News Wars or Wall Street Wars?

I watched the Frontline piece called Newswars, the other night.

While everyone agrees that a major reshaping needs to take place in the newspaper business, my intial reaction wasn’t as one-sided as Jeff Jarvis, perhaps because I am a Tribune employee, and knew some of these people firsthand.

Jeff is right; major cuts can be made on the print side of most newspapers without lowering the output of “real news.”

However, it’s also true that the economics of Wall Street might not be the best driving force when it comes to making newsroom decisions.

If that were the case, the whole country could just send one reporter to Iraq and we could all share her view.

Of course, views are plentiful in this day and age, but for a company the size of Tribune, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to have more than one newspaper covering a national war.

That said, I’m in total agreement that the organization as a whole is overlooking what real value it can provide for it’s readers and site users.

The real value does indeed rest in it’s local communities and journalism. I sometimes wonder if that’s always going to be enough.

In the Frontline story, I think it was the WAPO exec that said print revenue and circulation was declining, but he wasn’t sure how quickly Online would catch up.

It will never catch up.

There are too many competitors online for that to ever happen.

What newspaper sites should be asking

Washington Post reports the Tribune sale of two local newspapers, where I am the Senior Web Producer.

In fact, I was the first person within the company to ever work on these sites, back in the nineties, when I volunteered to get them listed in the Open Directory, Yahoo, and Search Engines.

Back then I was (thanks to Philip Greenspun) trumpeting around the company for an idea called “community.”
You know, what they now call UGC (User Generated Content).

Personally, I feel we should go back to calling User Generated Content “community” again. It’s more accurate, and less derogatory.

But most newspaper folks would not understand what I mean by saying that UGC is a derogatory term. Because it defines the user as lesser than the site “professional.” But most people in this business would say, “yeah, they aren’t on the same level.” Most smart bloggers realize that’s just not the case.

However, when I say this, I don’t mean to devalue the work done by many “professional” journalists. Some of it is great.

Unfortunately, media is a commodity. Even good media is a commodity.

Do these companies still have something of value? Absolutely, but we live in a “hit and run” web society. I read this story in the Washington today. Tommorrow, It’s BuzzMachine that get’s my attention. Next it’s my family’s group blog, pointing out late spring lift ticket deals. After that, it’s TechCrunch, Library Clips, and CNN. You get the idea.

Back to “community” on a news site. They all thought I was nuts. Now it’s one of Tribune’s main initiatives.

A little late to the party, and I’m still not sure they fully understand it. They think community is getting people to contribute to their sites. They should be asking, “what can we contribute to the community?”

In the nineties, message boards and other community features did, in fact reside on sites. Today these features are distributed across a million sites. (I know about myspace. If they don’t open to the rest of the distributed social network, they will go the way of the old AOL. It may take ten years, but they will)

If they asked me now, where I would focus. I think I’d say “syndication” (thanks to Dave Winer). Be cog in the distributed web of information flow.

However, these news companies cling to a page view model, and a home-page-centric view of themselves, even if they are aware of all the story-level traffic they are getting.

Ajax, RSS, widgets, downloads, OPML and the rest of the trends all indicate to me that the future winners are the people and businesses that provide value in the relationships and conversations happening out there, not the ones who try to corral their “users” into a one size fits all product, that so many news sites are.

Ask not what the users can do for us, but what can we do for the users.

Newspapers need to open up the conversation

Jarvis from Davos: “We are going to try to open up the conversation.”
All I can say is that if a deal happens soon with Tribune company, that our newspaper and a few others will open the conversation completely. This will be a major positive shift in the way newspapers conduct themselves, and I think plenty will follow our lead.

The Press Release is dead, and the death of newspapers killed it

Great quote form Stowe Boyd on the dying press release:

The argument that the press release is the right mechanism to transmit important information to the world because it works so well for newspapers, is something like saying that oats are what we should put into the gas tanks of cars because it works so well for horses.

Leave out the bad stuff Daylife, not the good

It’s funny how quotes can deceive.

Dave Winer quoted Mike Arrington about Daylife and I thought the quote was a positive one.

I though it meant that Daylife left out all the garbage you find at typical newspaper sites.

Turns out Mike meant leaving out RSS feeds. That’s not good.

RSS (and OPML) is more important to me than HTML. I think that trend will grow. Will that become a truth for the mainstream soon? I don’t know, but IE7 will certainly push it in that direction. No?

Just for that, the Old Media Doomsday Clock may be making a shift back a minute or two in favor of Old Media. Wow!

Stay tuned.

Newspapers have a channel conflict

I love Seth Godin. Well, I love to read his blog and books, anyway.

