frustrated and puzzled as they try to get jobs with five clips and a smile.



10. Okay, here comes the big one: THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it's being done at newspapers like the Washington Post and the Lawrence Journal-World and the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Petersburg Times and the Bakersfield Californian and all sorts of papers of all sizes. You don't need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. So let's stop writing and groaning about how things used to be different, and let's start building our own piece of the new world of newspapers brick by brick, story by story.

A Future for Newspapers

A Future for Newspapers
By ANDY KESSLER
May 24, 2007; Page A17
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117997297020012986-lMyQjAxMDE3NzI5NDkyNzQyWj.html


New technology is mucking up the media, and newspapers seem to be taking the brunt of it. Craigslist and eBay took away classified ad sales, direct advertisers are allocating budgets to search engines and circulation is receding faster than Bruce Willis's hairline. Investors seem to prefer the safety of television broadcasters and cable companies, with their nice, government-mandated franchises and pipes that reach directly into homes.

Media, after all, is about owning a pipe -- some conduit between the creation of news or entertainment and the eyeballs that consume it. Media companies sell the owners of those eyeballs lots of things we weren't even sure we needed. The higher the ad rates, the better the business. The pipe reaches the consumer directly, keeping competition at bay. The tighter the pipe, the less the competition.

For broadcasters, the pipe is spectrum given or bought from the Federal Communications Commission under the guise that spectrum is scarce. For cable operators, it is often the sole cable franchise in a town. For phone companies, it's those regulated copper wires, some of which are so old they have Alexander Graham Bell's teeth marks in the insulation.


And newspapers? Where's the pipe? What conduit to readers do they control? Well, there is the guy that drives up and somehow misses your driveway every morning. Or the sidewalk newspaper dispenser where the homeless man buys one copy and steals the rest so he can peddle them on street corners. So unless you are the only paper in town (ask Warren Buffett how much he makes on monopoly papers like the Buffalo News), there is not much of a pipe to control. Instead, reputation, quality news gathering, trust and credibility maintain the franchise, something The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times enjoy on a national level and the Washington Post and others have locally.

But so what, it's all over, right? The Internet has destroyed newspapers' business model. If Google News doesn't kill them, blogs certainly will. Hmm, maybe not so fast.

Last I checked, the Star Trek Holodeck, despite a Wikipedia entry, is still fiction. No one is teleporting a newspaper to your home anytime soon. Unlike music which can be copied once and stolen a million times, newspapers live in the material world. Thankfully, as an author, it's the same for books. Even a 30-inch screen can't match the readability of what cheaply spits out of a printing press. I really believe that the copy protection mechanism for newspapers is their consumer interface, in the form of ink spurted on newsprint. Newspapers are scrambling to embrace the Web. Paid subscriptions, blogs, it's all a grand experiment on how to monetize their expensive news-gathering organization. But thanks to a form that's hard to duplicate, newspapers still have time.

In the meantime, rather than just charge for content, I'd be licensing every type of newfangled software and Web service until I could come up with a tight community of interest around my newspaper, local or national. Don't just start the discussion, keep it. This means comments, reviews, personalized newsfeeds, social networks of like-minded readers, whatever. Give advertisers a little "link love" so they don't stray to generic search engines. Google, Microsoft and others dropped over $10 billion to buy online ad-delivery companies in the last few weeks alone. The value is there: Newspapers aren't in the printing business, they're in the ad business.

Technology is making things even more difficult for television and video as well. As technology advances, broadcast pipes leak like a sieve. TV these days, like it or not, is like music. The good news is that it's delivered electronically. The bad news is that it's, well, delivered electronically. Six megabit broadband and 250 gigabyte hard drives are wresting control from those who think they have it. Broadcast is about central control: pumping out signals from giant antennas in the middle of town or from cable "head ends." The Internet is about moving packets around from hop to hop until it gets where it needs to go. No central control.

The real dark cloud is technology known as peer-to-peer (P2P) bubbling up from the underground that leverages this architecture. Here's how it works: I might have a copy of this week's "American Idol" on my hard drive. You want a copy, you stream it from my PC, not FOX. Then you share it with five or six people that are close to you geographically so it gets to them quickly. They share as well, and on and on. Live video streams like a virus, which means once started you can't stop it.

