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May 03 2012
The newsonomics of Pricing 101
When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.
The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline.
Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The newsonomics of 99-cent media”), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each.
Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless.
When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot.
Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples.
The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust.
We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:
- 33-45 percent of consumers who pay for digital subscriptions click to buy before they ever run into a paywall. That’s right — a third to a half of buyers just need to be told they will have to pay for continuing access, and they’re sold. As economists note that price is a signal of value, consumers understand the linkage. Assign what seems to be a fair price, and some readers pay up, especially if they are exposed to a “warning” screen, letting them know they’ve used up of critical number of “free” views. Maybe they want to avoid the bumping inconvenience — or maybe they just acknowledge the jig’s up.
- If print readers are charged something extra for digital access, then non-print subscribers are more likely to buy a digital-only sub. Why pay for digital access is the other guys (the print subscribers) are getting it thrown in for “free”? Typically, Press+ sees a 20-percent-plus increase in signups on sites that charge print subscribers something extra. That extra may be just a third or so of the price digital-only subscribers pay (say, $2.95 instead of $6.95), but it makes a difference. Consequently, Press+ says 80-90 percent of its sites charge print subscribers for digital access. The company now powers 323 sites and thus has more access to collective data than any other news-selling source.
- You can reverse the river, or at least channel it. The New York Times took a year, but figured it out righter than anyone expected. It bundled its Sunday print paper (still an ad behemoth) with digital, making that package $60 or so a year cheaper than digital alone. The result, of course, is that Sunday Times home delivery is up for first time since 2006. It’s not just NYT or the L.A. Times which have embraced Sunday/digital combos. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune began a similar push in November. Now, of its 18,000 digital-only subscribers, 28 percent have agreed to an add on the Sunday paper, for just 30 cents a week, says CEO Mike Klingensmith (“A Twin Cities turnaround?”). So we see that consumers may well be more agnostic about platform than we thought. Given them an easy one-click way of buying even musty old print, and they will. Irony: If you hadn’t charged them for digital access, you probably wouldn’t have sold them on print.
- New products create new markets. 70 percent of The Economist‘s digital subscribers are not former print subscribers, says Paul Rossi, managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. That’s surprising in one sense, but not in another. Newspaper company digital VPs will tell you that they’re surprised to see how little overlap there is between their print audience customer bases and their digital ones. The downside here: Many print customers seem not to value digital access that much. The Star Tribune is finding a low take rate of 3 percent of its Sunday-only print subscribers willing to take its digital-access upsell. One lesson: The building of a new digital-mainly audience won’t be easy and will require new product thinking; it’s not that easy just to port over established customers.
- The all-access bundle must contain multiple consumer hooks. Sure, readers like to get mobile access as well as desktop and print, and maybe some video. Yet some may especially prize the special events or membership perks they are offered, as the L.A. Times is banking on (and start-ups Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Global Post have applied outside the paywall model). Some will like the extras, like The Boston Globe telling its new 18,000 digital subscribers, as well as its print ones, that they now get “free” Sunday Supper ebooks (“The newsonomics of 100 products a year”). Sports fanatics or business data lovers will find other niches to value — and ones that make the whole bundle worthwhile. Archives — and the research riches they offer — will prove irresistible to some. In 2012, a bundle may offer a half dozen reasons to buy, casting a wide net, with the hope that at least one shiny lure will reel in the customers. By 2013, expect “dynamic, customized offers,” targeting would-be buyers by their specific interests to be more widely in use.
- While pageviews may drop 10-15 percent with a paywall, unique visitors remain fairly constant. We see the phenomenon of those who do hit a paywall one month coming back in subsequent months, rather than fleeing forever. “It may be the second, third, or fourth month before someone says, ‘I guess I am a frequent visitor here, and I’ll play,’” says Press+’s Gordon Crovitz.
- Archives find new life. Archives have lived in a corner of news and magazine websites for a long time. They’ve been used, but not highly used or highly monetized. Now, courtesy of the tablet, and a new way to charge, The Economist is finding that 20 percent of its single copy sales are of past issues. Readers will pay for the old in new wrappers, whether back e-issues, or niched ebooks. The all-access offer can be much wider than cross-platform, or multi-device. It can extend across time, from a century of yesterdays to alerts for tomorrow.
- News media is probably underpriced. Take the high-end Economist. CEO Andrew Rashbass — speaking to MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2012, in a recommended video — said that a survey of its subscribers showed that a majority didn’t know how much they were paying for the Economist. When pressed to guess, most over-estimated the price. At the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, an early paywall leader in the middle of America, a recent price increase to $8.99 from $7.99 has so far resulted in no material loss of subscribers. At Europe’s Piano Media, early experience in Slovakia and Slovenia is that price isn’t a big factor, says Piano’s David Brauchli. “Payment for news on the web is really more a philosophical mindset rather than economic. People who are opposed to paying will always opposed to paying and those who see the value of paying don’t mind paying no matter what the price is.” That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial.
- Bundle or unbundle — what’s the right way? Mainly, we don’t know yet, and the answer may be different for differing audience segments. The Economist started with print being a higher price than a separate digital sub. Then it raised the digital price to match that of print — to assert digital value. It now offers all-access: one price gets you both. Next up: You can buy either print or digital for the same price, but if you want both, you’ll pay more. It’s an evolution of testing, and so far, it’s been an upward one.
Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity.
The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it: “The newsonomics of the FT as an internet retailer”) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:
I think overall publishers have to start thinking more like e-commerce companies. More like Amazon. You can’t just throw up a wall or an app and expect it to just sell itself. We’re still building that muscle here at the Globe, and some of our colleagues in the industry are even farther along. We have extensive real-time and daily analytics and are employing multivariate testing to try offers and designs to refine the experience that works best for each type of user.
Photo by Jessica Wilson used under a Creative Commons license.
April 26 2012
Daily Must Reads, April 26, 2012
The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung.
1. Ruling expected for U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks (CBS News)
2. Study: Newspaper web traffic increased 4.4% in the first quarter (Romenesko)
3. Silicon Valley's biggest tech firms on re-inventing journalism (PaidContent)
4. The first mobile app to integrate with Pinterest lets you make how-to guides with pics (PaidContent)
5. David Simon, creator of The Wire, warns writers who provide free content for the web (GalleyCat)
6. CU L8ter?: Are news text alerts a thing of the past? (Nieman Lab)
This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».
The newsonomics of 99-cent media
Honk if you still love newsprint enough to pay $700 or more a year for a seven-day print subscription to The New York Times. Of course, you have many other choices.
You can try one of several print/bundled options for considerably less money. Or if you want to be parsimonious, you can get 10 free article views a month, or more if you want to work the social and search on-ramps to NYTimes.com. Maybe you want to be among those who pay Ongo $1.99 a month, and get 20 Times news stories a day, among lots of other news content.
Love the Guardian, and want to follow each tick of the U.K.’s Murdoch saga? If you’re in the U.S., you can subscribe to the lively iPad edition for $13.99 a month — or access it for free via the Safari browser on the tablet. In the U.S., its smartphone app is free, but in the U.K. and Europe, it requires a subscription. Of course, it’s quite successful Facebook app gives you access for free as well, anywhere.
