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Act of desperation or smart strategic move?
AdAge :: Magazines once pumped up paid circulation as far as they could, even if customer acquisition, paper, printing and distribution costs overwhelmed any circulation revenue they got, because advertisers seeking big audiences made it worthwhile. In a rather unusual move for the magazine business these days, Bloomberg Businessweek is increasing the paid circulation it promises advertisers to 980,000 early next year from 900,000 now, more than undoing the prior owner's rate base cut in 2006.
Continue to read Nat Ives, adage.com
It’s safe to say that analytics are no longer online news’ equivalent of fantasy baseball circa 1998: relegated only to the geekiest corners of the operation. News editors and executives not only know what kind of hourly, daily, and monthly traffic their sites get, but they can tell you who’s their best referrer and what stories will predictably provide a pageview explosion. (Of course there’s still a debate on what role those metrics should play for news organizations.)
But what about on the print side? Specifically magazines: When it comes to newsstand distribution, the numbers are largely a guessing game. And when you’re spending millions on printing and delivering magazines, that’s an expensive guessing game.
“There’s a lot of waste, in a sense,” said Charlie Swift, vice president of database strategy and marketing for Hearst Magazines. “You may put out 10 copies, sell 4 and 6 get tossed.” The flip side, of course, being when you don’t stock enough magazines at locations where they sell out. Distribution has largely been based off previous sales at given locations, but variables can come into play, such as where magazines are placed (near the checkout vs. on a newsstand) and demographics in an area (or as Swift told me: “If you’re selling Cosmopolitan in a retirement community, that’s probably not a good idea.”).
“We believe there’s a way to make [distribution] more efficient by putting analytics behind it,” Swift told me.
All of this is why Hearst held a competition to see who could build a better analytics model to predict newsstand sales for magazines. It’s a Netflix Prize-like approach to figuring out how well a magazine will sell at a given location, based off historical sales data. There were more than 700 participants in the competition, and last month Hearst and the Direct Marketing Association awarded a team $25,000 for their formula, which generated magazine sales estimates that were nearest to actual newsstand figures. Swift said they’re looking at how they can adapt the model to distributing different titles.
They’re hoping analytics can be a way of becoming more efficient and saving money — starting by wasting less paper. According to figures provided for the competition by the National Center for Database Marketing, less than 40 percent of all copies are sold, and the magazine industry saw close to a six percent drop in newsstand sales between 2009 and 2010. Swift said using analytics benefits readers “if we can be more efficient as an industry and take costs out that are not adding to the customer.”
What’s almost ironic about magazines getting turned on to analytics is that they’re historically known for holding on to information about readers from home subscriptions, direct mail, and surveys. Swift knows this better than most; his job is a relatively new position created at Hearst specifically to look at metrics. Like many organizations, Hearst’s magazine division is in the process of building a unified customer database that ties together information like bill payments, web visits, and promotions received.
Aside from the economic benefits of getting better data, Swift said he thinks magazine publishers realize the cost of storing and managing information has gone down. They’re also taking notice of how analytics are used in making decision for news sites. “The web changes the culture too,” he said. “There’s too much information to absorb — you have to process it, have to let analytics drive it in ways.”
Photo by YoungDoo Moon used under a Creative Commons license.
As we draw to a close, it’s time for this year’s predictions from Martin Langeveld, which are the closest thing we have to a tradition around here. We just posted a look back at Martin’s predictions for 2010, a year ago. Here’s what he foresees for 2011; check back next year to see how he did.
Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming. My geezer head spins just thinking about all this, but look: All these things will not stay in separate silos. Why do you think AOL invested $50 million or more launching Patch in 500 markets, without a business model that makes sense to anyone? What’s coming down the pike is new intersections between all of these digital developments, and somehow, news is always in the picture because it’s at the top of people’s lists of content needs, right after email and search. There are business opportunities in tying all of these things together, so there are opportunities for news enterprises to be part of the action. Some attempts to find synergies will work, and some won’t.
But imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don’t). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we’ll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.
The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I’m going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed. (Disclosure: I’m working on a project with the University of Missouri to explore potential business models enabled by news clearinghouses.)