Cable may be the first to get flushed. The industry pays bribes in the form of franchise fees to local municipalities to be the only game in town. Telcos like Verizon and AT&T have lobbied hard to change video franchising rules. Verizon has had some success in Texas and, on March 1, the California Public Utilities Commission streamlined the rules to open up video distribution to competition. New services like Verizon's FiOS fiber to the home may finally become a reality. Another pipe in town! Add to that the proliferation of municipal Wi-Fi rollouts and other entrants like Craig McCaw's ClearWire. Price war anyone? The fact that Comcast and TimeWarner are carrying more debt than a condo-owning subprime borrower means this could get ugly in a hurry.

But what about guys who own networks and create shows? Are they safe? Well, if they decide to harness technology, they can license channels like ESPN and/or shows like "Grey's Anatomy" to all comers on the distribution side. But this is easier said than done. Network affiliates still think in 10 p.m. time slots and cable operators insist on exclusives. P2P -- the same stuff Skype uses to bypass the old phone network -- may change the definition of a TV network.

BitTorrent and eDonkey are the top P2P networks and half the usage is for TV shows. P2P hogs something like 35% or more of all Internet traffic. Thirty-five percent! But to replace cable, it has to be real time, and there are tons of real time P2P players, especially out of China: TVU, SopCast, PPMate. As I write this, I'm watching ESPN on my PC, denying Disney another outrageous $2.30 per month they charge me via Comcast. Just as the iPod opened up stolen music to the masses, devices like Apple TV mean I can stream to my wide screen. Is this Napster redux? It might well be. TV is no longer the safe cuddly business it once was.

Lots of painful restructuring is still ahead. But it's worth noting that Rupert Murdoch would bid to expand his newspaper empire. Perhaps he sees the same pipe-busting in the future of TV.

Mr. Kessler is the author of "The End of Medicine" (HarperCollins, 2006).

Hearst newspaper to publish on e-paper

HearstSeattle newspaper to publish on e-paper



US newspaper publisher Hearst has announced that it will trial versions of the Seattle Post Intelligencer on electronic paper within the next two years.

The 120 year-old company, which dates back to William Randolph Hearst's proprietorship of the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, will pioneer flexible colour LCD displays from LG Philips to deliver real-time daily news.

Articles carried on the electronic newspaper will be today's, rather than yesterday's, claim Hearst officials.

They hope to run the trials in other cities where Hearst publishes daily newspapers. The company owns 18 newspapers, 29 TV stations, 18 magazines and numerous websites in the US.

The electronic display will be a colour tabloid size (A3) screen the thickness of card, so that readers will be able to roll up the screen and carry it.

Turning the page, i.e. refreshing the screen with a new page image, will involve touching a pressure-sensitive control at the page edge.

While the screens will be made by LG Philips, they use technology developed by E Ink, a company in which Hearst invested when it was spun out of MIT a decade ago.

Hail to the power of print

"I am easily satisfied with the very best."
Winston Churchill


Hail to the power of print
By Gavin K O'Reilly
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2537371.e ce

Don't believe all you're being told about the death of the press: more people all over the world are reading newspapers. What's more, they're still a powerful medium for advertising, says Gavin O'Reilly

The chorus of disapproval for newspapers has become a global trend. These days it is nearly impossible to find a media analyst who actually reads a newspaper or who can see anything other than doom and gloom for the industry. I can present a different perspective.

Let's start with circulations, which continue to grow - and not just in India and China. Paid circulation grew globally by 1.9 per cent in 2006, with sales of 510.4 million copies a day. The number of paid-for titles is at a record 11,142, up 3.1 per cent on the previous year.

You can add to that the rapid growth in free dailies - titles such as thelondonpaper, 20 Minutes, Metro and the rest - which together distribute 40.8 million copies a day.

For those who think print is some relic of the past, newspapers and magazines are actually the largest advertising medium with a combined 42.3 per cent share of the market.

According to the accountants PwC, global newspaper advertising revenues increased by 4 per cent in 2006 and by 15.6 per cent over the past five years. Hidden within those figures is the fact that newspapers - the 2nd largest advertising medium after TV - are actually larger than the combined advertising value of radio, cinema, magazines and the Internet.

PwC predicts that by 2010 the global advertising market will grow by 6.2 per cent to $525bn (£265bn), a growth of $111bn (£56bn). Of that, newspapers will capture 18.2 per cent, second only to TV and the internet. Print (newspapers and magazines) will capture 27.4 per cent of that growth, greater than the internet.

According to the UK research company TGI, newspaper readership has grown by 2.1 per cent over the past five years, with readership among 15-24 year olds growing by 6.9 per cent and readers over 65 growing by 3.7 per cent. This counters the tired view that the newspaper readership is getting older with the important addendum that people are actually living longer.

