Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

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Sunday plan evolves from print-only to print-first

I wrote first last week about my employer, The Cincinnati Enquirer, experimenting with a print-only strategy for certain stories to boost Sunday single-copy sales.

Not long afterward, I was in a meeting where we decided on the next course of this ever-evolving experiment – and came up with a conclusion web readers should find a bit more agreeable.

First_in_Print_logo2This past Sunday, the logo and experiment changed from “Print Exclusive” to “Print First”. This week, the six selected Sunday stories were promoted on Cincinnati.Com and held from online publication until today. This was intended to give more value to the printed Sunday edition without keeping the stories unavailable for online and out-of-market readers. This was a solution suggested by many of those who responded to my post last week (more on that later) and very agreeable compromise in our editor meetings on the subject.

While I don’t know how it worked for print sales, it seemed to work well for us on the online side at Cincinnati.Com. Mondays are notoriously slow for news with art, so these embargoed Sunday blowouts have been there for us to use today in prominent spots – and a few of them (like this piece on Larry Flynt’s family lawsuit – like that  isn’t just primed for the web) are doing very well in terms of page views.

We’ve known for awhile that our online readers and print readers are not usually the same – not just here, but at all newspaper sites. A strategy like this seems to reflect that as well, since the stories we held from online yesterday are today enjoying new life and a burst of traffic (not to mention placement in search engines and linkage from all over).

Simply put, we shouldn’t try to sell our web readers the print newspaper – if anything, we should try to sell them news they want in the format they want it. Newspapers can’t afford to devalue the web audience if they want to succeed in the long run, hence why everyone’s trying to find a way to make money online in the form of paywalls, freemium content, micropayments and whatever else is coming down the pike.

While I’m personally not crazy about some of those plans, I think anything is better than entirely withholding the news from the web audience. Judging from the responses I got last week and what we discussed internally at the Enquirer, I’m not the only one.

Here are some of the responses I was sent via email  and social media to the “Print Exclusive” experiment:

– I purchase the paper every Sunday and truly enjoyed [last week’s] piece on homeless teens….  I was however disappointed when I could not find the article online, as I wanted to email it/tweet it. I see the point in having print-exclusives to drive paper sales, but I am wondering if it might not be possible to post the articles online once the print editions are no longer available?

– If the Enquirer sold the Sunday sports section as a standalone print product, I’d buy that, but that’s all I’d want. Mostly I’m a web reader.

– I can see not putting the content online before print, but don’t make it unavailable to me online. Even if I have to pay for it or buy a day pass to your e-edition, at least I have a way to read it if I want.

– You should be able to “buy” daily copies of the paper online in the e-edition. Maybe even just make the Sunday e-edition a subscription option. I’d buy it.

– This seems kinda bass ackwards to me. You should be increasing your online presence rather than reducing it. I think the proposed pay model for the New York Times is perfectly agreeable and I have no problem subscribing to that.

What about you? What do you think of this latest plan?

We don’t have to be everywhere at once

Every industry blog that’s into social media, including this one, loves to tell newsies about the latest and greatest social media craze and How Your Newspaper is Getting Left Behind (!!).

For weeks I’ve been thinking of writing one of these posts on Four Square, as everyone else has, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.

While I have been dreaming up some ways my paper can use geolocation services in regards to marketing, branding, advertising and repurposing news content, I simply cannot bring myself to suggest that newsroom personnel omgjusthavetobedoingthisrightnow. No, just no.

Sure, it’d be great to have reporters go out and leave tips, links and trivia all over town on FourSquare, but  I have to consider how much I’m willing to give up for that. I don’t know what it is like at everyone else’s newsroom, but I don’t have extra people waiting around for work to do – and frankly, I’d much rather have an online update from the courthouse by 10 am than a bunch of tips on where to find great public art on Four Square or Gowalla.

We in the social media cheerleader camp need a reality check sometimes. I’m frequently the one saying “We’ll find time, just don’t say no yet”, but as I’ve found myself stretched to run the news site and tweet and send email alerts and monitor traffic and and and – I know we can’t say yes to everything anymore. More importantly, we new media snobs shouldn’t feel as if we’re dinosaurs because we aren’t here, there and everywhere on every social network.

Case in point: Right after Google Buzz launched, Old Media New Tricks (who I love, by the way) was on the case, telling us how papers should get their Buzz profiles set up and hop to the status updates. While I don’t blame them for suggesting it (they do need to get blog readers after all) I had to question it. Not every newsroom can afford to have a staffer who can send status updates to a myriad of services all day. With the still-limited spread of Buzz and widespread popularity of Twitter, why divert our already-stretched resources there? It simply fueled the notion we social media types tend to have that says, “Well, this is out there and someday you’re going to look dumb if you weren’t doing it a long time ago.”

I recently attended a presentation by some incredibly talented social media gurus in my local network and one part of their message especially rang out loud and clear to this harried soul: Pick a few social media practices that work for you and do them well.

We as an industry should take that to heart.