If you’re shopping the Ongo news kiosk, look at wide spectrum of prices individual publishers are charging for access through that product: The Guardian is 99 cents a month, The Christian Science Monitor is $3.99, while the Chicago Tribune is $9.99 and The Boston Globe $14.99.
It’s not just newspaper companies that offer a patchwork of buying (or not buying) choices.
Are you a late-arriving fan of AMC’s series “Breaking Bad”? If you want to catch up and subscribe to Netflix streaming, you’ve got a good deal at the $7.99 a month rate. Cram in the first three seasons’ 37 episodes in a single month (where did that month go?), and you’ll pay just 21.5 cents per show, and anything else you have time to watch is gravy. Ah, but if we want to watch Season 4, which you can’t yet see on Netflix streaming, you have to upgrade to those red envelopes and get Season 4 DVDs — but it’ll cost you another $7.99 a month. (Ah, maybe that’s one of the reasons Netflix’s maladroit move to streaming is pushing it to a loss.)
Or you can turn to Amazon VOD and get the episodes for $1.99 each (or $2.99 in HD!), or $25.87 for the season. Or why stream when you own the DVD for $29.99 (or add an extra 10 bucks for added Blu-ray clarity). But wait — I’m an Amazon Prime customer. Can’t I watch it for free? It’s not part of the Prime free streaming offer, but I can watch “I Bought a Zoo” as often as I want for nothing. Or maybe I can access “Breaking Bad” through Comcast’s Xfinity $100-a-month plus service. Nah, no deal — Breaking Bad isn’t available.
One more try: on the AMC site itself, there’s quite highlights, blogs, and more on the series, but no full episodes.
Let’s add in music.
Take Tristan Prettyman. It’s $9.99 (or 83 cents a song) for her last CD on iTunes. Through my $36 annual ad-free Pandora subscription, I can listen to dozens of her songs, her musical soundalikes, and thousands of other tunes in a year, bringing down the cost to pennies per song. Or there’s Spotify, where her songs are available for either zero, five, or ten bucks a month, depending on what devices I want to use and whether I can stand ads.
Magazines, of course, are offering their own split-screen experiments. The U.S. magazine industry (“The newsonomics of Next Issue Media”) is testing the all-you-can-eat, cross-title buffet, bringing some its titles down to as long as 37 cents a month (if you consumed all 27 “basic” titles) through the kiosk, but $39, or $59, or $79 a year if you buy a single title directly through a publisher.
How much to charge?
It’s a fool’s paradise of pricing out there in the digital world, right now, at least for wily consumers. The Department of Justice’s ebook suit and related settlements only complicate things. Five and ten years ago we were wondering whether people would ever pay for digital media — Newsweek’s Steven Levy took us into the terra incognita in “Meet the Napster Generation” back in 2000. But now the question isn’t whether people, young and old, will pay — it’s how the hell to figure out how much to charge them throughout what we politely like to call our multi-platform world.
Content no longer demands to be free. It wants a fee — but how much of one?
Consumer pricing is not a core competence of many media companies. For decades, media pricing was on automatic. Newspapers picked a quarter or fifty cents, and then re-programmed the coinboxes. Magazines kept prices low enough to build audiences to reap substantial ad rewards. Book publishers did some minor stratification. Music companies picked a couple of price points, and let the vinyl and CDs fly.
In the digital era, though, pricing is confronting — and confounding — media companies. Just what in the digital world of vanishing manufacturing costs is digital media worth? Now with those 20th-century costs — printing, manufacture, distribution, shipping — passing into the night, the question of price, and value, is making itself loudly heard.
We can certainly identify the wrong-headedness of the Department of Justice’s price-fixing suit against book publishers and/or point out how the DOJ had little choice in pursuing the case, neither of which is a surprise. The law has struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with business changes wrought by the Internet, from fair use to antitrust to media monopoly. Oft-earnest American regulators find themselves falling farther and farther behind, trying to track technology’s dominating nature and make new sense of it. Often, European Union regulators take a more forthright stab but end up retreating.
Create a new legal framework that better balances producers, distributors, and consumers? Forget about that in this age of politics where stalemate and status quo is the order of the day.
Publishers of all media are on their own, then, and they’d better make sense of pricing. It’s core to their survival and future sustainability. Sure, the Amazons of the world will try to monopolize book pricing, returning closer to its pre-”agency pricing” market share of 90 percent from its current paltry 60 percent. Yet, publishers — especially of news and feature media, news organizations and “magazine media” — have many pricing plays to try as customers discover content near and far from traditional outlets.
The magic of a good price point
I’ll call this the newsonomics of 99-cent media because that’s the world into which we have moved. Today let’s look at that 99-cent model, and next week we’ll delve into the early lessons that pricing’s practitioners have stumbled across as they’ve moved into paid content.
At first, it looks like a tyranny of 99-cent pricing (or the parallel expected tyranny of $9.99 Amazon book pricing). Will 99-cent pricing cause brand damage? Will it last? If the U.S. follows Canada (which is dropping the loonie) forsaking the penny (and America often follows loonies), then the 99 cent pricing may fall into history. For now, though, it’s got a certain consumer magic.
“Ninety-nine-cent introductory offers have done wonders for take rates,” says applied economist Matt Lindsay, president of Mather Economics. His company has worked with more than 200 titles — about 75 percent of them newspapers — on pricing and related strategic issues. Take a look across media pricing, from The New York Times to Hulu Plus, and 99 cents (or its derivatives of $1.99 to $7.99 to $9.99) are everywhere.
Take rate is simple: What percentage of customers click yes — and provide precious credit card data — when confronted with an offer. Offer readers the ability to start a “trial” for 99 cents, and you’ll see results two to three times any other number, says Lindsey. At 99 cents, readers “take that as a signal. They understand that you want them to adopt this product. By setting the full price at a high number, you are basically saying, ‘This is the true value of the product.’”
Steve Jobs understood signaling in a parallel way. As Chris Anderson described well in Wired last November (“The Magic of 99 Cents”), one of Jobs’ great successes with iTunes and the iPod was that 99-cent pricing for songs. He could get the hardware and software right, but in the not-quite-post-piracy age, 99 cents was the third leg of the value equation. It worked as a signal: somewhere in between free and too much.
Start with 99 cents and you can conquer the world. As they set off on that quest, what are some of the pricing guideposts for publishers?
- 99 cents is a beginning and not an end. For newspapers used to being paid $200 or $400 a year, 99 cents seems like a declaration of cheapness. Put some round 0s on pricing; it just seems more honest. The oft-cited example of Louis CK’s $5 video is a case in point. Five bucks says authenticity. Yet media that answer thousands of reader questions every day aren’t comedians. Just because you set an intro price of 99 cents, the down-the-road price sends that other important signal to value. Ultimately, says Lindsay, it’s true that “people take price as a signal to quality.”
- If you have lots more to sell, then 99 cents isn’t a price, it’s a price of admission. Responding to my recent column about “small things” adding up, Rob Pegoraro asked, on Twitter, how The New York Times’ earnings results related to the notion. “I think NYT 454K dig subs become great market for ‘small things’ like ebooks, events+,” I responded. David Johnson then added, “You pay to be in a market. These business plans resemble theme parks and non-profit fundraising strategies.” That thought fits perfectly here: it’s not about the money, large or small, an even buck or 99 cents — it’s about establishing a new relationship. Or, to use the vernacular, 99 cents is gateway-drug pricing.