The key to media exposure is the time that people spend reading, watching, using or listening to that particular medium.

Let's reflect on how US advertisers invest their clients' money. According to the specialist private equity fund Veronis Suhler Stevenson, for every hour of TV viewing, advertisers spend $40.1m (E20.2m). For each hour of radio they outlay $19.3m (E9.7m) and for the internet - all the time people are supposedly glued in front of their screens - advertisers only spend $65.4m (E33m).

As for newspapers, advertisers spend $316.3m (E160m) for every hour of reading, that's eight times more than TV and reflects the quality demographic that a newspaper delivers.

The media scene never stands still. It is important to see newspapers within the rapidly changing media matrix, where the fragmentation of society, new forms of media consumption and growing competition everywhere make life more challenging for the media buyer.

There is both the need for more credible information and more accurate demographic targeting of the consumer. Asked to name the biggest issue they face, 67 per cent of marketing directors cite fragmentation. Their task is even more difficult when one reflects on what is happening in TV land - the high altar for media planners. Aggregate TV viewership is not growing, whereas newspaper audiences have either grown or remained stable.

According to BARB, which monitors television audiences, UK TV viewing fell in the period March 2000-March 2007 by 1.2 per cent. In that period the UK terrestrial channels lost nearly 24 per cent of their audience.

There is no shortage of statistical data on circulations, readership, viewership, time spent online - and there are doubtless pluses and minuses in the detail. What is indisputable is that newspapers increasingly represent the mass-market medium channel of the future, delivering a large, broadly stable, reliable and definable demographic.

A crucial question is whether online exists as a threat or as an opportunity for newspaper publishers in 2007 and beyond.

One thing that we can all agree on is that online is a rapidly growing area in terms of usage, and most importantly, in terms of advertising. PwC forecast that global online advertising will grow by a compound 18.1 per cent to 2010 and be worth about $52bn (E26bn).

To me, among the real questions is: what is driving this online growth?

BRMB Internet Monitor in the UK estimates that 25 million Britons use the internet for emailing. Is this media consumption?

There are other inconsistencies in the data, that suggests that only 4 per cent of internet users regularly visit adult sites, even though this is a multi- billion dollar industry. Only 3 per cent say they regularly gamble online. Getting reliable data on actual internet usage rather than aggregate usage is near impossible.

Every industry needs to evolve and that's just as true for the newspaper industry as any other. Over the past 18 months we have seen more new title launches than at any time in our industry's history.

As for the investment made by publishers in new printing and production equipment, we stopped counting at $6bn (E3bn). From News Corporation's $1 bn (E500m) investment in the UK to papers across the USA, Europe and Asia, it's clearly a good time to be manufacturing printing presses. That investment is yielding more colour, more flexibility and significantly lower unit costs.

So I suggest there has been no paradigm shift.

Every newspaper publisher produces a product - a brand - that has the capacity to be relevant to and purchased by the modern day consumer. Our only risk is that industry inertia leads to consumer apathy.

Which is why publishers are investing behind their brands and businesses - and that of course includes online, which is all about aggregating a larger audience, not cannibalising our existing audience.

When you pull it all together, the prognosis for newspapers is actually quite different from conventional wisdom.

Gavin K O'Reilly is the president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), and is the chief operating officer of Independent News & Media plc. This is an edited version of a presentation he gave last week to an audience in London, for WAN's Capital Markets Day

All-out outsourcing

Keep five yards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a wicked man cannot be measured.
Indian Proverb


All-out outsourcing by Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/

Struggling to sustain their traditional profitability amid weakening sales, newspaper publishers are looking to outsource everything from composing ads and printing papers to producing content and answering the phones.

After nipping and tucking headcount in newsrooms over the last few years, publishers appear to be poised to eliminate a significantly greater number of jobs in their plants by focusing on areas that previously were immune to cutbacks.

The initiative likely to claim the largest number of positions in the near future is the outsourcing of advertising composition to places like India and other low-wage countries.

In light of the apparent success of a pilot ad-outsource program at the Media News Group properties in Northern California, publishers like Gannett, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and Scripps are considering whether they, too, should export such duties to offshore vendors, according to insiders familiar with the discussions.

These talks may or may not result in a decision to outsource jobs at any given property. But, human costs aside, the economics are powerfully persuasive.

