VIDEO: “Fast Draw” on CBS This Morning explains how today’s newspaper situation has a history that goes back to the 18th century. Humorous – but insightful. Another example of how unconventional storytelling can help understanding.
Watch CBS Videos Online
One of the strangest traditions in print has been newspapers’ refusal to run ads on their front pages. I’ve never understood this. But think of all the missed revenue along the way. Above the fold, people see the paper in the newspaper boxes. Above the fold, they see the ads on newsstands. Above the fold is the first place they look when they get their papers. The most-viewed real estate in print was forbidden ground for ads. Why?
Something about ethics.
OK. Fine. So we made up that rule. No ads on the front page. So what happens when you go to the front page of a newspaper website? Giant freakin’ ads. Hell – they’ll “wrap” the site in your ad all the way around if you want. No ethical problem. Because it’s electronic instead of paper?
From a 2007 article in the Chicago Tribune:
Los Angeles Times Editor James O’Shea was also opposed to the possibilityof Page 1 ads.“Front-page ads diminish the newspaper, cheapen the front page and reducethe space devoted to news,” O’Shea was quoted in the L.A. Times saying. “This would be a huge mistake that will penalize the reader.”
But we’re cool with penalizing the reader online?
This year, the New York Times bowed to pressure (financial, that is) and started running ads on its front page. However, it will not sell above the fold ads: “In a statement, the paper said such ads would be placed “below the fold” — that is, on the lower half of the page.” The message to advertisers? We’ll let you onto the front page – just nowhere where people can see you in public.”
There are a number of papers that are now allowing advertisers this bottom-of-the-page option. Did the ethics change? Or did pragmatism finally win? If my paper were going under, I’d sell ads above the fold, above the banner and wherever else an advertiser wanted to be.
Just like they do online.
Facebook recently changed the way that its pages are laid out. Sure enough the petitions and votes started immediately. Right now on Facebook, there are 1.2 million votes against the new layout. Votes in favor of it? 80,000.
This is a convincing argument against the new layout, isn’t it?
I don’t think so.
There are a few things Facebook users are quite well known for. One is making endless lists about themselves. The other is signing lots and lots of petitions. Any time there is a change to Facebook, users engage in the latter.
Still, this landslide vote should be a sign to the company that they need to listen to their audience, right? Again, not necessarily. The short history of Facebook is one of reinvention and change. And the one constant in all of this is complaints. Whenever Facebook changes, its existing audience base complains. My experience in 10 years of running websites was exactly the same; even an incremental change on our website was sure to elicit angry emails. So, why not change it immediately?
The most compelling reason is that Facebook nearly always gets it right. Facebook is a “Web platform,” meaning it is well beyond a website or even closed social network. Facebook is the platform on which programs and communities are self-made. Its openness is one of the reasons why it has surpassed MySpace in growth and popularity.
Still, we always teach about “listening to the audience” and having “the conversation” of news and information. So why go against the grain? Because sometimes the audience doesn’t even know what it wants. If Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, had asked from the beginning “do you guys want a slightly different MySpace?” he almost certainly would have been met with a “no” answer. After all, there was no great public outcry for the iPod and the iTunes store. Now those are a central fact of online life.
Sometimes, when you ask the audience what it wants, the data is flawed. This is not because the audience doesn’t know what it desires; it just doesn’t realize what the outcome may be. The classic example of this is New Coke. Taste tests showed that people preferred the new formula for Coke. But the audience didn’t know that New Coke would be introduced and would supplant their old, favorite formula. You know the rest.
People hate change. This becomes especially true as people get older, and the Facebook audience is indeed getting older. Where once it was college students-only, now people like you and me are running amok in Facebookland.
Robert Scoble tells about an experience he had that is instructive:
“My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say, “well, they just designed a Volvo.”
His words were meant to get us out of letting the customers run our business mode we often found ourselves falling into.
It is certain to me that, were a traditional media company to have something as successful as Facebook, it would never change it. Yet Facebook has gone through several incarnations. Here, once again, Scoble is instructive, outlining the history and phases of Facebook:
Phase 1. Harvard only.
Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.
Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.
Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).
Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.
Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.
Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph.Phase 5 is known as when Facebook (really found its) business model. This is why Mark Zuckerberg is absolutely correct to say he can’t listen to people who (want) Facebook to get stuck in Phase Four. It was a nice phase, yes, when Facebook only had people in the social graph, but those days are over…
Zuckerberg is a real leader because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to do what he thinks is best for his business. I wish Silicon Valley had more like him.
