Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: advertising

The Enquirer’s print-only news experiment

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On February 24, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

Publishers all over the country are currently trying to figure out how to make money from online content or, at the very least, how to make more money off their still-profitable print products.

Recently, The Cincinnati Enquirer (my employer) has been experimenting with ideas to boost the value of the printed newspaper. As an online employee my entire career, it’s been a bit out of my wheelhouse to focus on print, especially since the Enquirer’s previous claims to fame have been more in the digital side. Whether we like it or not, print still pays the bills, so our paper – and many papers – are willing to experiment if it means keeping the lights on.

The experiment started Feb. 7 when the Enquirer editors opted to hold the publication of our big Sunday showcase story until 5 p.m. on Sunday in order to to boost single-copy sales of the Sunday print edition. Prior to this, we had been posting the weekend blowouts online on Friday mornings or afternoons to give a “sneak peek” of sorts to our online readers.

The next week, Feb. 14, the experiment widened as the editors opted against publishing the Sunday centerpiece online at all. The print-only designation grew further this past weekend, Feb. 20, as one Sunday feature in every section of the newspaper was designated to be “print only”, with an icon denoting it as such in the paper.

On the Fridays before these experiments, we put a promo on the front of our site telling our online readers what they’d be missing online over the weekend and urging them to buy a newspaper. I don’t know what kind of reaction bubbled up to those on the print side, but I know I fielded a few reactions from readers looking for those stories online after the fact.

It could take awhile to determine the experiment’s success – or even figure out what success really means. My editor, Tom Callinan, said he expects the experimentation to become more focused and strategic over time. It could possibly accelerate toward a pay wall or premium model of some sort in the future.  I guess we’ll see what develops.

I realize this kind of print-only content plan is hardly unheard-of, as many papers (see this in the Minneapolis Star Tribune)  have been holding some or all publication from the web – and it’s pretty much the norm in the magazine publishing world.

I’m putting this out there because I’d like some feedback.

If you’re a Cincinnati-area reader: Did you notice this? What did you think? If you saw a story promoted only that was print-only that interested you, would it prompt you to seek out a Sunday paper?

If you’re an industry wonk (or wannabe wonk like me): What’s your reaction to this kind of experimentation? Do you know of other news sites that usually have everything online withholding their best stories from the web? More importantly, is this working to boost print sales?

If you don’t want to leave a comment, shoot me an email.

Editor’s Note:  I opted against editorializing on this experiment because (as you might imagine) I like getting a paycheck. While I have a lot of thoughts on this, I’ll save them for internal discussions where they might actually be useful.  You can probably figure out where I stand if you’ve ever read this blog before.

Gawker’s leaving page views behind, so when’s our turn?

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On February 1, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

Since the beginning of my professional online career in 2004, my employers have been enslaved by the almighty page view. If you work for a news website – or deal with people who do – you come to measure your self-worth in those metrics.

Gawker, some might say, was one of the big influences in creating the page-view-is-king mentality amongst news execs in the first place. Earlier this month, Gawker changed their preferred method of audience engagement to unique users. I hoped at the time this would be a big red flag to news executives that it’s finally time to change our definition of success.

The Neiman Journalism Lab was also hopeful that this would signal a trend away from the lick to measuring true audience engagement.

Original content and exclusives require far more time and energy than excerpting and aggregating…. The upside is that all that extra effort can create strong relationships with audiences and advertisers alike. Engagement leads to revenue, which leads to sustainability, which stokes hope and other things in short supply these days. A focus on uniques may or may not yield better journalism, but it could create better businesses.

Unfortunately, we haven’t heard as much as a peep from any of the big companies yet – and the pressure isn’t changing overnight in my neck of the online woods, either.

This change should be absolutely huge for everyone in online media, but we as an industry may be uneasy about changing our measurement methods because we’re just so darn comfortable setting ad rates the way we always have. I would think that a measure of unique users would be similar to the good old days, back when we could measure our audience in single copy sales and subscriptions. So why hold on to the page view?