Embracing real digital strategies. Among newspaper companies, Journal Register will continue to point the way: CEO John Paton ardently evangelizes for digital-first thinking — read his presentation to the recent (Nieman-cosponsored) INMA Transformation of News Summit, if you haven’t seen it. Is there another newspaper company CEO who agrees with Paton’s mantra, “Be Digital First and Print Last”? I doubt it, because what it means, in Patton’s words, is that you “put the digital people in charge, and stop listening to the newspaper people.” Most newspaper groups pay lip service to “digital first,” but in reality they’re focused on the daily print edition. And that’s why audience attention will continue to go to new media unencumbered by print, like Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Patch, Gawker Media, and hosts of others. So for a prediction: Journal Register will outsource most of its printing, sell most of its real estate, bring the audience into its newsrooms with more news cafes like their first one in Torrington, Conn. It will announce by year end that 25 percent of its revenue is from digital sources. It will also launch online-only startups in cities and towns near its existing markets, perhaps with niche print spinoffs. And finally, toward the end of 2011, we’ll see some reluctant and tentative emulation of Paton’s strategies among a few other newspaper groups.
Newspaper advertising revenue. An extrapolation of the 2010 trend (see my 2010 scorecard) would mean 2011 quarters of, say gains of 2 percent, 4 percent, 6 percent and 8 percent. But for that to happen, marketers would have to decide, during Q4 of 2011, to direct 8 percent more money into advertising in a medium that continues to report “strategic” cuts in press runs and paid print circulation, that is not finding fresh eyeballs online, that has an audience profile getting older every year, and that has done little R&D or innovation to discover a digital future for itself. With sexy new opportunities to advertise on tablets and smartphones coming along daily, why would any brand, retailer, or advertising agency be looking to spend more in print? My prediction is for a very flat year, with the quarterly totals (for print plus online revenue) coming in at Q1: +1.5%, Q2: +2.0%, Q3: no change and Q4: -3%. That final quarter will revert to negative territory primarily because of major shifts in retail budgets to tablet and smartphone platforms and to digital competitors like Groupon.
Newspaper online ad revenue. This has been a bright spot in 2010, with gains of 4.9 percent, 13.9 percent, and 10.7 percent so far. Assume another gain in Q4. But there are several problems. First, at most newspapers a big fraction of so-called online revenue is hitched to print programs with online components, upsells, added values, or bonuses. So there’s no way to tell whether the reported numbers are real, representing actual gains purely in ads purchased on web sites, whether there’s a lot of creative accounting going on to make the online category look better than it actually is, or whether it would even exist without the print component. Secondly, there’s a lot of new competition at the local level for dollars that retailers earmark for web marketing. Groupon, alone, will do close to $1 billion in revenue this year, compared with about $3 billion total online revenue for all newspapers combined. Add the “Groupon clones” like LivingSocial, and the social couponing business is probably already at about 50 percent of newspaper online revenue, and could well pass it in 2011, very much at newspapers’ expense. That’s why I predict newspaper online revenue will be: Q1: +5.0 percent, Q2: +3.0 percent, Q3: no change and Q4: no change.
Newspaper circulation. The trendline here has been down, down, down, every six-month reporting period ending March 31 and September 30. Complicating the picture: newspapers have been selling combo packages, ABC-qualified, where a single subscriber counts for two because they are buying (sometimes on a forced basis) both a 7-day print subscription and a facsimile digital edition. Lots of inflated and un-real circulation will show up in the 2011 numbers. But if we look at print circulation alone, which ABC will continue to break out, demographics alone dictate a continuation of the negative trend. My prediction: down 5 percent in each of the spring and fall six-month ABC reporting periods. That will mean that by year’s end, print newspaper penetration will fall to about one in three households (a long way down from its postwar peak of 134 newspapers sold per 100 households in 1946).