- Get ready to sell lots of stuff. So if you are Six Flags, or The New York Times or the L.A. Times, you’d better be able to leverage that new relationship by selling lots of stuff. Maybe not yet 100 products a year, but at least a half dozen to start. Ebooks, of course, fit perfectly here, as add-on products offered to members or subscribers. Sure, use some, as The Boston Globe is doing with Sunday Suppers, to reinforce subscriber/member value. But price others to match potential value. A guide to Boston-area colleges from, who else, the Globe, could be a $19.95 solid seller, given the $100,000-plus parental investment ahead. “Ebook,” though, is much too limited a name to put on it, and sounds like something not current. Wonderfactory founder and creative director David Link made this basic but hugely important point when we talked last week: There really isn’t a fundamental difference between an app and an ebook. “From an agency and a technology’s point of view, it’s only in how you create them. Talking about a recent product Wonderfactory worked on, “You go to the ebookstore, and it’s just text. You go into the app store and it’s got the text with 50 percent app-like sauce.” So, right now, publishers and their creative people are having to create multiple forms, but essentially the same product is both an app and an ebook. The technologies, and the costs, will clarify, as will the marketplaces for all the digital paraphernalia of our lives. The point for publishers selling more stuff is clear though: solve audience needs better than someone else, create products for the devices of the day, and price accordingly.
- It’s not just the content we’re paying for. That’s a tough, tough lesson for literal newsies. As with the music revolution Apple wrought, it was the combination of convenience, ease, presentation, pricing, and wonder that rationalized (for good and bad) the digital music industry. Today’s first batch of digital news subscriptions rely as much on convenience and mobility values as they do on the words and pictures.
- We’re all in the same business. Think of your own media purchases. A little music, more and more video, selective news and magazine subscriptions, increasing numbers of ebooks. Yes, the marketplaces for ebooks and apps, alongside this kiosk and that e-store, are confusing. Media, though, is media, and the pricing schemes are forming in a remarkably similar way across movies, music, newspapers, and magazines. We all like, for instance, the notion of All Access; we’ll pay once and get our stuff everywhere. So news and magazine publishers must look through the assorted lessons of the music and movie industries, those lessons still in much progress. News pricing is not an island.
March 29 2012
Comparing apples and oranges in data journalism: a case study
A must-read for any data journalist, aspiring or otherwise, is Simon Rogers’ post on The Guardian Datablog where he compares public and private sector pay.
This is a classic apples-and-oranges situation where politicians and government bodies are comparing two things that, really, are very different. Is a private school teacher really comparable to someone teaching in an unpopular school? What is the private sector equivalent of a director of public health or a social worker?
But if these issues are being discussed, journalists must try to shed some light, and Simon Rogers does a great job in unpicking the comparisons. From pay and hours worked, to qualifications and age (big differences in both), and gender and pay inequality (more women in the public sector, more lower- and higher-paid workers in the private sector), Rogers crunches all the numbers:
“[T]he proportion of low skill jobs in the private sector has increased, and the proportion of high skill jobs in the public sector increased to around 31% of all jobs by 2011, compared 26% of all private sector jobs.
“But, at the same time, people who are most highly qualified actually get paid worse in the public sector.
“… Public sector workers tend to be older … Average mean hourly earnings peak in the early 40s in both sectors. They decline slightly approaching retirement although the decline happens earlier in the private sector than in the public sector, possibly because the higher earners in the private sector are more likely to leave the labour market earlier.
“It also shows that if you’re older in the public sector, you get paid better than in the private sector.
“… [T]he bottom 5% of workers in the public sector earn less than £6.91 per hour, whereas in the private sector, 5% of workers earn less than £5.93 per hour.”
When you find yourself in an apples-and-oranges situation you can’t avoid, this is the way to do it. Any other examples?
Comparing apples and oranges in data journalism: a case study
A must-read for any data journalist, aspiring or otherwise, is Simon Rogers’ post on The Guardian Datablog where he compares public and private sector pay.
This is a classic apples-and-oranges situation where politicians and government bodies are comparing two things that, really, are very different. Is a private school teacher really comparable to someone teaching in an unpopular school? What is the private sector equivalent of a director of public health or a social worker?
But if these issues are being discussed, journalists must try to shed some light, and Simon Rogers does a great job in unpicking the comparisons. From pay and hours worked, to qualifications and age (big differences in both), and gender and pay inequality (more women in the public sector, more lower- and higher-paid workers in the private sector), Rogers crunches all the numbers:
“[T]he proportion of low skill jobs in the private sector has increased, and the proportion of high skill jobs in the public sector increased to around 31% of all jobs by 2011, compared 26% of all private sector jobs.
“But, at the same time, people who are most highly qualified actually get paid worse in the public sector.
“… Public sector workers tend to be older … Average mean hourly earnings peak in the early 40s in both sectors. They decline slightly approaching retirement although the decline happens earlier in the private sector than in the public sector, possibly because the higher earners in the private sector are more likely to leave the labour market earlier.
“It also shows that if you’re older in the public sector, you get paid better than in the private sector.
“… [T]he bottom 5% of workers in the public sector earn less than £6.91 per hour, whereas in the private sector, 5% of workers earn less than £5.93 per hour.”
When you find yourself in an apples-and-oranges situation you can’t avoid, this is the way to do it. Any other examples?
February 20 2012
“All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard”
Here’s a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism that goes beyond the weekend’s player ratings. As one of the biggest names in European football goes into administration, The Guardian carries a piece by the author of Rangerstaxcase.com, a blogger who “pulled down the facade at Rangers”, including a scathing commentary on the Scottish press’s complicity in the club’s downfall:
“The Triangle of Trade to which I have referred is essentially an arrangement where Rangers FC and their owner provide each journalist who is “inside the tent” with a sufficient supply of transfer “exclusives” and player trivia to ensure that the hack does not have to work hard. Any Scottish journalist wishing to have a long career learns quickly not to bite the hands that feed. The rule that “demographics dictate editorial” applied regardless of original footballing sympathies.
“[...] Super-casino developments worth £700m complete with hover-pitches were still being touted to Rangers fans even after the first news of the tax case broke. Along with “Ronaldo To Sign For Rangers” nonsense, it is little wonder that the majority of the club’s fans were in a state of stupefaction in recent years. They were misled by those who ran their club. They were deceived by a media pack that had to know that the stories it peddled were false.”
Over at Rangerstaxcase.com, the site expands on this in its criticism of STV for uncritical reporting:
“There does not appear to be a point where the media learns its lessons. There is no capacity for improvement. No voice that says: we have been misled by people from this organisation so often in the past that we need to get corroboration before we publish anything more. Alastair Johnston, you will recall, artfully created the impression for Rangers’ supporters and shareholders that the payment of the tax bills that are now crushing their club would be the responsibility of the parent company. His words then were carefully chosen to avoid actually lying, but his intended audience seemed in little doubt at the time as to what they thought he meant. Either Mr. Johnston has been misrepresented by STV or he appears to be trying to gain an advantage in the battle to oust Whyte by misleading Rangers’ supporters.”