This kind of leadership is lacking in our industry. I have heard many anecdotes from journalists who are frustrated that their company doesn’t give enough time to innovative products. They tell me “as soon as people start to complain, management pulls the product at once.”
1.2 million votes against the new Facebook is certainly a big number. But Facebook has 180 million users and sometimes adds more than a half-million more per day. Mark Zuckerberg has become a billionaire trusting his instincts. So far, so good.
Jill Geisler
This is fantastic. A little sad – but fantastic. Jill Geisler at Poynter writes a “letter of recommendation” to anyone considering hiring a journalist (or ex-journalist). In ten points, she highlights the good work, deadline-driven attitude, tenacious approach, critical thinking and quality-writing a journalist would bring to any organization. A couple of samples:
Journalists will improve the writing, photography or design in your organization. When journalists volunteer for church, school or civic organizations, they are inevitably asked to work on communications projects. Their writing is clear and succinct; their photography and design skills make whatever they’re working on look more polished and professional. They’re sticklers about copy editing and will raise the quality of even your internal memos.
Journalists have a great work ethic. If you’ve ever complained that your team has a 9-to-5 approach to the job, hire a journalist. Some may think they’re crazy, but they’ve often followed stories, not schedules. They’ve dropped everything for breaking news. They’ve gotten up in the middle of the night to catch a perfect picture of the moon or listen to a source who could talk only in darkness. They took on the work of laid-off colleagues while still doing their own, for as long as they could. And they still have energy.
I don’t want to add any more spoilers. It’s a positive, forward-looking, even inspiring piece of work. I know – the best place a journalist should work should be at a media outlet. Barring that, this article shows how versitile we really are.
The report starts with “Some of the numbers are chilling.” And that is among the most optimistic observations of the 2009 Project For Excellence In Journalism, put out by Pew Research. The annual report has always been a benchmark; this year, the bench is crumbling.
Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23% in the last two years. Some papers are in bankruptcy, and others have lost three-quarters of their value. By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7% in an election year — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or flat across the schedule.
The study does not engage in placing blame, wishful thinking or demanding a return to business models gone by. Rather, it makes the one conclusion that seems to escape so many:
The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem. It is a revenue problem — the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.
If we accept one fact at the center of our business right now, that’s it. People still want news, especially local news. So we can’t blame the audience. Nor can we blame those nefarious “bloggers.” Ad money is moving; news organizations are not. Those that are moving are in freefall, and nobody can take any joy from this. The report notes this massive shift:
…audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media. And the news industry does not know — and has done less than it could to learn — how to convert this more active online audience into revenue.
This is a dense, thought-provoking study. In this, its sixth year of study, the Pew report finds little in the way of encouragement — at least for the way things were and are. Local TV news viewing is flat or down, and the evening newscasts are in big trouble. Local TV spot ad revenue is projected to be off by nearly $2 billion in 2009. National spot revenue could drop 15% in 2009. In 2007, the last year for which data is available, earnings at news producing stations dropped 10%. Imagine what that number is going to look like once all the numbers are in for 2008 and 2009. As for newsroom staffing, well, you know…
Online advertising is still growing, but the rate of that growth is slowing. The one area of hope for the next 12-18 months? Mobile.
As online advertising growth began to slow down, broadcasters looked hopefully toward a potential technological innovation: local television on cellphones. If all goes as planned, the first Americans could begin viewing live television on their specially equipped handheld devices in late 2009 as broadcasters convert to digital transmission and broadcasters and mobile device manufacturers come to agreement on standards. The potential for revenue gain though wider exposure to advertising or subscriptions is obvious.
Mobile broadcasting is a banner Terry Heaton has been carrying since last year if not earlier. He believes, as do I, that the reception of live television on mobile devices shows tremendous promise for local revenue. The caveat here is obvious: it, too, will require capital investment. That investment may be as low as $250,000. Can we find that capital? If the days of Web investment are anything to go by this, too will be a struggle. And yet we will have to. Reinvention will also require personnel. The Pew report finds that “few stations are dedicating news employees exclusively to websites.” This will continue to work as badly as it has in the past.
