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- David Sarno on blogging and “performance journalism”
- RightsLink, Reprints, and the New York Times
- Rethinking printer friendly format
- Should you offer your print newspaper subscription for free?
- Things that were Not Invented Here are OK. Really.
- Small town classifieds: San Angelo
- Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers
- Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers
- 2008 to be the worst year for newspaper advertising? Surprise!
- Deck chairs
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- Ben A says: In all fairness, I also don’t know enough about... ( more )
- Ben A says: Maybe I’m just daft, but why in the world would... ( more )
- Matt Hanson says: Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added... ( more )
- Curt M. says: Will people pay for content on the internet? Maybe,... ( more )
- Curt M. says: This is a very good post. Lots to ponder here.... ( more )
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David Sarno on blogging and “performance journalism”
A few months ago, Emily Gould wrote a well-discussed cover story for the New York Times Magazine that poked and prodded at some of the issues that journalists are beginning to face as they dip their toes into the blogosphere.
How much do you post about yourself? Can you adopt a colloquial approach and maintain journalistic standards? What are the consequences of doing so? If you succeed, will it be worth it?
David Sarno is a writer for the Los Angeles Times who covers entertainment and internet culture on their Web Scout blog, and one of only a few level-headed voices that weighed in on the firestorm that sprouted up behind Gould’s article.
I sent him an e-mail and he was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the tensions I see between the personal nature of blogging and the journalistic standards of the institutions now trying to incorporate blogs. Hit the jump for the QnA.
RightsLink, Reprints, and the New York Times
I noticed a new button next to articles on the New York Times this week. It says “reprints.”
Never one to be gun shy with a mouse-click, I decided to check it out. Clicking this link brings up a window from RightsLink, a copyright licensing management company, that offers various options for “licesning” content from the New York Times for varying amounts of money.
I think this is the wrong solution to a very real problem.
The problem is figuring out how to “protect” (which really means, “how do I make sure I am the only who who makes money from”) copyrighted content when it is online.
Introducing artificial barriers is not the way to do it, because you’re betting against the market.
Rethinking printer friendly format
Most news sites now carry a little “control panel” along with each of their articles that lets viewers e-mail, tag, or otherwise manipulate the page. One of the more common buttons is the “print” button—you know, the one that takes all the ads off the page?
Ahhh.
Why does “printer friendly format” mean a plain page with, at most, a “printer format sponsored by” image at the top of the page?
Newspapers have spent years specializing in making things look nice on paper. Why not offer articles for print in a format that looks nice on a printed page AND provides space for advertisements? It’s not like it can’t be done - look at any magazine that approximates an 8×10 printed page.
If you want to be nice, display only grayscale ads, so that you won’t waste people’s color ink.
But I see no reason why “printer-friendly” need to mean “revenue-free.” It just needs to mean: “optimized for reading on paper.”
Should you offer your print newspaper subscription for free?
Newspapers today generally offer two products: they offer an online product and they offer a print product. These products are different in some very basic but inconspicuous ways, which is why a lot of papers are still trying to shoehorn their print product into their digital offering; they haven’t figured out how important those little changes are.
The print product is becoming less and less viable. The online product is growing at ridiculous rates, even during the current economic downturn.
Newspapers need to start accepting the fact that their online product is their primary service. There’s a reason that 50% of your web traffic comes from Google: search is a web dashboard, your home page is a print dashboard.
So what do you do? You start treating your print product as a marketing tool for your online product.
Things that were Not Invented Here are OK. Really.
I just saw Dan Gillmor’s post from a few days ago about McClatchy doing real journalism on Guantanamo and getting ignored:
It’s falling through the cracks, because of the NIH syndrome in journalism — institutional unwillingness to talk about other journalists’ great work and what they’ve reported.
I’m taking it as a convenient excuse to gripe about newspaper linking habits - specifically, the fact that many newspaper try to avoid linking to other papers because it sends the user away from their site.
This is a habit that papers will have to break, especially if they want to pursue aggregation as a strategy.
The fact is that finding good content elsewhere on the web is a great way to get people to come back to your site. In an environment where putting content up is easy, the value comes in finding the stuff that’s worth reading.
Add to that the new habits of tabbed browsing, and often people aren’t even leaving your site when they click links (they just open them in a new tab).
It was proven in the late nineties that trying to build a complete content destination online is going to be much harder and much less worthwhile than building a portal that helps people find what they need. Best example I can give you? Yahoo!.
Small town classifieds: San Angelo
Today I looked through most of the San Angelo Standard-Times. It’s the big newspaper in town here.