Newsday is paying for that paywall

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On January 29, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

New York Times cheerleaders and other fans of paywalls should take note of the plight of nearby Newsday.

Newsday went behind a paywall for non-subscribers three months ago, They revealed this week that since then, they’d netted only 35 online-only subscribers. Ouch.

Newsday was banking on their local news coverage being so important to online readers that they’d eagerly pay to access it even though there’s plenty of (free) competition in the NYC/NJ area.. Their redesign made it possible for non-subscribers to see article excerpts, then they’d have to pay $5 per week to read whole stories.

Because of the low adoption rate so far, the web traffic to Newsday’s site has, predictable, plummeted.  According to their Nielsen Online analytics, the site’s page views dropped 30% from October to December, meaning that any non-subscription revenue earned from online advertising is taking a plunge.

Their editors don’t seem to mind – they say it wasn’t about numbers and subscribers, but rather about protecting their brand from freeloaders and offering a ‘premium” product to loyal subscribers. While that’s noble and gutsy, it doesn’t create any new form of revenue to fund an online product. Food for thought, I suppose.

Times chose quick bucks over a lasting audience

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On January 21, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

If you read here yesterday – or just about any other journalism blog online – you know about the New York Times‘ plan to charge for online content beginning in 2011.

The reaction in my own newsroom has largely been one of relief. Most of the journalists I work with are less experienced with the expectations of the online audience and are, understandably, very protective of their work. Many have been arguing with me for years that we shouldn’t just “give our content away for free online” (even though we’ve essentially been giving it away for free in print since the beginning of newspapers).

It’s a short-sighted philosophy that is borne out of the naivete from years or working in that bygone era where news was a monopoly. It isn’t anymore – not even close – and online readers care less than they ever did about who writes the news they read (or why).

Felix Salmon at Reuters really underscores the glaring truth behind the NYT’s charge plan, saying it is an act of desperation from a company that still believes it is big enough to matter more to readers than a website that doesn’t charge for content.

“This is, of course, exactly the approach that the NYT’s management would take if it felt that it was managing a company in terminal decline, and wanted to squeeze as many dollars out of it as possible before it dies. Successful media companies go after audience first, and then watch revenues follow; failing ones alienate their audience in an attempt to maximize short-term revenues.”

The fact of the matter is that any sort of pay wall will inevitably alienate a core of online readers, particularly those without any real sense of loyalty to a particular news source. Worse yet, this audience is not only a primary audience we hope to keep around in the future, it is also a very, very valuable audience to advertisers.

Advertising Age noted yesterday that the heaviest Times Online users, those reportedly about to start getting charged, are the last ones any site wants to drive away because they are attractive to advertisers. The most frequent online readers are also the ones we as websites know the most about thanks to our site analytics.

Unlike our print readership, we can know without doubt where our online readers come from, what technology they use, what time of day they are online and, most importantly, we can piece together what they like based on the story sets they choose.

In this plan, the Times is giving up on one potential source of long-term revenue and a chance to build audience for a quick make-a-buck scheme that could be very detrimental in the long run.

And another thing to consider is just how many subscribers does the Times think it will gain in the online only space? Last week, Alan Mutter analyzed a survey that compared the number of  print subscribers who subscribe online at news sites with pay walls or e-editions. It turns out only 2.4% of those who are loyal enough to buy a paper are also willing to pay to read exclusive content online.

While I’m not sure this is a very fair indication of overall online subscription adoption, it is alarming to see that print subscribers, who we likely assumed would be the first to pay online, are not so eager to shell out money for online content. Once the print audience declines to a sliver, what does this say for the future of the subscription?

Can we forget about page views?

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On October 20, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models, Rants

Working on the online side of daily newspapers for a little more than five years now, I’ve come to measure all manner of worth in terms of the almighty page view. That elusive metric is used to determine what stories are the “best” by newspaper execs everywhere – and it leads people like me to have our value to the company measured in daily traffic numbers (coming soon to therapist’s couch near you).