Local TV websites are turning a profit — at least those that are following best practices. The report finds that a third reported being profitable in 2007. We don’t know what the 2009 numbers will look like, but we do know what up-to-date websites are starting to look like: their own businesses with their own brands and own missions: “Stations’ sites are no longer adjuncts for newscasts but instead are positioning themselves to serve a wider audience than that of their broadcasts and broadening the spectrum of information available to visitors… The challenge for the old media was to use their legacy revenue to figure out how to financially reinvent themselves on the Web.” Actually that wasn’t the challenge — that was the problem. Those who only used “legacy revenue” were simply unable to dedicate financial resources to the Web. Revenue should not be confused with capital.
We can look at this report (and, indeed, analyses like mine) as simply more “ivory tower thinking” that doesn’t give us new solutions for these problems. We can’t expect our hands to be held that tightly. The numbers are here, they are terrible, and it is up to us to improve them. Not everyone will survive this downturn, but those who do will be stronger and, I believe, will produce better local journalism. That survival will depend entirely on the willingness to reinvent the news gathering and dissemination process, as well as rethinking how we sell local advertising.
The newspaper industry is contracting, with many papers outright collapsing. There is still time for papers to hang on without changing much but they, too will suffer the same fate. So, what’s next?
You have read Terry and me on the topic of “localism” for some time. Forget us – you read it in almost every discussion of the future of news. We’ve been bandying about the idea for more than 10 years. But now hyper-localism is seeing its first real series of tests. The sites are run lean, and their ad model is different than those of old.
AR&D promotes the idea of media reinvention. Building sites from scratch is a reinvention, and there are plenty of good journalists to go around.
Christopher Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University explains part of the dilemma on his blog, J-School:
“Usually the organizations that have bothered to do the experimenting (like Philly Future, or Young Philly Politics, or Hallwatch) have been those organizations with the fewest resources. We need to stop relying on the starving visionaries. Or rather, somebody with cash and an organization infrastructure needs to take the lead and help the visionaries not starve.”
This is one of those “only in news” things. Only in news would you try to start a company with no money. Only in news would you start a new division of the company but limit its ability to sell advertising. (”Go sell – but don’t step on the toes of the ‘real’ sales guys.”)
In late February, The New York Times announced it was starting a local blogging initiative. From AdAge:
“The New York Times (has) dipped its toe in the water with the launch of two local blogs it calls The Local: one covering the Brooklyn communities of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and another covering the New Jersey suburbs of Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Each site has a dedicated Times reporter, but they share an editor and take contributions from bloggers and journalism students.”
But this, too, is an experiment that is asking for trouble. For starters, the sites have awkward URLs: fort-greene.blogs.nytimes.com is hardly a catchy brand name. To find these sites, you need to go to the NYTimes.com site, click on “Blogs” and then find the local site you’re looking for. This is no way to start a new business.
Reports give credit to Brownstoner, a Brooklyn blog — whose self-described “turf” includes Fort Greene and Clinton Hill — for scooping the story:
According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’” Each site will be helmed by a writer/editor from the paper, a Times official told us, but will draw upon contributors from the neighborhood as well as some free labor from the CUNY journalism program.
WNCN-TV (NBC17) in Raleigh is undertaking one of the biggest-scale hyperlocal reporting projects we’ve seen. (NBC17 is an AR&D client.) MyNC.com aims to cover its region, one town at a time. MyNC covers 20 communities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. MyNC was launched last year, and takes an innovative approach to local reporting. It has hired “community content liaisons” to report and encourage local contributions. These liaisons live and work in the communities about which they report. In July, 2008, WNCN President and General Manager Barry Leffler talked with AR&D’s Terry Heaton about the liaisons:
“Our Community Content Liaisons are responsible for being our eyes and ears in the community. They are helping us listen to what a community’s needs are so we can respond accordingly. They then work within the local communities to facilitate content for the sites.”
MyNC.com acts as a portal for the region, but is not a brand-extension site for the TV newscast. It aggregates news from the local “pro” media as well as from area contributors. The aggregation is critical – it’s the way to bring in lots of stories and take advantage of the region’s information resources. MyNC.com aims to report, one town at a time, about its region. The site has built up an impressive database of advertisers and bloggers. This is crucial to the success of hyperlocalism.
As excellent journalists look to reinvent themselves (by choice or otherwise) we encourage the development of these new models. Run lean, work with your public, incorporate the new tools of the media trade. Those who believe there will be “no replacement for newspapers” have already given up. We have to keep trying and learning from these exciting experiments.
The “Twitter of video” is now actually integrated with Twitter. 12seconds.tv gives you the ability to record and post a video right from your computer. It’s a social site, and now it’s even easier to use if you’re running Tweetdeck, a Twitter client.
