Wednesday, June 18, 2008
News / News Bites Will Newspapers Survive?
Posted by Michael Miner on Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:37 PM
The topic was “Will Newspapers Survive?” and the panelists were Chicago journalists who had for the most part passed through the first three stages of dying -- shock, grasping, and grief -- and could lucidly consider the fourth stage, letting go.
Their collective answer -- no they won’t survive, not as we know them now.
The Chicago Headline Club and the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association sponsored the well-attended discussion, which was held a few days ago in the auditorium of the law firm Mayer Brown. We’d all come to hear from working stiffs, rather than the “media consultants” who dine out on the trade’s miseries. These panelists understand that as journalism tries to reinvent itself, their own careers are on the line.
"We’re here because the business model is broken,” said Bill Adee, who’s in charge of innovations at the Tribune, where Sam Zell has brought in a crew from Clear Channel Communications to think the biggest thoughts. “Hopefully they won’t ask journalists to fix it.”
Eileen Brown, who has the innovations job at the Daily Herald, took exception. She gets her best ideas from journalists, she said, as well as some that are “cockamamie.” She has “to beg and plead the business side” to try new things, but the newsroom is “passionate. They won’t want the Titanic to sink.”
Moderator Dirk Johnson, an NIU journalism professor who used to cover Chicago for the New York Times, wondered at the outset, “How do we keep the fabled romance that gave us The Front Page from turning to the last page,” and the discussion that followed was tinged with an odd sort of forward-looking nostalgia. In the Front Page era, every social and economic class was served by its own daily, which cost pennies. Today isn’t that different, with an infinite array of Web sites, all free and all sure to flatter somebody's notion of the world and how it works. The most sentimental of the panelists, Monroe Anderson of EbonyJet, recalled how much fun the newspaper business still was when he broke in at the Tribune in 1974, but when he complained that everything became “very corporate, very structured’ and “they’re looking to the bottom line,” he was describing a middle period now ending, when metro dailies resembled the local gas and water works and other utilities, except that they were unregulated and made a lot more money.
Anderson fondly remembered a colorful Tribune editor with an eighth-grade education, the sort of person who would soon become unthinkable in metro newsrooms. When someone in the audience asked the most pointed question of the evening -- young people understand the Internet “intuitively,” so why don’t the papers give them the wheel -- Anderson replied at once, “Because the baby boomers won’t give it up.”
But when Adee patted himself on the back for hiring Luis Arroyave, a marginally qualified kid who’s become a hit as a blogger and soccer writer, Anderson marveled, “That’s how papers used to be, before the suits took over.”
Beyond letting go are healing and serenity, and Tom McNamee, editorial page editor of the Sun-Times, a paper on the brink, seemed OK with all of it. If the papers die, he said, they die. Journalism will survive. He compared the news to popular music: “Even bands like Wilco, nobody's buying the records, they get them free online. So what's going to happen, music is not going to die, people still love music, there will still be bands out there making fantastic music, but they won’t make megafortunes. There's nothing wrong with that. That’s a wonderful thing -- the only people it’s bad for is Wilco. Same thing here. We may not all be making fortunes. Our 30 percent profit days are over. We may not survive. But you know what -- that’s our problem. Not to say that the world’s in crisis because newspapers may not survive in the form that we recognize now.”
The next form is digital, but there are considerations. Jim Slonoff, publisher of The Hinsdalean, brought up one of them, which is that his hyperlocal weekly, which he and a partner started a few years ago, is making money. “The old way still does work,” he said. And Brown put in a good word for the enduring pleasure of passing a Sunday afternoon curled up with the New York Times.