Of course, we use this measurement because it’s the only way we really know how to measure ad cpm. This method is about the closest we have to the way we measured advertising value in newspapers for generations, so we just stuck with it. Each reload or link-click is measured an an impression – even if it didn’t make an impression at all.

We as an industry need to rid ourselves of this antiquated view of internet value. Page views are a metric that means very little when you get right down to it. It doesn’t measure anyone’s engagement on a page, or even how many sets of eyeballs have scanned the headline. All it tells you is that someone clicked a link to this page or refreshed it on their screen. They might not have even scanned the page.

Call me crazy, but I say we need to move away from the almighty page view just to get back to the core of our business. We know news doesn’t make an impact by merely being spotted, it needs to be read (at least a little). If we really care about engaging our audience, we should measure actual engagement (in time on site) or at least the true number of visitors (unique users).

Why pat ourselves on the back for receiving hundreds of thousands of page views from 200 people who have loaded a webcam that auto-refreshes every 10-15 seconds? Is that engagement? Are they even really watching it at all?

More importantly, does anyone even care?

Seeking your input on business models

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On September 3, 2009

In Online Revenue Models, Surviving

I’ve mentioned before that I am pulling together an event 9/9 at the Enquirer Media offices, the News 2.0 Forum, where people inside and outside our news organization will give five minute presentations on their perception of “the future of news”. We’ve got a great lineup ready from quite  few different perspectives (I’ll post it when it’s finalized).

Anyway, I’m preparing my own five minute presentation on possible future business models. For some reason, I was crazy enough to volunteer to set up this event, emcee it and do a presentation (all of this the night before I leave for a long vacation).

Because I know the few (but elite!) readers of this blog are pretty savvy folks, I figured I’d ask you for your input on my presentation.

Here’s the models I’m focusing on:

1. The continuation of an advertising supported model. Using examples like HuffPo, West Seattle Blog, Gawker to show that ad support can work – but you need to be pretty well streamlined to make that happen.

2. The grant-funded model (e.g Pro Publica, Common Language project).

3. The membership/subscription based model.

4. Micropayments of all kinds.

5. Offering other products/services to support news operations.

So what am I missing here? Remember, it’s five minutes, so let’s not get crazy.

New AP plan: Taking web traffic from members?

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On August 13, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

The Nieman Lab blog obtained a copy of the AP’s latest plan to preserve it’s aging business model. The name  – “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online” – sort of says it all (for better or for worse).

The plan is to withhold some of it’s content from it’s wire and other means of distribution, instead forcing member sites to link to the content on an AP site. So…the AP is seeking to compete with its member sites for online traffic? Wha?

The AP plan differentiates between “utility” content and “unique” content when deciding what to keep on this centralized site and what to distribute for member use. The AP’s lawyer seemed to define “utility” content as the AP’s usual offerings of traditional news feeds. The “unique” content, I’d think, would be their supplemental interactive graphics, galleries and non-daily news features from AP staff.

While I can appreciate that the AP is at least thinking 21st century on this latest scheme, it begs the question: What exactly are AP members paying for, anyway? Member-owners subscribe to the AP precisely because we want to use this content on our sites specifically to get page views and sell our own ads around it. If AP members have to send that traffic off site – why even pay the huge AP membership fees in the first place? We can give traffic away for free.

In addition to that obvious question, the plan prompts many more alarm bells.

Steve Buttry says the AP seems to be off on the wrong foot from the get-go with this name about the name:

[It] uses two words that reflect the dangerous thinking that plagues way too much of our industry today: The focus on protection of a declining model rather than development of a new, prosperous model and the stubborn denial of all evidence that paid content is not the path to a prosperous model.

Secondly, on this business of unique vs utility content, Buttry and others ask how this distinction will be made and if member-contributed content will be “protected” too. After all, so much of the AP’s state and local feeds seem to be from member papers’ reporting, not that of local AP staffers.

Thirdly – a Nieman commenter asks how will all of this work in terms of search engine optimization? The AP seems to be hoping these outside links will provide all the SEO they’ll need – but these stories aren’t on all the various member sites themselves – how much will the AP content fall in SEO rankings?