Newspapers sending ad production offshore typically can reduce payroll costs by some 45%, says Robert Berkeley, president of Express KCS, one of the outsourcing companies. Thus, a paper could cut its costs to $30,000 a year per outsourced worker from $55,000 for an American doing the same job. These savings are even higher in unionized metro environments, where papers are struggling the hardest to sustain their margins.

The Columbus (OH) Dispatch was among the first to shift ad production to India, eliminating 90 jobs from a paper with daily circulation of 231,355. Assuming savings of $25k per employee, the paper should be able to add roughly $2.25 million a year to its bottom line.

Putting it another way: If a paper paid each departing employee a generous half-year of severance, the outsourcing project would begin to pay for itself in little more than 12 months - a terrific return on investment.

In what may be a harbinger of future initiatives elsewhere in the country, the San Francisco Chronicle has signed a 15-year contract with a Canadian company to begin printing the paper in in a new plant being constructed by early 2009. The opening coincides with the termination of the contract covering the newspaper's 230 unionized press operators. When the new plant opens, their jobs will be gone.

While not outsourcing their production altogether, companies like the New York Times, Gannett, Media News and Journal Register have consolidated the printing and mailroom operations among certain of their geographically contiguous properties. In New Jersey, 200 production positions were eliminated when Advance Publications opened a plant to combine the production of the Newark Star Ledger and the Trenton Times.

While outsourcing production is complicated and not always feasible, the easiest jobs to shift are those of the people who work in telephone rooms or perform accounting, billing, accounts payable, human resources and other clerical functions.

Many newspaper groups already funnel want-ad and circulation calls to regional or national centers, where a single group of workers serving multiple time zones is far more efficient than a team dedicated to a single market. Many chains also have either consolidated clerical functions at in-house service bureaus or outsourced them to domestic vendors.

Sending call-center and clerical work offshore can shave 25% to 30% off the present costs of such operations, according to Gartner Research, a private firm. The New York Times and Boston Globe, among others, are each sending 40 to 50 clerical jobs to offshore contactors.

Even editorial and online operations are not immune from outsourcing.

Knight Ridder had a plan to create regional copy desks to handle headlines and layouts for groups of newspapers, a concept that was shelved prior to the sale of the company last year. Preposterous as the idea might sound, this is exactly what is being implemented in New Zealand by the publisher of the country's largest daily and several other publications.

APN News and Media, a division of Britain's Independent News & Media, is outsourcing about 70 jobs to an Australian company, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. If it works well, Independent News may extend the program to its titles in England and Ireland.

Reuters has more than 300 journalists in India writing many of the routine stories on its financial wires, according to MediaGuardian. Reuters has said it may increase the size of the Indian staff to 1,500 writers, though this could be affected by the potential merger with Thomson Corp.

And today's Los Angeles Times reports that a hyper- local website in Pasadena (not affiliated with a newspaper) has hired two writers in India, who, among other things, will cover city council meetings via webcam.

As valuable as Internet operations are to the future of newspaper companies, some publishers are having at least a portion of the work done overseas. London's Financial Times, for example, relies on a staff in the Philippines to help edit and maintain its web site.

With offshore development, testing, hosting and technical support common in the information- technology sector, it is only logical that newspapers could achieve additional economies by moving - or expanding - many of these functions abroad.

When everything from designing buildings to analyzing X-rays can be performed by lower-paid professionals in another part of the world, there's no reason to believe newspapers can avoid the workforce shake-ups that have jolted most other industries.

Institutional inertia and economic self-satisfaction have maintained the status quo until now. As an increasingly challenging business environment forces newspapers out of their comfort zones, many dedicated workers, unfortunately, will be forced out of theirs, too.

BoSacks Speaks Out: GM Wants More Newspaper Advertorials

BoSacks Speaks Out: GM Wants More Newspaper Advertorials
I need a show of hands here. Does anyone know of a dumber company than GM? Geez, What the heck is going on? They go from the largest car maker in the world, to the worst and the dumbest, in a single generation. Has that been done before?

They are getting their clocks cleaned because they can't, no hold the presses there, . . . make that, won't make fuel efficient cars. That refusal has put them and the US auto work force in dire straits. So now they are looking for advertorials. Yes, like that will make a big difference.

Hey, GM ya wanna sell cars and get all the free editorial space you can handle in every paper in America?
Here is the secret you haven't been able to figure out in twenty years. . . Make better more fuel efficient cars then the others guys.