The problem is what she called the “middle ground,” that considerable realm of quotidian national and international stories that can be read just as easily on a computer as in a newspaper -- maybe a lot more easily. Zell’s people had already warned that Tribune Company papers were cutting back their news holes, and McNamee predicted “the most local Tribune since Colonel McCormick.” I sat there thinking what a loss that will be, for just that morning almost every story in the Tribune's front section had been an engaging house-written report on an off-beat but important topic, and if I hadn’t read them in the Tribune I wouldn’t have read them at all because (a) it would never have occurred to me to look for them online, and (b) if a paper hadn’t commissioned them they’d never have been written.
“Our perceptions now are all driven by what’s coming up in online hits,” mused Mark Brown of the Sun-Times, who’s certain his online audience and the audience for his printed columns are not the same. Elaine Eileen Brown said, “You still make more money in print than you do online. And so the money -- it’s not a dollar for a dollar, it’s ten cents for a dollar. So it’s this weird transitional phase where you’d love to say ‘OK we’ll move everybody over here,’ but you can’t because you still have to feed the mother ship.”
Tossing sand in the gears of progress, she said, are advertisers who aren’t comfortable advertising online and ad salesmen who “are in the ice age” and much happier selling ads for the paper. Adee pointed out that the “big successes” on the Internet, Web sites such as YouTube, have content that’s 95 percent generated by the public. Content on the Tribune’s site is 97 percent house generated, just 3 percent public -- the comment boards and photos. So his paper isn’t anywhere close to the prominent models of online success, and given that the point of the Tribune is to provide professional journalism, never will be. On the other hand, Adee told the crowd that RedEye is the fastest growing paper in the country, tailored for and given away to an audience that can’t imagine paying for news. He also said, “People want what journalists do more than ever. They want it in different forms. They can accept it in amateur form, semipro form, or professional journalism."
There wasn’t much said to hearten the young professionals in the audience. One of them asked about freelance opportunities and Anderson said to talk to Slonoff. “He’s expanding and the Tribune’s shrinking.”
For video highlights of the panel discussion, click here.
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Yes, lets talk about change in the way advertising is sold. Media News policy is "feet on the street". But the sales reps sell the same old way through no fault of their own. Take the LA Daily News (please TAKE it)where a new sales initiative consisted of a new plan to sell small space advertisers in the paper - reps secured around 180 leads each etc etc - nothing new there folks. So maybe the ad reps "feet on the street" is having a negative impact on the news room side at Media News. Glad I worked there when Jack Kent Cooke owned it -
People want what journalists are producing, they just don't want to pay for it. In that case, it's not going to be journalists who give it to them. It'll be guys in their pajamas and 'citizen journalists' who get to pick and choose what they write and what days they work, etc. And while it may be true that the news will survive but there will no longer be 30 percent profits, that certainly won't cut it with the corporate types who run things and the investors who only know how to 'cut costs' so their profits can go up a few pennies every few months. And about user-generated content, take a look at the comments under some of the political and crime stories in either city paper these days and consider if you really want the public to generate the majority of content.
Edited and regulated (and heck, maybe even paid for!) content produced by the public would be welcome. The Tribune needs to steer away from the psychotic rantings of the Topix crowd and get out into the city and beyod and give people their say.
Let's all assume that Ian's typo was ironic.
Eileen Brown...and...Elaine Brown. Did the poor woman change her name during the forum?
It's over. Journalism will become -- is becoming -- a hobby that used to be a job, like sailing. Those who can afford it will indulge in it. The rest of us will look for work.
That's why I got a private investigator's license and left the news business after 10 years. We've got the skills...might as well put them to work doing something that pays.