I’m sure there’ll be a lot more info out about this in the coming days and weeks and maybe I’ll feel better about it. Right now, despite what their people may say, the AP seems to be looking for a fight with it couldn’t possibly win.

WaPo v. Gawker: Battle in the Blogs

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On August 7, 2009

In Industry News & Notes

This week, for some reason, Gawker is suddenly Public Enemy #1 to the online media world. It seems to be because they’re doing pretty well when it comes to online revenue and they do it largely by blogging about the news researched by other sources.

The reason it’s suddenly a big deal is that a writer at the Washington Post, Ian Shapira, finally decided to throw a (well-written) snit about Gawker blogging about one of their pieces. Shapira charges that Gawker infringed on the copyright of his work because so much of their post was derived from his story.

Gawker’s post quoted heavily from the source’s quotes in the Post story  in fact, slightly more than half of their very short post was from the WaPo story. The Nieman Journalism Lab took a look at what was used and asked it’s readers if they thought Gawker violated Fair Use or fell well within its guidelines.  The comments are well worth a full read, as they really put the heart of the debate right out there:

1. The Gawker post clearly qualifies as Fair Use. Commenter Justin reminds us that the code states that content use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Comment and criticism – what else is Gawker if not that?

2. Despite Shapira’s claims to the contrary, the Post did get credit. Sure, Gawker could have said it came from the post before the end – but they gave them something far more valuable. They linked to the original story – several times in fact. As commenter (and excellent young blogger) Cody Brown says, in the online world, that’s the best credit you can get.

3. Was the Post damaged by it? Hardly. Shapira noted that Gawker was the #2 referrer on the web to his story and likely contributed quite a few new readers to an otherwise mundane story that may not have had a lot of legs online otherwise.

4. Who owns the quotes from the source anyway? If Gawker should cut the post a check for quoting their piece and selling ads around it (which the WaPo writer suggests in jest), what does the Post owe their original source for selling ads around her quotes? (And furthermore, does reporting count as aggregation, too?)

5. Would the Post be complaining if it wasn’t Gawker? That’s debatable. As the commenter notes (and I say all of the time) other newspapers, broadcast and wire services do this quite a bit too – why isn’t there any more outrage about that?

I really question why Shapira’s editor even let him write that follow-up charging that Gawker stole from his work. Does Shapira really have a background that makes him knowledgeable enough about these sticky issues of fair use and media law that he can make claims that even experienced media lawyers aren’t altogether clear on? Also, how many of the Post’s online readers even care about this issue? You know who cares to hear about how much work Shapira put into this everyday story only to have it “ripped off” by big, bad blogs? Journalists. That’s about it.

How much of this whole debate – not just the WaPo v. Gawker, but the whole blogs/aggregators vs. old media – is based in old-fashioned jealousy? Chris Krewson, editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer, said this to me on Twitter: “Aren’t we at least a little annoyed that Gawker and the aggies are faring well, ad-wise?”

Yes, I think we are. Gawker’s media sales have shot up this year. Ad revenues are up 45% year-over-year for the first six months of 2009 – and their production costs fall way below that of a newspaper. But isn’t that just good competition?

Maybe we just need to be better.

Here are more related posts about the whole Gawker debate you may find interesting:

  • Journalism’s Problem Isn’t Gawker. It’s Advertising. – The Atlantic Politics Channel – Atlantic’s followup analysis to the Nieman Lab post. Gawker isn’t the issue here, they insist, online advertising is the real issue – so maybe all of these people wringing their hands about Gawker and the like should focus on the task at hand. (amen)
  • Gawker’s Link Etiquette (or Lack Thereof) : CJR – An interesting look at Gawker’s linking habits. As the CJR notes, what they do falls within existing Fair Use guidelines and they DO link to the original piece – just way, way down in the story. I don’t agree with the practice, but I also don’t think we need a law that makes Gawker link to the original higher in the story.