Online news readership. There are a couple of ways to look at this. For newspaper websites, NAA recently switched from Nielsen to Comscore because they liked Comscore’s numbers better. As a base measure, Comscore is showing about 105 million monthly unique visitors and 4 billion pageviews to newspaper sites, with the average visitor spending 3.5 minutes per visit. Prediction: all three of those metrics will stay flat (plus or minus 10 percent) during 2011. The other way to look at it is: Where are Americans getting their news? The Pew Research Center looks at this on an annual basis, and in 2010 showed online, radio, and newspapers more or less tied as news sources for Americans. Is there any doubt where this is going? In 2011, Pew might add mobile as a distinct source, but it will show online clearly ahead of newspapers and radio, with mobile ascendant.
Newspaper chains. Nobody can afford to buy anybody else, and no non-newspaper companies want to buy newspapers. There might be some mergers, but really, there are no strategic opportunities for consolidation in this industry, because there are no major efficiencies or revenue opportunities to be gained. Everybody will just muddle along in 2011, with the exception of Journal Register, which as noted above will move into adjacent markets with digital products and generally show the way the rest should follow.
Stocks. The major indices will be up 15 to 20 percent by September, but they’ll drop back to a break-even position by the end of 2011. Newspaper stocks will not beat the market. Others: AOL and Google will beat the market; Yahoo and Microsoft will not.
[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]
So the newspaper business is now figuring out how to deal with a new middleman, Apple. The last decade has been about moaning and groaning about The Google, how it has become the mass medium, leaving newspapers in the niche, and how it has gotten the big share of digital ad revenue as an aggregator while news creators have gotten the short end of the hockey stick. The new decade looks like it’s bringing up a suite of similar questions, with Apple first in focus (and maybe Facebook coming next).
Just when newspaper companies thought they’d seen a big, new opportunity to establish strong new reader revenue lines on the tablet, their dreams have hit the pause button. Apple says it wants 30 percent of that emerging reader revenue — including ongoing digital subscription streams — telling publishers that they, like everyone else, have to go through the App Store to do the transaction, giving Apple its due cut. Publishers are now figuring outhow to respond, and as they do, let’s look, briefly, at four sets of numbers that tell us why this Apple/newspaper company tiff matters so much. Within those four sets, we can see the emerging newsonomics of tablet reader revenue.
Those 40 percent (of total U.S. music sales) and 28 percent (Apple’s share of overall music sales) numbers are ones to note. If they held true for news reading, then by 2017, we can be assured of one thing: Apple’s share of news “circulation” revenue would be mind-bending.
[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]
Jim Moroney thinks he may be on to a new formula. It’s not as great — not nearly as profitable — as that old newspaper formula, but it’s one that may sustain his company into the future.
“The Dallas Morning News now gets 38 percent of its revenue from circulation, 54 percent from advertising, and 8 percent from contract printing plus,” the Morning News’ publisher tells me.
Those numbers are a far cry from the way it used to be for newspaper companies. They long used one of the many 80/20 rules out there: 80 percent of their revenue came from advertising, and 20% came from circulation.
Now, as ad revenue has been on a precipitous decline — down from almost $50 billion in 2000 to $24 billion in 2009, and still sliding a bit more — that old formula is out the window.
While the digital news world seems consumed with conversations about paywalls and memberships, it is old-fashioned print circulation revenue that is the gainer in the post-80/20 formulas. Sure, advertising’s ski slope decline has greatly altered the 80/20. So has, though, the significant up-pricing of both subscriptions and single copies over the past three years.
At the Morning News, Moroney — aided by research from consumer products company The Modellers — took monthly subscriptions from $18 to $30, in one fell swoop. Many other publishers have upped prices, though most have done it more gradually. Pick up a slim copy anywhere in your travels, and you see it now costs 75 cents or a buck; it used to be the “25-cent or 35-cent?” discussion that consumed executive committees.
The impact of the pricing moves is still uncertain. Short-term, they seemed to work. Though circulation continued to decline, circulation revenue was mildly up. The central notion: Get those with the newspaper habit to pay more of the freight, figuring that few would drop the newspaper because it cost two Grande Mochas more.
As we look at last quarter’s financial reports, we have to wonder how the up-pricing of circulation will work. As many companies showed a decline in circulation revenue in the second quarter as showed an increase.