The piece also includes some interesting reflections on collaborative journalism and crowdsourcing:
“Rangerstaxcase.com has become a platform for some of the sharpest minds and most accomplished professionals to share information, debate, and form opinions based upon a rational interpretation of the facts rather than PR-firm fabrications. In all of the years when the mainstream media had a monopoly on opinion forming and agenda setting, the more sentient football fan had no outlet for his or her opinions. Blogs and other modern media, like Twitter, have democratised information distribution.
“Rangerstaxcase.com has gone far beyond its half-baked “I know a secret” origins to become a forum for citizen journalism. The power of the crowd‑sourced investigation initiated by anyone who is able to ignite the interest of others is a force that has the potential to move mountains in our society. All that is required is an issue about which others are passionate and feel unheard.”
Rangerstaxcase.com is not unique. Combine the passion of sports supporters with the lack of critical faculty in much sports journalism and you have potentially fertile ground.
For my own club, Bolton Wanderers, for example, I turn to Manny Road (site currently laid low by a malware attack).
For the Olympics there will be a regular and easy supply of good news stories to wade through, but also an extremely active network of local and international blogs from people scrutinising the foggier side of the Olympic spirit, which is why I set up Help Me Investigate the Olympics and am encouraging my students to connect with those communities.
January 23 2012
Pew Report: Tablet Ownership Doubles. What's Left for Print?
The shift from print to mobile reading went into overdrive this holiday season, with ownership of e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad doubling in a single month.
A new survey-based study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that the percentage of adults owning tablet computers went from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January, with the same growth rate seen among black-and-white e-readers like the Kindle.
Source: The Dec. 2011 and Jan. 2012 Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
So how should content providers and publishers react to this news? As the founder of e-book publishing startup BookBrewer, I live and die by these kinds of numbers, and they're obviously good for us. But they should serve as a wake-up call for traditional publishers -- especially newspapers, magazines and book publishers that still manage their businesses around shrinking print audiences.
LOOKING AT THE NUMBERSThe Pew study said tablet and e-reader adoption sped up due to holiday gifting, but it was amped by two new value-priced color tablets: Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's new $249 Nook Tablet, both of which are far below the iPad's $499-$829 price point. Amazon doesn't release exact figures on the Kindle Fire, but investment research firm Morgan Keenan recently estimated that Amazon sold 4-5 million Fires over the holidays at the expense of 1-2 million iPads that Apple would have sold absent the Fire.
Also noteworthy in the study is that the sex divide has disappeared -- at least for tablets. In November of 2010, 60% of tablet owners were male. Today? It's at a healthy 50-50 male to female ratio. Curiously, black-and-white e-readers went in the opposite direction, with women now making up 57% of of e-reader owners. (My theory on that based on e-book sales data I'm privy to as the owner of BookBrewer is that romance e-books play a role, but I digress.)
In both cases, people with more education and higher incomes were more likely to own a tablet or e-reader, although the difference was slightly less for e-readers.
GOODBYE PRINT?
So what's left for the print market? This is a valid question because the contrast in trends for tablets and traditional print couldn't be more stark. Think about it. In just one month the number of people with a sexy new device that can display books, websites and streaming video doubled. When's the last time you saw those kinds of figures for mass-market newspapers or magazines?
What's more, these tablets are generating significant sales from content after very little time on the market. An RBC Capital analyst projects that the brand-new Kindle Fire will make Amazon $100 over the lifetime of the device. The revenue comes directly from sales of e-books, apps and streaming content from Amazon.
Compare that to Pew's figures on yearly newspaper revenue, which has been going in the opposite direction for some time.
Having been completely out of the newspaper industry for over two years, I see the glass as more than half full, but I keenly remember how it felt to work for a newspaper and feel tied to a tanking business model. That's partly why I've been urging journalists and news organizations to repackage and publish their content as e-books. E-book sales were surging even before the numbers looked this rosy, and they represent a new way to monetize content without advertising.
And here's the great news there. I now have multiple, solid examples that readers buy e-books about news.
Our first news partner, The Huffington Post, has published several e-books through BookBrewer that quickly moved into the No. 1 spots of their categories -- including this latest about the Occupy Wall Street movement. And we're seeing a similar effect with The Denver Post's first e-book about Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos. Based on these successes, we're openly looking for more news organizations that are ready to jump into the e-book world with both feet, so let me know if that means you or your organization.
To those of you who mourn the loss of the feel of a printed product in your hand, don't fret. Print is not completely dead. If you think of the digital revolution as a play, print is going through a wardrobe change.
Here's just one example. On January 8, we started pre-order sales for the Post's Tebow book as a Print on Demand paperback through our partner Consolidated Graphics. Even though readers have a choice between e-book and print, we've been amazed to see the print orders outpace the e-book orders by a 3-to-1 ratio. The book's print pre-order sales reached $23,000 in just 10 days, and they show no signs of slowing down.
I heard something similar from the folks at O'Reilly Publishing at a session I ran at their recent NewsFoo camp in Phoenix. Founder Tim O'Reilly told participants that his company sells twice as many e-books from the O'Reilly website than it does directly through Amazon. Those e-book sales are high, but print sales still make up at least half of their business. More and more of those print books are printed on demand from online orders, too.
GIVE INFORMATION CONSUMERS WHAT THEY WANT
Here's what I see as the broader trend. It's not the printed book itself that's dying, but rather the way that books are mass-marketed, shipped to physical book stores, retailed, sold at a loss, and ultimately shipped back to publishers for a refund. (And what does that tell you about my view on daily newspaper delivery? It should be obvious. Stop the insanity! Newspapers should be personalized and on demand, too.)
On the same note, the growth in tablets and e-readers says more about peoples' desire for convenience and choice than it does about gadget lust.
Information consumers now expect to get whatever they want, whenever they want, in whatever form they choose. Tablets, e-readers and smartphones speak directly to that need, but so does an impulse buy of a printed book that shows up at your doorstep five days later. In fact, more and more of those purchases initiate from smartphones. The need for on-demand, multi-platform publishing -- perhaps including an app or two -- has never been more important.
January 17 2012
Are Newspapers Civic Institutions or Algorithms? | Endless Innovation | Big Think
January 13 2012
This Week in Review: Google and the social search wars, and the Post’s in-house innovation critic
Social search and competition: Google made a major move toward unifying search and social networks (particularly its own) this week by fusing Google+ into its search and deepening its search personalization based on social information. It’s a significant development with a lot of different angles, so I’ll try to hit all of them as understandably as I can.
As usual, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan put together the best basic guide to the changes, with plenty of visual examples and some brief thoughts on many of the issues I’ll cover here. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid explained that while these changes may seem incremental now, they’re foreshadowing Google’s eventual goal to become “a search engine for all of your stuff.”
PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts liked the form and functionality of the new search, but said it still needs a critical mass of Google+ activity to become truly useful, while GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers said its keys will be photos and celebrities. ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell was impressed by the non-evilness of it, particularly the ability to turn it off. Farhad Manjoo of Slate said Google’s reliance on social information is breaking what was a good search engine.