"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking."
Henry Ford


GM Wants More Newspaper Advertorials CEO Rick Wagoner Also Eyes U.S. Papers for Foreign Promotional Deals
By Hoag Levins
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article? article_id=116590

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Although it has significantly reduced the amount of advertising space it buys in U.S. newspapers, General Motors Corp. is still interested in discussing advertorial and out-of- country promotional opportunities with publishers, its chief told the Newspaper Association of America conference here.

'Deal of the month' Speaking at the annual four-day event, held in Manhattan's Marriott Marquis, GM Chairman-CEO Rick Wagoner told the audience of print media executives that because GM vehicles are "no longer on sale all the time," the company did not need to constantly buy newspaper ads announcing "the deal of the month."

Mr. Wagoner, who has headed GM since 2002 and overseen massive cuts in the company's workforce and U.S. manufacturing facilities, went on to say that "one area where we're beginning to do more, and will want to work with newspapers to explore new options in, is advertorials."
Foreign promotional deals
He said GM was also interested in working with U.S. newspaper publishers in ways that crossed national borders. "Some of you own foreign-language newspapers that may have links to papers in other countries," he told attendees. "Hispanic papers with links to South American or the Caribbean, for example. Others, I'm sure, have business or editorial connections with foreign newspapers that we at GM probably have no idea about."

As a second advertising imperative, Mr. Wagoner said the automaker was searching for new creative ideas. "We're working hard with our agencies on this assignment, of course, but I want to note that we're open to new thinking from everyone in this area," including newspapers.

How to Sink a Newspaper

"Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego"

Jack London quotes (American short-story Writer and Novelist whose works deal romantically with elemental struggles for survival. One of the most extensively translated of American authors. 1876-1916)




How to Sink a Newspaper
By WALTER E. HUSSMAN JR.
May 7, 2007; Page A15
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117849835415093994-lMyQjAxMDE3NzA4NzQwOTc4Wj.html


One has to wonder how many of the newspaper industry's current problems are self-inflicted. Take free news. News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.

Not many years ago if someone wanted to find out what was in the newspaper they had to buy one. But not anymore. Now you can just go to the newspaper's Web site and get that same information for free.

The newspaper industry wonders why it is losing young readers. Those readers might be young, but many of them are smart, not to mention computer-savvy. Why would they buy a newspaper when they can get the same information online for free?

Newspapers initially created their Web sites with the best of intentions. After all, newspapers are in the information business. And rather than fight the new medium, the Internet, why not embrace it? Wanting to be the leading information providers and thereby have the most popular Web site in the community, they posted all of their news online for free.


Exacerbating the problem with free news was the decision by the newspaper industry, which owns the Associated Press, to sell AP copy to news aggregators like Yahoo, Google and MSN. These aggregators created lucrative news portals where the world could get much of the news that was in newspapers. So readers could now get free news not only on newspaper Web sites, but also from portals and aggregators that had a chance to monetize the content, most of which was created and financed by the newspaper industry.

With local radio and television stations also creating Web sites and posting their news for free, newspapers soon realized that much of the news on the broadcast Web sites had been created by the local newspaper. So, whereas before the newspapers were selling print ads while radio and TV were selling air time, now they were all selling the same medium: their Web sites. Since newspapers share their content with the Associated Press so other members can use it, radio and TV members are using much of that content to compete against the newspapers that created it.

Newspapers have for years been frustrated by radio stations which merely read the stories which are printed in that morning's edition. TV stations often get much of their news from the newspapers, too. But reading it on the air is clearly different from posting it online, placing them in direct competition with newspapers' Web sites.

All of this would be fine if newspapers generated lots of additional revenues from offering free news. But the fact is newspapers generate most of their online revenues from classified advertising, not from news. Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, estimated that newspaper Web sites generated 78% of their revenues from classifieds in 2006.

It turns out that a Web site is a very different medium from a newspaper. While consumers often find pop-up ads a distraction and banner ads as more clutter, readers often seek out the advertising in newspapers.

The Inland Cost and Revenue Study shows that newspapers will generate between $500 and $900 in revenue per subscriber per year. But a newspaper's Web site typically generates $5 to $10 per unique visitor per year. It may be that newspaper Web sites as an advertising medium, and free news, just can't generate the revenue to sustain a valued news operation.

In fact, online revenues for the publicly traded newspaper companies in 2005 varied from 1.7% at Journal Register Co. to 5.7% at Belo Corp. The only company higher was the Washington Post Co. at 8.4%. Yet newspapers typically spend 12% or more of their revenues on their news and editorial operations.