A few of the numbers:
Moroney’s own company, A.H. Belo, of which he is an executive vice-president, reported a 6.6-percent increase. Additionally, The New York Times Company reported a 3.2-percent increase and Scripps a 4.5-percent increase (from 1st quarter data; 2nd not out until Aug. 9). Significantly, I think, each of those companies may have done a better job of minimizing newsroom cuts and reinvesting — at least a little — in that now higher-priced product.
While the jury is out on the stickiness of price increases, it’s clear the old 80/20 rule is gone.
Broadly, in research I conduct annually for Outsell, we track the global moves in ad, circulation and digital revenue. In 2009, circulation revenue was up more than a point over 2008 to 41 percent. Significantly, Japanese publishers continue to get a majority of their revenue from circulation, while much of Europe and UK see their percentages in 35-45 percent range.
ln the U.S., let’s just pull some data from the second-quarter reports. They show:
Several factors will continue to push and pull the new ad/circ breakdown.
For one thing, we’re moving into an era of “reader revenue,” one that will roll up print subscriptions, single print copies, digital pay per view, digital subscriptions, all-access (across platform) subscriptions, memberships and more. For a next generation of reader revenue, tablet access is the big prize in the sights of publishers; witness, for instance, the likelihood of a News Corp. “iPad division.” Further, advertising will continue morph greatly, as digital marketing replaces some of that spend, enlarging and changing definitions.
Finally, don’t forget “other.” For A.H. Belo, it’s 8 percent now, but growing at at 35-percent clip. As news companies find “other” ways to make “other” revenue, we’ll see new formulas begin to make sense.
The New York Times Company has reported operating profit for the second-quarter rose to $60.8 million from $23.5 million in the same period the previous year, excluding some special items. The figures show the first increase in quarterly revenue since 2007, as a growth in digital advertising halted decline in print advertising.
The company NYT statement also showed that second-quarter revenue had risen to $589.6 million from $584.5 million one year ago. However, net income dropped to $32 million from $39 million year-over-year.
Digital advertising revenue rose 21 per cent, making up 26 per cent of total ad revenue compared to 22 per cent the year before. They also reported that print advertising has improved, from a 12.3 per cent downturn in the previous quarter, to six per cent.
The company also gained a 3.2 per cent rise in circulation revenue, put down to higher subscription and newsstand prices for both the Times and the Globe.Similar Posts:
Newspapers could borrow a line from a recent Dilbert comic strip: “We’ve been doing great since we redefined success as a slowing of failure.” Or perhaps it was the other way around, and Dilbert creator Scott Adams was inspired to write that line in a recent strip by the inventive terminology of newspaper executives describing “sequential improvement” and “moderating declines” in their revenue trends despite continuing losses in the double digit range.
Currently, the industry is reporting first-quarter earnings, and last week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released unaudited “publisher’s statements” reporting paid circulation for the six months ending March 31. The numbers are down, but the spin is up.
On the circulation front, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that circulation fell 8.7 percent on weekdays and 6.5 percent on Sundays, among newspapers filing publisher’s statements. This compares with drops of 10.6 percent weekdays and 7.6 percent Sundays for the prior six-month period, enough of an improvement for Newspaper Association of America CEO John Sturm to declare that “the data indicates the declines are moderating.”
Actually, it’s hard to discern real moderation in the rate of decline. The losses in the most recent period are indeed a bit less severe than those in the prior (Sept. 30) period, but they are worse than the drop in the period before that, or in any previous period. If we ignore the Sept. 30 data as an outlier, we actually have a trend that’s been worsening steadily for the last six years:
Nothing about that final uptick indicates that it’s a reversal of the trend — it would take two or three periods of “improvement” in the form of “moderating declines” to make that a valid conclusion. In fact, both of the upticks in the trendline disappear if we take the statistically reasonable step of averaging spring and fall six-month circulation changes into annual figures and graphing those:
Moreover, viewed in long-term context, this latest minor slowdown in the rate of decline disappears entirely when newspaper circulation is viewed in the context of population: Since 1945, the number of papers sold per 100 households has dropped steadily, declining in 61 of the last 64 years.