Of course, the move was also quite obviously a shot in the war between Google and Facebook (and Twitter, as we’ll see later): As Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher noted, Google wants to one-up Facebook’s growing social search and keep some of its own search traffic out of Facebook. Ben Parr said Facebook doesn’t need to worry, though Google has set up Google+ as the alternative if Facebook shoots itself in the foot.
But turning a supposedly neutral search engine into a competitive weapon didn’t go over well with a lot of observers. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal saw a conflict between Google’s original mission (organizing the world’s information) and its new social mission, and Danny Sullivan said Google is putting score-settling above relevance. Several others sounded similar alarms: Mathew Ingram of GigaOM said users are becoming collateral damage in the war between the social networks, and web veteran John Battelle argued that the war was bad for Google, Facebook, and all of us on the web. “The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture,” he wrote.
For others, the changes even called up the specter of antitrust violations. MG Siegler said he doesn’t mind Google’s search (near-) monopoly, but when it starts using that monopoly to push its other products, that’s when it turns into a legal problem. Danny Sullivan laid out some of the areas of dispute in a possible antitrust case and urged Google to more fully integrate its competitors into search.
Twitter was the first competitor to voice its displeasure publicly, releasing a statement arguing that deprioritizing Twitter damages real-time search. (TechCrunch has the statement and some valuable context.) Google responded by essentially saying, “Hey, you dumped us, buddy,” and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, told Search Engine Land they’d be willing to negotiate with Twitter and Facebook.
Finally, some brief journalistic implications: Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman said this means SEO’s value is waning for news organizations, being replaced by the growing importance of building strong social followings and making content easy to share, and Mathew Ingram echoed that idea. Daniel Victor of ProPublica had some wise thoughts on the meaning of stronger search for social networks, concluding that “the key is creating strategies that don’t depend on specific tools. Don’t plan for more followers and retweets; plan for creating incentives that will gather the most significant contributions possible from non-staffers.”
Innovation and its discontents: Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton inducing a bit of eye-rolling among digital media folks this week with a column arguing that the paper is “innovating too fast” by overwhelming readers and exhausting employees with a myriad of initiatives that lack a coherent overall strategy. J-prof Jay Rosen followed up with a revealing chat with Pexton that helps push the discussion outside of the realm of stereotypes: Pexton isn’t reflexively defending the status quo (though he remains largely print-centric), but thinks there are simply too many projects being undertaken without an overarching philosophy about how or why things should be done.
Pexton got plenty of push-back, not least from the Post’s own top digital editor, Raju Narisetti, who responded by essentially saying, in Rosen’s paraphrase, “This is the way it’s going to be and has to be, if the Post is to survive and thrive. It may well be exhausting but there is no alternative.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said he was just about to praise the Post for its bold experimentation, and the Guardian’s Martin Belam argued that Pexton is actually critiquing newness, rather than innovation.
J-prof Alfred Hermida argued — as Pexton himself seemed to in his chat with Rosen — that the issue is not about how fast or slow innovation is undertaken, but whether that innovation is done in a way that’s good or bad for journalism. Former Sacramento Bee editor Melanie Sill responded that many newspapers remain stuck in 20th-century formulas, blinding them to the fact that what they consider revolutionary change is only a minor, outmoded shift. She noted that all the former top editors she’s talked to have had the same regret: that they hadn’t pushed harder for change. And Free Press’ Josh Stearns pointed out that we should expect the path toward that change to be an easy one.
‘Truth vigilantes’ and objectivity: Pexton wasn’t the only ombudsman this week to be put on the defensive after a widely derided column: New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane drew plenty of criticism yesterday when he asked whether Times reporters should call out officials’ untruths in their stories — or, as he put it, act as a “truth vigilante.” Much of the initial reaction was a variation of, “How is this even a question?”
Brisbane told Romenesko that he wasn’t asking whether the Times should fact-check statements and print the truth, but whether reporters should “always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing.” He reiterated this in a follow-up, in which he also printed a response by Times executive editor Jill Abramson saying the Times does this all the time. Her point was echoed by former Times executive editor Bill Keller and PolitiFact editor Bill Adair, and while he called the initial question “stupid,” Reuters’ Jack Shafer pointed out that Brisbane isn’t opposed to skepticism and fact-checking.
The American Journalism Review’s Rem Rieder enthusiastically offered a case for a more rigorous fact-checking role for the press, as did the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles (though his enthusiasm was with tongue lodged in cheek). The Atlantic’s Adam Clark Estes used the episode as an opportunity to explain how deeply objectivity is ingrained in the mindset of the American press, pointing to the “view from nowhere” concept explicated by j-prof Jay Rosen. Rosen also wrote about the issue himself, arguing that objectivity’s view from nowhere has surpassed truthtelling as a priority among the press.
How useful is the political press?: The U.S. presidential primary season is usually also peak political-journalism-bashing season, but there were a couple of pieces that stood out this week for those interested in the future of that field. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank mocked the particular pointlessness of this campaign’s reporting, describing scenes of reporters vastly outnumbering locals at campaign events and remarking, “if editors knew how little journalism occurs on the campaign trail, they would never pay our expenses.”
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy defended the political press against the heat it’s been taking, arguing that it still produces strong investigative and long-form reporting on important issues, and that the speed of the new news cycle allows it to correct itself quickly. He blamed many of its perceived failings not on the journalists themselves, but on the public that’s consuming their work.
The Boston Phoenix reported on the decline of local newspapers’ campaign coverage and wondered if political blogs and websites could pick up the slack, while the Lab’s Justin Ellis looked at why news orgs love partnering up during campaign season, focusing specifically on the newly announced NBC News-Newsweek/Daily Beast arrangement.
A unique paywall model: The many American, British, and Canadian publishers implementing or considering paywalls might marvel at the paid-content success of Piano Media, but they can’t hope to emulate it: A year after gaining the cooperation of each of Slovakia’s major news publishers for a unified paywall there, the company is expanding the concept to Slovenia. As paidContent noted, Piano is hoping to sign up 1% of Slovenia’s Internet-using population, and the Lab’s Andrew Phelps reported that the company is planning to bring national paywalls to five European nations by the end of the year. As Piano’s CEO told Phelps, the primary barrier to subscription has not been economic, but philosophical, especially for commenting.
Elsewhere in paywalls, media consultant Frederic Filloux looked at what’s making The New York Times’ strategy work so far — unique content, a porous paywall that allows it to maintain high traffic numbers and visibility, and cooperation with Apple — and analyst Ken Doctor wondered whether all-access subscriptions across multiple devices and publications within a company could be a key to paid content this year.
Reading roundup: Tons of smaller stuff going on this week outside the glare of the Google-Facebook-Twitter wars. Here’s a quick rundown:
— One item I forgot to note from late last week: The AP and a group of 28 other news organizations have launched NewsRight, a system to help news orgs license their content to online aggregators. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds offered a detailed analysis, but GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram was skeptical.
— The online commenting service Disqus released some of its internal research showing that pseudonymous commenters tend to leave more and higher-quality comments than their real-name counterparts. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram used the data to argue that a lack of real names isn’t nearly as bad as its critics say.
— No real news in SOPA this week, but the text of Cory Doctorow’s lecture last month on SOPA and the dangers of copyright regulation has been posted. It’s long, but worth a read.