The myth of the “free ride”

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On August 6, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

David Marburger took his show on the road this week with a much-emailed guest editorial in the LA Times titled “The free ride that’s killing the news business” (again with the hostile wording). Of course, I got this emailed to be from no less than 20 fellow journalists, all of whom seemed to not understand the online news business at large. He’s preaching to the choir of the same “stay the course” news people who got us here in the first place – and they love it.

Marburger tells and retells the story of the Little Red Hen in all of his appearances. Have you read it yet?

Remember the Little Red Hen? She’s the one in the folk tale who asks the other barnyard animals if they will help her cut the wheat, grind it into flour and bake the bread. They refuse. But when the warm bread emerges from the oven, they are eager to help the hen eat it.

Now let’s suppose the story continues, with the Little Red Hen opening a roadside stand to sell her bread. Instead of merely eating it themselves, the cow, the pig and the dog each take some of her loaves and open competing roadside stands. Vying for sales, they undercut her price and each others’. Because the Little Red Hen bore all the costs to produce the bread, and the other animals bore none, she can’t afford to match their prices, and they drive her out of business.

Newspaper sites are supposed to be the hen. He likens aggregator sites like Newser.com to the other animals.

To anyone that isn’t in the news business, this sounds pretty acceptable. After all, isn’t the point of competition in a free market supposed to mean that you try to undersell your competition by having a lower overhead? It’s called good business. Too bad for the Little Red Hen – maybe she should become a manufacturer or wholesaler instead of a shop owner.

To whose that aren’t familiar, Newser.com is a worldwide wholesaler of other people’s news, in a sense. They summarize stories from many news sources in a paragraph or so and link back to the original story. As you can see here, they state on each summary where the source is and link to it. Sure, it could stand to be more prominent, but it’s better than what TV does every day. (It should also be pointed out that site looks dreadful and isn’t very user-friendly)

Marburger claims that sites like Newser are “free riding” on newspapers and it should be illegal. From the poll on the editorial, which asks “Should websites be allowed to use excerpts from daily news sites?” the populace doesn’t agree (it’s 68% against the Marburger plan, 32% for it as I write).

The basis for the Marburger argument is that sites like Newser are driving down online advertising rates because they aggregate content and surround it with low-priced ads. He calls them “competitors”. He says they are “direct substitutes for newspapers”.

First of all, if your story can be summarized in a paragraph and that’s honestly enough for a casual reader to know about it – it probably isn’t worth fighting about. Secondly, Newser isn’t a competitor with the newspaper websites it links to. A quick look at Alexa shows how their traffic compares to the likes of the two Times, Tribune and Guardian:

Newser ranks way, way below the big news sites in terms of the golden stat of pageviews.

Newser ranks way, way below the big news sites in terms of page views.

While I agree that advertising is the issue – it isn’t the fault of aggregators. It’s that the entire business model for online advertising is broken. As Bill Grueskin said last month in an excellent paidContent analysis, “Aggregators are more a distraction from the real crisis than the cause of it” because even if they are siphoning off users (of course, they also refer users), it isn’t really hurting the bottom line.

Online ad rates have been artificially low for years. We’re partly to blame – after all, most newspaper have been online since the 90s and we never charged for online ads what they are worth. Furthermore, the online audience doesn’t like and doesn’t see value in online ads. They block them, they don’t click on them, they HATE them.

CPMs are so low that thousands upon thousands of views to our site today won’t even buy lunch for our newsroom, let alone sustain the industry. Grueskin says what a lot of us in online news have been whispering for years – why are we measuring our worth in page views anyway? We should be using metrics like page views per user or time on site rather than by the  number of people visiting the site, “many of whom may not assign any value to the journalists who generated the content”.

In other words, better understand the audience, seek out what it wants, determine what we can provide – possibly in terms of a premium service – and find a way to monetize that outside of online ads. That’s something an operation like Newser could never do and it actually provides a sustainable plan for future growth. Crazy, I know.

So why do we have to keep giving face time to David Marburger and his ilk of “stay the course” followers who want to legislate their way out of an adaptation of the business model. Let’s get to the task at hand…

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