Newspapers are made possible by advertisers and readers (subscribers, single copy purchasers, etc). My point deals with the advertisers and to a lesser degree the readers. I don't think newspapers and the periodicals publishing industry (magazines and newspapers) people have listened to to media buyers, such as Renatta McCann of Starcom MediaVest Group. In 2005 McCann spoke passionately to attendees of FIPP (http://www.magazine.org/press_room/speeches/12152.cfm) and said “You have to constantly monitor and identify the key motivators that bring people into your magazine. Then you have to fine-tune that content and help marketers target customers with tailored advertising that has the most meaning for each of them. Find that intersection and you will deliver the highest levels of response.†Newspapers have yet to implement a digital color newspaper publishing strategy that would utilize variable data printing (VDP) technology so advertising can be targeted and personalized to subscribers delivering increased responses to marketers. VDP is not the "end all" solution, but again I am only dealing with the advertisers issue and that one is critical for survival. Advertisers want better response rates, and even readers want more relevant ads as well as editorial. Both of these objectives can be achieved using VDP. This is only one step in the right direction and will require a different mindset from traditional offset printing and publishing. My company is is embracing VDP and I have developed a business model that supports personalized newspaper publishing with targeting advertising and user generated editorial that is relevant and meaningful. I'm excited about the future of periodical publishing, especially newspapers, and I think it is in personalization and VDP.
Funny that Eileen Brown attended this forum. She helped engineer the Daily Herald from a can-do, energetic newsroom to the flailing, skeletal penny saver it is currently. The Herald has been behind about three years behind the curve ever since she stepped in; the only evidence is their website. It sure is edgy and 'innovative'!!
I've been working on the digital side of newspapers and magazines for about a decade -- I love the news, I am not enthralled with newspapers. There are models for how digital works and makes money -- but it requires two things: 1) a radical restructuring of how operations run and 2) a vision and understanding of how people use the Web (not how they read your newspaper). As I wrote yesterday, when George Carlin died, here is my media progression: A received a Twitter from one of my followers that said the comedian had died. I checked out Wikipedia's entry, which had been updated. I visited YouTube and watched some of his old routines. Then a read a few recollections from bloggers who felt a connection to Carlin. At no point did I feel the need to engage with a newspaper (and, for the record, I'm in my mid-thirties). We seek answers to questions we have online (Google, Travelocity, MovieFone) first; then we look for what others might say. Believing that we hold the keys to information is a fallacy.
I've been working on the digital side of newspapers and magazines for about a decade -- I love the news, I am not enthralled with newspapers. There are models for how digital works and makes money -- but it requires two things: 1) a radical restructuring of how operations run and 2) a vision and understanding of how people use the Web (not how they read your newspaper). As I wrote yesterday, when George Carlin died, here is my media progression: A received a Twitter from one of my followers that said the comedian had died. I checked out Wikipedia's entry, which had been updated. I visited YouTube and watched some of his old routines. Then a read a few recollections from bloggers who felt a connection to Carlin. At no point did I feel the need to engage with a newspaper (and, for the record, I'm in my mid-thirties). We seek answers to questions we have online (Google, Travelocity, MovieFone) first; then we look for what others might say. Believing that we hold the keys to information is a fallacy.
Nice to see that most of the comments here focussed on the important issues facing the newspapers. Naturally, this does not include the vituperative rant by Ruth "On the Rag" Ginsberg. Jeez, Justice Ginsberg, how do you know so much about the DH newsroom?
Whoever Ginsburg is knows nothing about the Daily Herald. It is far behind the curve because of other higher ups there. Please, Brown was only managing editor for a year or so and then moved into innovations. She started Beep, the paper's youth rag and pushed and pushed for better Web product. She can't move mountains, and the Herald has a long past of bad decissions and faltering leadership. Take the fact that in 2000 they paid like $15 million for a new printing press because they wanted to zone more. They put nothing into internet. Today they have spend money to upgrade the web site to even get comment postings or Web capability. Meanwhile, they have lay people off and cut salaries to make the profit margin dictated on the loans for the printing press. By the way, they zone less now then they did 10 years ago.
Keep USA today, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. The rest of the dailies can die. (Although we in Iowa will miss and need the watchdog Des Moines Register). The small towns will have their weekly papers for local names and news. There will be a demand for these hardy puplications which most journalists liked to make fun of. The rest of the information we need (and are overloaded with) can come from the airwaves.
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