One thing that caught my eye is that they have a 14-page classifieds section. That’s as big or bigger than most of their other sections.
It makes sense that a small town in Texas would be behind Seattle in terms of adopting the internet—and therefore craigslist—as an alternative to the classic newspaper. It is happening, however. I spoke to a couple people in town here who have recently cut their subscriptions because they wind up just reading news online (sound familiar?)
Out of curiosity, I looked at their online classifieds setup, because sooner or later they’re going to start seeing their paper-based classified ad revenue dry up, unless they take steps to move their classifieds customers (who are clearly active) online now.
The good news is that they’ve got classifieds listed prominently on their home page. They’ve got a step-by-step guide system to posting an ad. They allow interactive elements like slide shows.
The bad news is that they’re charging money. And if they don’t move to a freemium system soon, they run the risk of losing that audience.
The cost of printing a newspaper no longer provides the relative monopoly (and therefore relative captivity) of a community audience. If there are better and cheaper tools online, people will find them.
Wall Street Journal reports: the AP is hurting newspapers
A few weeks ago I explained how the AP is now competing with newspapers.
Apparently, other people agree. The Wall Street Journal has a story today about the widening rift between the AP and various newspapers, especially those in Ohio. Here’s the story that Ben Marrison, editor of the Columbus Dispatch had for the WSJ:
In the past, Mr. Marrison says, he could usually count on the AP to cover such a trial if he wanted to commit more reporters to a bigger story. When he was told the AP wouldn’t have a reporter there, he sent one of his own to Akron. Shortly after the story was posted on the Dispatch’s Web site, an AP staffer rewrote it for a broader audience and put the new version on the state wire. “So it was important enough for them to move, but not important enough for them to cover,” Mr. Marrison said. “What has happened is we’ve become the wire service for the wire service.”
There’s a lot I don’t know about the AP. But from the outside looking in, their role in the news space is definitely changing.
The AP used to be a great way to efficiently cover important stories for multiple papers at the same time. This is because newspapers have limited staff, and some stories really only need to be written once, even if people in Lexington, Seattle, San Angelo, and Orlando all need to know about the subject.
Why Cost Per Click ads are unfair to publishers
In February of 1998 Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, launched a new search site called GoTo.com.
The basic idea behind GoTo.com was fairly simple: Gross figured that if he could buy generic web traffic (around 5 cents per visitor) and then resell that traffic as targeted traffic (which is inherently worth more), he could play the traffic market and make a killing.
He further reasoned that the best way to turn random web traffic into structured, goal-seeking web traffic was search.
Removing the risk
Gross knew that launching a new search engine where the results pages where made up of paid listings would only work if he had paying customers. So Gross had a dilemma: he had to convince people that search keywords were worth paying for.
In his book The Search, John Battelle explains how Gross approached the issue:
Gross solved his problem by adopting the time-honored approach of dumping—or perhaps drug dealing is a better comparison: the first one’s free (or nearly so). Gross built not one but two entirely audacious ideas into GoTo’s initial business proposition for advertisers: first was the concept of a performance-based model—one in which advertisers paid for a visitor only when a visitor clicked through an ad and onto the advertisers’ sites. Instead of demanding upfront money from advertisers, the way AOL or Yahoo did, GoTo.com’s model guaranteed that advertisers had to pay only when their ads were clicked upon. Of course, this is now the standard model for the multibillion-dollar paid search market.
2008 to be the worst year for newspaper advertising? Surprise!
The New York Times reported yesterday on the continuing downward trend in newspaper advertising:
Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.
To me, and I think to most people, this is anything but surprising.
The Times article blames the slow economy for the lower-than-usual growth in online ad sales:
Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20 percent to 30 percent annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15 percent. The Internet still accounts for less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue.
This is probably true, but I think newspapers also need to work on killing the CPC model of online advertising, since it is completely unfair to publishers.
Deck chairs
There are a lot of people talking about the Orlando Sentinel redesign.
Some people think it will work and others think that no matter what dress you put the duck in, it’s still a duck.
While I don’t think that print publications will ever go completely out of style, I think that trying to grow the print readership is not the best strategy for success. And redesigning the pages is relatively pointless if it doesn’t come with substantial changes to the content, or at least the places where content is presented.
I think that money would be much better spent doing usability testing and trying new things on their website. Let’s invest in the future not in the past.*
Someone recently told me that this redesign is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That may well be the case.
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* I think there might be a future for free print editions. If papers can swing it without subscription revenue, I think you’d see a persistent jump in the subscription base.
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