(The circulation numbers on which this chart is based come from Editor & Publisher via NAA; E&P hasn’t released its Yearbook with a 2009 figure, so 2009 is my estimate based on the last two ABC cycles and estimated census households.)
It’s also quite possible that the uptick is entirely the result of some of the new options newspapers have in counting their circulation. Some of the declines of the past few years have come from ditching distribution in unprofitable outlying areas, and cutting back on “third-party” programs in which advertisers were persuaded to pay for bulk distribution, free to recipients, at community events or door-to-door in targeted areas. The value of this circulation was always questionable, but now ABC rules are permitting substitution of new forms of questionable circulation.
Take, for instance, the Bend (Ore.) Bulletin, where weekday circulation grew 34.3 percent. How? Since Jan. 1, with ABC approval, the paper has been counting e-subscriptions sold to current print subscribers for an extra 50 cents per month. As long as the subscriber can choose to opt in or out of the added digital subscription, the e-subscription counts as one paid subscription in addition to the printed one, even if the customer never accesses it. Applying this stratagem for only three months of six-month reporting period, the Bulletin tacked 12,462 weekday e-subs to its “core” print circulation of 29,072 (which is actually down by more than 1,000 from 30,155 a year ago). And next time around, counting the e-subs for six full months, it expects to report circulation of about 54,000.
How much of that is going on, and to what extent is it responsible for that uptick? I haven’t delved into the data, but Paid Content did, and reported that e-edition circulation was up significantly: the digital editions of the top 25 newspaper e-editions rose 40 percent, from to 1,363,212, versus 973,721 a year earlier.
There’s are other questionable figures being circulated, as well. In his statement on the ABC data, Sturm also cited readers-per-copy data that appears, at first glance, to mitigate the downward trend in copies sold: “Newspaper print products are also finding their way into more people’s hands, with readers-per-copy increasing by 7.5 percent in just the last three years to 3.3 adults on average, according to a recent analysis from Scarborough Research and Newspaper National Network LLP.” Here’s the graph:
Missing from this statement is the important qualifying statement that the Scarborough study applies to 25 selected “top markets,” not to all newspapers.
For its report (PDF download), Scarborough chose the 25 largest newspapers omitting “national” newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today), as well as omitting papers in the midst of major circulation pattern transitions (Denver Post, Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury-News, Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer).
In response to email inquiries, NAA’s research director Jim Conaghan and communications chief Jeff Sigmund defended Sturm’s statement. “He correctly cites the Scarborough research,” Conaghan wrote. “John Sturm’s statement references research conducted by Scarborough which was based on an analysis of the top 25 markets,” Sigmund wrote. But Sturm’s statement leaves out the important qualifier of the 25 markets. Conaghan also wrote to me: “You need to carefully read what is contained in the Scarborough report. Large markets/papers, survey data. The old NAA estimates were derived by a different method, and would represent total U.S.” By “old NAA estimates” he meant a 2007 report available at the NAA site that found 2.128 readers per copy weekdays and 2.477 on Sunday. (That study, in a footnote, discounts the validity of the Sunday number, stating: “Projection relatively unstable for Sunday RPC. Use with caution.”
Now, as that quote suggests, readers-per-copy (a.k.a. the “pass-along rate”) is a notoriously difficult thing to measure. But it has been tracked by Scarborough and others for a very long time and has been pretty consistently cited (and drilled into the heads of newspaper advertising representatives) as being around 2.3, plus or minus a point or two. This allowed salespeople for a 30,000-circulation newspaper to tell retailers that readership was actually about 75,000. The readers-per-copy factoid was included for years in NAA’s own “Facts About Newspapers,” a vest-pocket sized booklet of data distributed annually to advertisers and publishers. In 2000, Facts About Newspapers claimed 2.1 readers per copy, and 2.2 on Sundays. In 2004, it was 2.3 on weekdays, 2.4 on Sundays. In 2007, as cited above, it was 2.1 weekdays and (with a grain of salt in the NAA footnote) 2.5 on Sundays. When I started in the business, in the late 1970s, I recall that it was 2.6. In 1983, Scarborough and Simmons both came up with about 2.7, but that was noted as seeming to be on the high side. The average U.S. household is about 2.57 people, another reason why any reader-per-copy finding above that level is questionable. I think Conaghan is right on the money to say that Sturm’s claim of 3.3 can not be applied to any markets outside the those selected 25 and that reality is still in range of 2.2 to 2.5 as it has been for 50 years.