— Finally, three fantastic practical posts on how to practice digital journalism, from big-picture to small-grain: Howard Owens of the Batavian’s list of things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, Melanie Sill at Poynter on how to begin doing open journalism, and Steve Buttry of the Journal Register Co. on approaching statehouse coverage from a digital-first perspective.
Photo by SpeakerBoehner used under a Creative Commons license.
January 05 2012
The newsonomics of the News Dial-o-Matic
It’s an emerging issue of our time and place. They know too much about us, and we know too little about what they know. We do know that what they know about us is increasingly determining what they choose to give us to read. We wonder: What are we missing? And just who is making those decisions?
Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?
Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and mutliplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)
The “theys” here aren’t just the digital behemoths. Everyone in the media business — think Netflix and The New York Times as much as Pandora and People — wants to do this simple thing better: serve their customers more of what they are likely to consume so that they’ll consume more — perhaps buying digital subscriptions, services, or goods and providing very targetable eyes for advertisers. It’s not a bad goal in and of itself, but sometimes it feels like it is being done to us, rather than for us.
Our concern, and even paranoia, is growing. Take Eli Pariser’s well-viewed (500,000 times, just on YouTube) May 2011 TED presentation on “filter bubbles,” which preceded his June-published book of the same name. In the talk, Pariser talks about the fickle faces of Facebook and Google, making “invisible algorithmic editing of the web” an issue. He tells the story of how a good progressive like himself, a founder of MoveOn.org, likes to keep in touch with conservative voices and included a number in his early Facebook pages.
He then describes how Facebook, as it watched his actual reading patterns — he tended to read his progressive friends more than his conservative ones — began surfacing the conservative posts less and less over time, leaving his main choices (others, of course, are buried deeper down in his datastream, but not easily surfaced on that all-important first screen of his consciousness) those of like-minded people. Over time, he lost the diversity he’d sought.
Citing the 57 unseen filters Google uses to personalize its results for us, Pariser notes that it’s a personalization that doesn’t even seem personalized, or easily comparable: “You can’t see how different your search results are than your friends…We’re seeing a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.”
Pariser’s worries have been echoed by a motley crew we can call algorithmic and social skeptics. Slowly, Fear of Facebook has joined vague grumbles about Google and ruminations about Amazon’s all-knowing recommendations. Ping, we’ve got a new digital problem on our bands. Big Data — now well-advertised in every airport and every business magazine as the new business problem of the digital age to pay someone to solve — has gotten very personal. We are more than the sum of our data, we shout. And why does everyone else know more more about me that I do?
The That’s My Datamine Era has arrived.
So we see Personal.com, a capitalist solution to the uber-capitalist usage of our data. I’ve been waiting for a Personal.com (and the similar Singly.com) to come along. What’s more American than having the marketplace harness the havoc that the marketplace hath wrought? So Personal comes along with the bold-but-simple notion that we should individually decide who should see our own data, own preferences, and our own clickstreams — and be paid for the privilege of granting access (with Personal taking 10 percent of whatever bounty we take in from licensing our stuff).
It’s a big, and sensible, idea in and of itself. Skeptics believe the horse has left the barn, saying that so much data about us is already freely available out there to ad marketers as to make such personal databanks obsolete before they are born. They may be forgetting the power of politics. While the FCC, FTC, and others have flailed at the supposed excesses of digital behemoths, they’ve never figured out how to rein in those excesses. Granting consumers some rights over their own data — a Consumer Data Bill of Rights — would be a populist political issue, for either Republicans or Democrats or both. But, I digress.
I think there’s a way for us to reclaim our reading choices, and I’ll call it the News Dial-o-Matic, achievable with today’s technology.
While Personal.com gives us 121 “gem” lockers — from “Address” to “Women’s Shoes”, with data lockers for golf scores, beer lists, books, house sitters, and lock combinations along the way, we want to focus on news. News, after all, is the currency of democracy. What we read, what she reads, what they read, what I read all matter. We know we have more choice than any generation in history. In this age of plenty, how do we harness it for our own good?
Let’s make it easy, and let’s use technology to solve the problem technology has created. Let’s think of three simple news reading controls that could right the balance of choice, the social whirl and technology. We can even imagine them as three dials, nicely circular ones, that we can adjust with a flick of the finger or of the mouse, changing them at our whim, or time of day.
The three dials control the three converging factors that we’d like to to determine our news diet.
Dial #1: My Sources
This is the traditional title-by-title source list, deciding which titles from global news media to local blogs I want in my news flow.
Dial #2: My Networks
Social curation is one of the coolest ideas to come along. Why should I have to rely only on myself to find what I like (within or in addition to My Sources) when lots of people like me are seeking similar content? My Facebook friends, though, will give me a very different take than those I follow on Twitter. My Gmail contact list would provide another view entirely. In fact, as Google Circles has philosophized, “You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle.” The My Networks dial lets me tune my reading of different topics by different social groups. In addition, today’s announced NewsRight — the AP News Registry spin-off intended to market actionable intelligence about news reading in the U.S. — could even play a role here.
Dial #3: The Borg
The all-knowing, ever-smarter algorithm isn’t going away — and we don’t want it to. We just want to control it — dial it down sometimes. I like thinking of it in sci-fi terms, and The Borg from “Star Trek” well illustrates its potential maniacal drive. (I love the Wikipedia Borg definition: “The Borg manifest as cybernetically-enhanced humanoid drones of multiple species, organized as an interconnected collective, the decisions of which are made by a hive mind, linked by subspace radio frequencies. The Borg inhabit a vast region of space in the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy, possessing millions of vessels and having conquered thousands of systems. They operate solely toward the fulfilling of one purpose: to “add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to [their] own” in pursuit of their view of perfection“.) The Borg knows more about our habits than we’d like and we can use it well, but let’s have us be the ones doing the dialing up and down.
Three simple round dials. They could harness the power of our minds, our relationships, and our technologies. They could utilize the smarts of human gatekeepers and of algorithmic ones. And they would return power to where it belongs, to us.
Where are the dials? Who powers them? Facebook, the new home page of our time, would love to, but so would Google, Amazon, and Apple, among a legion of others. Personal.com would love to be that center, as it would any major news site (The New York Times, Zite-powered CNN, Yahoo News). We’ll leave that question to the marketplace.
Lastly, what are the newsonomics of the News Dial-o-Matic? As we perfect what we want to read, the data capturing it becomes even more valuable to anyone wanting to sell us stuff. Whether that gets monetized by us directly (through the emerging Personals of the world), or a mix of publishers, aggregators, or ad networks would be a next battleground. And then: What about the fourth wheel, as we dial up and down what we’re in the marketplace to buy right now? Wouldn’t that be worth a tidy sum?
January 04 2012
2011: the UK hyper-local year in review
In this guest post, Damian Radcliffe highlights some topline developments in the hyper-local space during 2011. He also asks for your suggestions of great hyper-local content from 2011. His more detailed slides looking at the previous year are cross-posted at the bottom of this article.
2011 was a busy year across the hyper-local sphere, with a flurry of activity online as well as more traditional platforms such as TV, Radio and newspapers.