I learn something every time I read a paragraph.

In his latest post, he explains why ignorance of accepted standards or user experience will result in death of a relationship.

Here, , I equate his frustration with the forced registration on Newspaper sites. “Nope,” is the answer that a large percentage of users will give.

Seth is speaking about channel conflict. The problem with newspapers is they still have a channel conflict. It’s between their own two channels, print and web.

I have an analogy.

Could you sell a car that required you to get out and crank the engine, once the battery had been introduced for equal or lesser price.

Of course not.

But, since newspapers (in print) are a very special thing since they are the only people in town that have a press, they figure they have some special status on the web.

They try to justify it by saying that the journalism is the value of their business, but nothing can shake the fact that advertising fuels journalism, and on the web advertising doesn’t care about journalism, only relationships. It was always the distribution channel that held the value.

And pepsi and mentos videos can fuel that fire as well.

Sorry, the world is changed.

As always, I’m not saying that good journalism has no value, but the user is now in control. Period.

Please them and they will reward you. Try to control them and they will ignore you.

Cuban is no Newspaper man

Scott Anderson pointed me to Mark Cuban’s (you know I don’t subscribe to that crap ) talk of local newspaper sales reps selling adsense and SEO wisdom. Cuban obviously doesn’t work at a newspaper.

Pure hogwash.

Here is what I commented on Scott Anderson’s (Onsquared.com) blog:

No way. Aint gonna happen.
IF (capital IF) the newspaper sales staff could be adequately trained to understand SEO and adsense style marketing, the amount of time it would take to explain, set up, and sell to a local shop for likely a fraction of what a print ad revenue would be. . .
It’s mixing oil and water.
News corporations should have been , and should still be, creating their own content, ad, and social networks (or buying them) and competing on the same playing field, not some hybrid one.

While it seems logical to want to leverage existing relationships and migrate them, unfortunately the web has changed how we need to relate with each other, especially businesses and their clients and customers.

I just don’t see web marketing in the future blending well with a sales rep sauntering into a local shop and saying ‘How do you do?’

In fact, the only reason why it has any level of success currently is because the perceived value of print ads is fogging the local advertisers vision of value on the web.

In the future, perceived value will be meaningless and actual value will be the only thing that matters.

Pay-per-click will evolve to pay-per-action. While pure branding has it’s place for some time to come, who can deny that Adsense singlehandedly changed the name of the game.

I told a Sales Manager once that pay-per-click was the future, and they laughed at me.

They wouldn’t laugh now, but they might if I told them pay-per-action was.

Newspapers: The empty quarter needs to be removed

Look at this post by Alex Barnett and check out the graph.

I can’t help but think that a large part of the people calling the shots in the Newspaper Industry fall into the “empty quarter” of non-adopters of 2.0 tools. This includes many veteran journalists as well as business folks.

Look at all the examples of Jarvis gives for the changing landscape of news. There is a pretty big gap between these news services and the average newspaper staff.

So the bet on whether they can transform their business before it’s irrelevant really comes down to this. Will the non-adopting group of managers be retired or replaced before it’s too late. Unless they can change themselves, but I doubt it.

That may sound harsh, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just an opinion based upon years of observation.

Two-edged sword of independent newspaper ownership

Some interesting news from my company.
A group of employees and investors have asked to purchase Southern Connecticut Newspapers Inc. from Tribune.
We publish The Advocate and Greenwich Time newspapers.
While I think local and private ownership could be a good thing under the right circumstances, I also know that the current editorial department does not have the level of understanding to effectively direct an online strategy.
The union employees mentioned in the article are the editorial department.
If my role here continued after such a transition, I would push heavily for an online strategy that embraced RSS at it’s core. Full text feeds would be the norm, not the exception.
I would promise that the link in the story above would never change or be put behind a walled archive.
I would embrace other communites like Flickr and del.icio.us and would open our own platform through the use of APIs.
I would immediately start the transition from a page-view model to one of relationships and gestures.
I would embrace and help to grow the local blogger community, as equals, not lessers.
The sites would be more of a hub of local information flowing two ways, not the one way channel we currently provide.
I don’t always see eye to eye with our current owners and strategists at Tribune, but they may be better equipped to handle the needs of a successful local news site.
Their own challenge is being able to move and adapt quickly enough, something I know they are trying to address.
In short, the freedom to move quickly that independence affords, is only valuable if you are able to act intelligently on that freedom.

UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control

I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.

My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.

Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .

He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.

As Stowe says, we are now all participants.

He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.

Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.

Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.

The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)

By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.

But I’m not here to argue semantics.

I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.

Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.

UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.