Let’s back up for a sec.
Tweetdeck is an excellent program that lets you look at Twitter in a different way. It lets you sort out tweets and customize feeds. It’s a better Twitter.
12seconds.tv is like Twitter, only with video. You post video status updates instead of text updates. Why 12 seconds? The site has a scientific answer: “Because anything longer is boring.” Twitter limits you to 140 characters, 12seconds goes with the video equivalent. Fair enough. 12seconds is micro-video-blogging, with the ease of sharing that Twitter has taken to a new level.
By integrating, you’re now able to record a video right through the Tweetdeck program, eliminating one more step in the overall social media process. Once you’ve recorded the video, you can post it directly to Twitter along with your message.
Up to speed?
So, what’s the value in all of this? Tweetdeck alone is worth your time because it allows you to monitor and participate in Twitter conversations about your community, major stories – even your station. We’ve seen how Twitter has been front and center for pictures during breaking news. Adding 12seconds will enable video eyewitness accounts, instantly.
The addition of 12seconds presents another way of interacting with the audience. We are, after all, video people. WSPA anchor Amy Wood uses 12seconds to give behind-the scenes tours, show us what life is like after a storm, and demonstrate her latest gadgets – in this case, unboxing the Kindle 2. And if you don’t think unboxing is a big deal, you don’t know geek.
(Disclosure: WSPA is owned by Media General, an AR&D client.)
Amy’s one-on-one connection came in handy last Thursday, when one of her Twitter followers found out her mother was being held hostage inside a Greenville, SC, bank. Kathryn Moore found out about the crisis because she follows Amy on Twitter. Kathryn and Amy connected. As a result, Amy was able to get news from Kathryn. Writes Amy:
“Kathryn actually lives in Georgia, but follows me on Twitter to keep up with news in the Greenville area. She had no idea, “keeping up,” would ever involve her discovering her mom was in the middle of a breaking news story.
“She followed my news updates with all the developments and also fed me information as she was able to get it from her mom. Information that I was able to share with you.”
The audience appreciates seeing station talent as real people, and the new tools of the trade make this easy. It also gives the audience a way to communicate back with the station (they can post their video responses just as easily).
The integration of 12seconds into Tweetdeck is another one of those big steps disguised as a small step. These are the developments we need to notice and act on. And if utilizing any of these tools turns out to be unrewarding, they are as easy to stop as they are to start.
The more that social media integrates, the more possibilities there are for everyone. This is one of those rare win-win moments, where both the station and the audience get something positive and nobody loses. There’s no ad revenue loss and no audience loss. Everyone wins.
(This article originally appeared in the March 4 edition of the AR&D Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)
It’s a small thing, but when I see that companies are keeping up with social media, I like to pass it along. In this case, it’s the folks behind MacSpeech Dictate. On Twitter, I posted a link to my recent review of their computer dictation software. It was a generally positive review. Sure enough, MacSpeech noticed and “retweeted” my link. An ego boost? Sure. But more to the point, it shows they are listening.
Are you monitoring what people are saying about you on Twitter? Facebook? Blogs? If you are, are you responding? Be sure that your social media efforts are two-way. I was pleased to see that MacSpeech, a company built on “listening,” heard me. Now I am adding their Twitter stream to my “subscriptions.” Be engaged.
It has become a cliché to test out and write about speech software at the same time. But who am I to ignore clichés? So I thought I would write this entry using MacSpeech Dictate. I’ve been testing it out all day. I have to say it is the best speech recognition software I have seen so far.
In the old days of speech recognition software you had to enunciate each word separately. Now it recognizes the way we talk complete with all the slurring and my occasionally thick Boston accent. (The louder I yell, the thicker it gets.) After a five-minute training period, I found MacSpeech Dictate got about 95% of the words correct. I don’t know how many words per minute that works out to, and there are still a few hiccups. But overall, I have to say, it’s a lot easier on the wrists.
The cool thing about the software is that it learns as you go. It also works with a lot of other software programs like Word and does a decent job on some websites. It understands homonyms very well, so you can write things like “the deer is very dear to me,” should you be a mind to do so.
So, MacSpeech Dictate and I are still learning about each other. It’s having a hell of a time with “AR&D,” my company name and my wife’s name (”Leticia,” which I can’t seem to convince it is not “Lakeesha.” But the pluses seem to outweigh the minuses, and the “Star Trek” fan in me really likes talking to a computer and having it listen.