Sturm also pointed to the online newspaper audience, stating: “The latest Nielsen Online data found that newspaper websites attracted a record 74.4 million unique visitors per month on average in the first quarter of 2010 — more than one-third (37 percent) of all Internet users.” Left unsaid: the monthly UV average for this quarter was probably boosted in February by traffic related to the Olympics. The February UV count was 76.1 million, an all-time high. In March, with 10 percent more days than February, UV’s were 5 percent lower at 72.1 million.
But everyone knows by now that UVs are not a very good indicator, and “time spent on site” is what counts, at least if you’re trying to sell advertising. By that score, Q1 did not shape up very well for newspapers: in January, the average visitor spent 33:09 minutes at newspaper sites, in February, 29:06 minutes, and in March 32.21 minutes. These are three of the four shortest attention spans recorded by Nielsen Online for NAA since January 2004 (with the caveat that data before June 2009, which showed significantly higher times spent, was based on a different survey sample and can’t be compared with later stats).
Here’s the trend line for attention, or time spent, at newspaper websites since the June 2009 methodology change.
When that trend starts to demonstrate clear and strong “sequential improvement,” newspapers will have something to shout from the rooftops.
[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]
The first quarter newspaper numbers are in. They paint a consistent picture.
Across the board, the reporting of public news companies reflects a new, if unsteady reality. In short, that reality is one of profit. Not the big profit of 20-percent-plus profit margins — the envy of many other industries — that were a truism as recently as five years ago. Now, the profit’s more tepid, mostly in single digits: The New York Times, 8 percent; Gannett, 8 percent, McClatchy, 1.5 percent. Expectations run that news companies will show a five to 10 percent profit for the year, absent unforeseen calamity.
But that mild profit is good news. Recall that a year ago, much of the industry was in freefall. A number of companies — stunned by the quick near-Depression downturn of ad revenues — went operationally into the red. They responded with draconian cuts in staff and newsprint, and as the recovery has emerged, they’ve positioned themselves as smaller but profitable companies, though their first-quarter revenues still largely lagged the first quarter of the horrific Q1 2009. Wall Street has rewarded them with improved credit ratings and advanced share prices. There seems to be, say investors, some future here. This week’s tenacious auction in Philadelphia with lenders led by the Angelo Gordon private equity company — now a big player in the U.S. daily business — winning the papers with a $135 million bid only reinforces the notion that newspaper valuation may have been trashed too much.
It’s a fragile stability. One big question for all publishers: where do we go from here?
Here the newsonomics are constrained. While Google is off buying a company a month and Apple charts its own strong growth path, most newspaper companies have little room to maneuver. Sure, the private Hearsts — a diversified media company with newspaper interests — can invest in new companies and technologies, but for publicly owned newspaper companies, it’s a different story.
First off, their meager profits are uncertain. They then face three ways to use those profits. The three:
To put it simply, at this point, there’s not enough profit to satisfy all three goals. So, in 2010 — a year crying out for investment in innovative mobile media product creation and marketing services/advertising infrastructure build-out — news companies have far fewer resources than they’d like and they need. While once they were the big guys, looking at buying startups, for now, they’re largely on the sidelines, marveling at the mojo, the profits, and the acquisitions of the Googles and the Apples.
Interesting column from Roy MacGregor for Canada’s Globe and Mail on the damage that chasing ‘hits’ online can do to journalism and why circulation and web traffic should not be confused with circulation:
Why be a storyteller when a ranter will have far more traffic? Why be investigative when instigative is a far quicker route to success on the web?
(…) It is a terrible vision of what journalism could evolve into as it enters a world it so desperately wishes to own, but has little idea of what the available measures in this digital world actually mean.
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