The Wall Street Journal Online now has 931,000 paying subscribers, more than the paying subscribers to all but three U.S. newspapers: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Our newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, does not offer our news for free on the Web site. We offer free headlines. On a few selected stories, we offer a few free paragraphs, designed to get people to read our paper. We also offer free classifieds.

Recently I had the opportunity to compare our Web site policy with the free news policies of other papers. For the six months ending March 31, 2007, the newspaper industry's circulation was down 2.1% daily and 3.1% Sunday. By contrast, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's circulation was up 1.24% daily and up less than 1% Sunday.

I was able to make another interesting comparison, too, with the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. Columbus and Little Rock are both state capitals. Columbus is a larger market, and the Columbus Dispatch's circulation of 217,291 compares with 176,172 for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Up until Jan. 1, 2006, both our paper and the Columbus Dispatch offered news content only by subscription. We even charged the same price, $4.95, for an online monthly subscription, and both of us offered the same style electronic editions.

But Columbus dropped its subscription model on Jan. 1, 2006, and began offering most of its news for free. Its Web traffic and revenues certainly increased. But what happened to its paid circulation?

The six months ending Sept. 30, 2006 was a good comparison, since it compared six months in 2006 when the Columbus Dispatch had free news on its Web site compared with six months in 2005 when it did not offer free news. The Columbus Dispatch's daily circulation was down 5.8% while Sunday was down 1.1% for the six-month period. This compared with our loss of less than 0.4% daily and 1% Sunday.

When I looked at this comparison with Columbus, as well as the newspaper industry's larger losses, it didn't encourage me to change our Web policy to free news.

So what are we doing with our Web site? We have hired a videographer to complement our text coverage in the newspaper. We have added photo galleries to increase the number of photographs beyond what we can publish. We offer an electronic edition where you can search the entire edition by keywords, something you can't do in the print edition. And we offer breaking news email alerts, something else you can't do in print. In other words, we are offering value on our Web site that complements, rather than cannibalizes, our print edition.

Collectively, the American newspaper industry spends $7 billion on news and editorial operations. This includes everything from copy editor salaries to sports travel expenses. In addition, the Associated Press spent about $600 million world-wide in editing and creating news. By offering this news for free, and selling it to aggregators like Google, Yahoo and MSN for a small fraction of what it costs to create it, newspaper readership and circulation have declined.

These declines are accelerating. In 2004 and prior years, industry circulation declines were usually less than 1%. Since March 2005, these declines have been 2%-3% per year. With declining readership comes declining ad revenues, which are followed by layoffs.

The newsroom layoffs are most troubling, as less news with less quality, context and details results in more declines in readership and later, declines in advertising. If the $7 billion spent covering news becomes $6 billion, and later $5 billion, it is not just the newspaper industry that gets hurt. Journalism will be diminished in America with less investigative and enterprise reporting; indeed, less reporting of state houses, city halls, school boards, business and sports. Clearly a lot is at stake.

It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news.

Craigslist founder questions print future

"The printed page conveys information and commitment, and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience, and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience-there and then gone."
Bill Moyers


Craigslist founder questions print future

http://www.newsandtech.com/dateline/05-07- 07_date.htm

NEW YORK - Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said newspapers' hallmark should be in investigative journalism, even as he predicted a dismal future for ink-on-paper distribution.

"People who run printing presses are screwed," Newmark said at the opening of the Newspaper Association of America annual meeting.

Citing "talk of newspapers' 10 to 20 percent profit margins," Newmark suggested the industry remains vital, although he said he believes that newsprint is a luxury. A newspaper can be received online and printed out if desired, he said.

As for Craigslist itself, Newmark said he has no plans to change the site's successful model.

"We do one thing really well and we figure we should stick with that. It's easy enough (to expand)," he said. "We have a set of templates and when we have the time and desire we move into another city."

Meantime, the NAA released data that showed the audience for newspaper Web sites is growing at nearly twice the rate of the overall online audience.

Nielsen//NetRatings NetView custom analysis reported that an average of more than 59 million people visited newspaper Web sites each month during the first quarter - a record number that represents a 5.3 percent jump from 2006 stats, NAA said.

"Newspaper publishers have aggressively transformed their business models, continually providing ground-breaking content to consumers with their expanding digital portfolios," said NAA President and Chief Executive Officer John F. Sturm.

Other findings include:

· A little more than 88 percent of newspaper Web site visitors made a purchase online in the last six months, compared with 78.9 percent of the overall Internet audience.

· Forty-one percent of newspaper Web site visitors are employed in professional or managerial occupations, compared with 32.7 percent of the overall Internet population.