The Government’s plans for Local TV have been considerably developed, following the Shott Review just over a year ago. We now have a clearer indication of the areas which will be first on the list for these new services and how Ofcom might award these licences. What we don’t know is who will apply for these licences, or what their business models will be. But, this should become clear in the second half of the year.
Whilst the Leveson Inquiry hasn’t directly been looking at local media, it has been a part of the debate. Claire Enders outlined some of the challenges facing the regional and local press in a presentation showing declining revenue, jobs and advertising over the past five years. Her research suggests that the impact of “the move to digital” has been greater at a local level than at the nationals.
Across the board, funding remains a challenge for many. But new models are emerging, with Daily Deals starting to form part of the revenue mix alongside money from foundations and franchising.
And on the content front, we saw Jeremy Hunt cite a number of hyper-local examples at the Oxford Media Convention, as well as record coverage for regional press and many hyper-local outlets as a result of the summer riots.
I’ve included more on all of these stories in my personal retrospective for the past year.
One area where I’d really welcome feedback is examples of hyper-local content you produced – or read – in 2011. I’m conscious that a lot of great material may not necessarily reach a wider audience, so do post your suggestions below and hopefully we can begin to redress that.
December 21 2011
Dan Kennedy: 2012 will bring “the great retrenchment” among newspaper publishers
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Boston-based media commenter Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, a regular panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press,” and the author of the Media Nation blog.
Following years of retreat in the face of shrinking readership, mounting financial losses, and a rising chorus of digital visionaries telling them they’re doing it all wrong, 2012 will be a year of retrenchment for newspaper publishers.
Still standing some three years after the near-implosion of the newspaper industry in 2008 and 2009, executives will point to their continued existence as proof that their situation was never as bad as it seemed, and that a few tweaks here and there will restore them to pink-cheeked, if downsized, health.
Their rallying cry will be Dean Starkman’s essay in the November/December 2011 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, “Confidence Game.” In the course of nearly 8,000 words, Starkman dismisses those he calls the “news gurus” (principally Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis), arguing they are more interested in promoting their own the-sky-is-falling agenda than in the fate of public-interest journalism. Starkman calls for the preservation of traditional journalistic institutions, which brought a memorable retort from Shirky:
Saying newspapers will provide a stable home for reporters, just as soon as we figure out how to make newspapers stable, is like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread.
Starkman’s essay is actually a nuanced, deeply intelligent meditation on the future of journalism, but it’s the caricature — newspapers good, news gurus bad — that traditionalists will embrace. That is especially true with respect to the notion that online readers have been getting a free ride, and that it’s time to insist that they start paying.
At the Boston Globe, for instance, several staff members have taken to tweeting “This is why we pay for journalism” whenever their paper has published something particularly noteworthy — a reference to the Globe’s newly instituted paywall. Never mind that we have always paid for journalism — until recently, primarily through advertising. Never mind that NPR, some commercial broadcast outlets and a rising tide of non-profit news organizations are producing excellent journalism every day that is paid for by someone other than the end user. The unspoken message is, We hard-working journalists have been giving away our work for 15 years, and we’re finally putting a stop to it.
In fact, there are reasons to hope the traditional newspaper industry might have a bit more life left in it than we thought a few years ago. The Globe and The New York Times, both owned by The New York Times Company, are pioneering the use of flexible paywalls that keep much of their content open to social networks and blogs while imposing a fee on regular readers. The Times, at least, has had some success; the Globe has not yet released any numbers. Publishers everywhere are hoping to emulate them.
The forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore.
Since advertising comprises an ever-shrinking share of revenues, publishers have to persuade readers to pay in the form of higher prices for print and something — anything — for online access. The alternative is to continue sliding toward oblivion. And despite some promising experiments here and there, it’s still not at all clear what would replace newspapers, especially at the local level. For every community that has a high-quality non-profit news site like Voice of San Diego (currently experiencing its own problems) and the New Haven Independent, or a for-profit like The Batavian or Baristanet, there are hundreds without anything but their shrinking, debt-ridden, chain-owned local newspaper.
The great newspaper retrenchment may prove to be more than a dead-cat bounce. As the economy slowly improves, the newspaper business may well enjoy a semi-revival. But before long, the forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore. Some progressive newspaper executives, like John Paton of Digital First Media, are trying to figure out how to combine the best of the new and the old before it’s too late. For the most part, though, you can be reasonably sure that newspaper companies will continue to cut costs, maximize profits (or minimize losses), and do their best ostrich imitations until they find themselves under siege once again.
After all, they’re standing up for traditional values — and what could be more traditional than failing to plan for the future?
Wall image via Mark Heard used under a Creative Commons license.
December 19 2011
Why not a reverse meter?
As I ponder the future of The New York Times, it occurred to me that its pay meter could be exactly reversed. I’ll also tell you why this wouldn’t work in a minute. But in any case, this is a way to illustate how how media are valuing our readers/users/customers opposite how we should, rewarding the freeriders and taxing — and perhaps turning away — the valuable users.
So try this on for size: Imagine that you pay to get access to The Times. Everyone does. You pay for one article. Or you pay $20 as a deposit so you’re not bothered every time you come. But whenever you add value to The Times, you earn a credit that delays the next bill.
* You see ads, you get credit.
* You click: more credit.
* You come back often and read many pages: credit.
* You promote The Times on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or your blog: credit. The more folks share what you’ve shared, the more credit you get.
* You buy merchandise via Times e-commerce: credit.
* You buy tickets to a Times event: credit.
* You hand over data that makes you more valuable to The Times and its advertisers (e.g., revealing where you’re going on your next trip): credit.
* You add pithy comment to articles that other readers appreciate: credit.
* You take on tasks in crowdsourced journalistic endeavors: credit.
* You answer a reporter’s question on Twitter and the reporter uses your information: credit.
* You correct an error in a story: credit.
* You give a news tip or an idea for an article The Times publishes: credit.
Maybe you never pay for The Times again because The Times has gained more value out of its relationship with you. If, on the other hand, you hardly do any of those things, then you have to pay for using The Times.
I’ve been thinking about this, too, in light of a few other trends I’ve seen with newspapers online. First, some that are trying meters are finding that very, very few readers ever hit the wall (which papers are setting at anywhere from 1 to 20 pages). That so few hit the wall is frightening. It means that most readers don’t use these sites much. That’s nothing to brag about. Engagement is criminally low. Second, I’ve seen many sites that get a surprising proportion of their traffic from out of their markets — traffic that is valueless (or even costly, in terms of bandwidth) to sites that sell only local ads. This comes from following a goal of pageviews, pageviews, pageviews — brought in with search-engine optimization — rather than valued relationships.
After hearing a few such stories, I suggested that a site with a meter might want to reward local readers by giving them more free content and charge out-of-market readers by charging them sooner.
You see, that values the local reader over the remote reader. My idea for the reverse meter values the engaged reader over the occasional reader — and even rewards greater engagement. And therein lies, I think, the key strategic skill for news businesses online: understanding that all readers are not equal; knowing who your more valuable readers are; getting more of them; and making them more valuable.
Now I’ll tell you why my reverse meter won’t work: When I spoke with all our journalism students at CUNY about their business ideas on Friday, I asked how many had hit the Times pay wall — many — and how many had paid — few. Abundance remains the enemy of payment. There’s always someplace else to get the news. The Times can make its present meter work because (a) it’s that good [the Steve Jobs exception that proves the rule], (b) it’s still sponsoring — that is, giving a free ride — to its most valuable readers, though that is supposed to end soon, and (c) its engagement is still too low and thus many readers don’t even confront the wall (that needs to change).
So never mind the idea of the reverse meter, but retain the lesson of it: Value should be encouraged, not taxed. Readers bring value to sites if the sites are smart enough to have the mechanisms to recognize, exploit, and reward that value, which comes in many forms: responding to (highly targeted and relevant) ads; buying merchandise; contributing information, content, and ideas; promoting the site…..
The key strategic opportunity for news sites is relationships — deeper, more valuable relationships with more (but not too many) people. Engagement.
December 07 2011
The rise of local media sales partnerships and 19 other recent hyper-local developments you may have missed
In this guest post Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe cross-publishes his latest presentation on developments in hyperlocal publishing for September-October, and highlights how partnerships are increasingly important for hyper-local, regional and national media in terms of “making it pay”.
When producing my latest bi-monthly update on hyper-local media, I was struck by the fact that media sales partnerships suddenly seem to be all the rage.
In a challenging economic climate, a number of media providers – both big and small – have recently come together to announce initiatives aimed at maximising economies of scale and potentially reducing overheads.
At a hyperlocal level, the launch on 1st November of the Chicago Independent Advertising Network (CIAN), saw 15 Chicago community news sites coming together to offer a single point of contact for advertisers. These sites “collectively serve more than 1 million page views each month.”
This initiative follows in the footsteps of other small scale advertising alliances including the Seattle Indie Ad Network and Boston Blogs.
These moves – bringing together a range of small scale location based websites – can help address concerns that hyper-local sites are not big enough (on their own) to unlock funding from large advertisers.
CIAN also aims to address a further hyper-local concern: that of sales skills. Rather than having a hyperlocal practitioner add media sales to an ever expanding list of duties, funding from the Chicago Community Trust and the Knight Community Information Challenge allows for a full-time salesperson.
Big Media is also getting in on this act.
In early November Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL agreed to sell each other’s unsold display ads. The move is a response to Google and Facebook’s increasing clout in this space.
Reuters reported that both Facebook and Google are expected to increase their share of online display advertising in the United States in 2011 by 9.3% and 16.3%.
In contrast, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are forecast to lose share, with Facebook expected to surpass Yahoo for the first time.
Similarly in the UK, DMGT’s Northcliffe Media, home to 113 regional newspapers, recently announced it was forging a joint partnership with Trinity Mirror’s regional sales house, AMRA.
This will create a commercial proposition encompassing over 260 titles, including nine of the UK’s 10 biggest regional paid-for titles. Like The Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL arrangement, this new partnership comes into effect in 2012.
These examples all offer opportunities for economies of scale for media outlets and potentially larger potential reach and impact for advertisers. Given these benefits, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see more of these types of partnership in the coming months and years.
Damian Radcliffe is writing in a personal capacity.
Other topics in his current hyperlocal slides include Sky’s local pilot in NE England and research into the links between tablet useand local news consumption. As ever, feedback and suggestions for future editions are welcome.
December 06 2011
Broadcasters press Supreme Court to allow TV, radio and newspaper acquisitions
The Wrap :: Broadcasters are urging the Supreme Court to loosen restrictions that prevent companies from owning newspapers, radio stations and television stations in the same market. The NAB argues that rather than resulting in dangerous monopolies, allowing broadcasters to own multiple news organs helps them improve their financial health. That in turn gives them the flexibility to invest in higher quality reporting.
Continue to read Brent Lang, www.thewrap.com
November 27 2011
A Dallas Morning News not every morning? Will dailies stay daily?
Caitlin Johnston is a graduate student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Will dailies still exist in 3 years from now? Johnston summarized the discussion for us.
American Journalism Review :: Mark Medici, then-vice president of audience for the Dallas Morning News, triggered a brief media frenzy in October when he said at a conference that within three years the Morning News wouldn't be publishing seven days a week. Though the paper quickly backed away from his remark, with Publisher Jim Moroney asserting that the Belo-owned paper has no intention of cutting back, the flap raised the question of whether daily newspapers will soon cease to be daily.
Continue to read Caitlin Johnston, www.ajr.org
November 26 2011
UK - Since the closure of News of the World, Sunday newspaper readers vanish
Guardian :: The latest newspaper readership figures suggest that a huge number of people have stopped reading a Sunday newspaper altogether since the closure of the News of the World. The statistics released today by the National Readership Survey (NRS) are the first to cover the period following the NoW's closure on 10 July.
Details - continue to read Roy Greenslade, www.guardian.co.uk
October 09 2011
Tools (US) - NewsLibrary provides ($) access to more than 173m news articles
NewsLibrary (US) is a huge archive of news articles. The service provides paid access to more than 173 million articles (of course growing), to thousands of newspapers, publications and other news sources, and more than 32 years of newspaper coverage.
According to their website (as of today) you can conduct searches for free. For retrieval and more membership is required. Membership features: $2.95 per article, $19.95 a month (25 articles), and $199.95 a year (500 articles).
Visit the site NewsLibrary.com
September 15 2011
20 recent hyperlocal developments (June-August 2011)
Ofcom’s Damian Radcliffe produces a regular round-up of developments in hyperlocal publishing. In this guest post he cross-publishes his latest presentation for this summer, as well as the background to the reports.
Ofcom’s 2009 report on Local and Regional Media in the UK identified the increasing role that online hyperlocal media is playing in the local and regional media ecology.
New research in the report identified that
“One in five consumers claimed to use community websites at least monthly, and a third of these said they had increased their use of such websites over the past two years.”
That was two years ago, and since then, this nascent sector has continued to evolve, with the web continuing to offer a space and platform for community expression, engagement and empowerment.
The diversity of these offerings is manifest in the Hyperlocal Voices series found on this website, as well as Talk About Local’s Ten Questions feature, both of which speak to hyperlocal practitioners about their work.
For a wider view of developments in this sector, you may want to look at the bi-monthly series of slides I publish on SlideShare every two months.
Each set of slides typically outlines 20 recent hyperlocal developments; usually 10 from the UK and 10 from the US.
Topics in the current edition include Local TV, hyperlocal coverage of the recent England riots, the rise of location based deals and marketing, as well as the FCC’s report on The Information Needs of Communities.
Feedback and suggestions for future editions – including omissions from current slides – are actively welcomed.
September 13 2011
"We're doing all fine!" - 8,000 weekly papers in small towns across America
Los Angeles Times :: We've been hearing a lot of depressing news in recent years about the dire financial prospects for big daily newspapers, including the one you're now holding. Or watching. Or, in the argot of the digital age, "experiencing."
Judy Muller, LA Times: "But at the risk of sounding like I'm whistling past the graveyard, I'd like to point out that there are thousands of newspapers that are not just surviving but thriving. Some 8,000 weekly papers still hit the front porches and mailboxes in small towns across America every week and, for some reason, they've been left out of the conversation. So a couple of years ago, I decided to head back to my roots, both geographic and professional ..., to see how those community papers were faring. And what I found was both surprising and inspiring."
Continue to read Judy Muller, www.latimes.com
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