Every newsroom should have a goal in mind for their social media use – and then should pick and choose the right tools to best go after that goal without sacrificing what’s important. Consider how seamlessly a social media practice will fit into the newsroom’s workload – and consider if a new idea is worth taking a staff member away from this task or that task (if that’s the case).

It isn’t always a good investment of your limited resources to chase every social media rainbow that comes along – picking just a few is more than OK.

Weather coverage made easy

Weather is big business for those of us in news, especially when it gets to be extreme weather like just about every state has experienced in the last two weeks.

Lots of news outlets have developed amazing new ways to get out weather information and pull in interaction from readers, but sometimes what’s simple can work in a pinch.

Most of the time when we’ve had snowstorms in the past, we at Cincinnati.Com have had a basic story file set up that we re-top and add to throughout the day as the news changes. Without the occasional total re-write during the course of the news cycle, it can end up reading like a very long Frankenstein of an article, with the possibility of specific items getting buried in all of the text.

I recently set up a basic WordPress blog specifically to handle weather events news to avoid this problem. It has links to all the basic weather info we have available on the site, a way to search all of the posted entries and tags/categories that make posts easy to browse by topic or location. The blog uses the TDO mini Forms plugin that can allow our reporters – and our readers – to submit updates from where they are.

Even though we haven’t yet gotten a lot of reader submissions, the blog has been immensely helpful from a news management standpoint. Reporters can file to the blog from their homes, phones or satellite offices, all we have to do it click “publish” in our dashboard. No re-writes are necessary because as the story develops, we can just add news posts. The format also provides an easy way to “sticky” important posts at the top and generates an easy link for the day’s event cancellations.

This easy method of publishing updates weather news has been a great supplement to our info releases and content on Twitter, on our mobile site, text alerts and all of the usual photos and videos we bring out fr every story. The blog’s been doing great traffic on storm days and, from my view, has been a huge burden lifted from the backs of already busy online editors (such as myself).

Because this info has such a short shelf life, I’ve just been deleting all of the old content as soon as the storm coverage ends. We don’t want readers coming back for new weather updates only to find outdated info from last week’s storm. I know that isn’t the greatest option for the sake of SEO and outside linking, but it has made it very easy to essentially launch whole new blogs for each circumstance. I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on what they would do to prevent link breaks and confusion.

Anyway, that’s been our publishing plan these past two weeks – and if it’s something you think you could use, go for it. WordPress is free, quick to set up and has lot of plugins to enhance user experience.

What has anyone been doing to cover these storms online? What have you been reading?

Newsday is paying for that paywall

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.

NYT giving lessons in ineffective revenue models?

Last week, I and pretty much every other media blogger on the earth wrote about the potential problems facing the New York Times’ plan to charge non-subscribers for using their site. Giving a bit of credit where it is due, the Times has evolved it’s metered paywall plan to not charge those coming into stories from blog referrals, emails and social media (which had been a big concern of mine).

While this change is great in that it recognizes the importance of the passer-by reader, it does present a challenge in the sense that most online readers fall into this category – so what kind of money can they get from charging for this content in the first place? As others have noted, it isn’t even as if they’re charging for content now, just for the ability to use their site navigation. In other words, they want to kill their section front traffic, but keep their story-by-story page views.

The Times’ Opinionator Blog even grudgingly admits this seems like a bit of a back-off. No surprise, of course,  a NYT writer thinks the metered paywall is a good idea, but he realizes that online readers do not simply navigate to a newspaper site to peruse the news, they get their news from a combination of search, aggregators (including their own RSS readers) and recommendations from friends. If this trend continues and these sort of readers increase in number (which they will, as this is the preferred newsreading method of my generation and those younger), this porous paywall thingie doesn’t look much like a revenue model at all. It’s half-assed at best.

Which begs to mind the real question: Did the Times even really think this out? They made all kinds of big news when they first announced the metered paywall last week to all kinds of old-school-media backpats, but then they started immediately  backpedaling.

It’s made me wonder if they really had a firm grasp of what they sought to accomplish – audience and revenue-wise, with this plan from the get-go. I have to wonder, how much more will it change before it is implemented? And why did they announce this plan when they don’t seem to be very cognizant of what it will be or what they want out of it?

Jay Rosen hosts something of a debate about all of this on his blog. I suggest a read through the comments for a good look at what the reaction’s been to all of this re-jiggering.

Times chose quick bucks over a lasting audience

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?

In asking readers to change, will the NY Times change too?

The New York Times announced today that it will begin charging online readers for unlimited access to articles beginning in 2011.

The plan suggests that online readers who do not subscribe to the print product will be asked to pay a flat rate to access articles after a certain number of site visits. They have not outlined how many articles a non-subscriber could visit before being asked to pay, but it could be anywhere from three or four to ten. The plan is obviously aimed at protecting their print product by making some pieces unavailable for free online while saying a little prayer that they can still make some money off their “frequent” online readers.

While I think it’s great that the NYT will have some system in place for the occasional reader (as opposed to an all-or-nothing pay wall), one can’t help but wonder how long their “frequent readers” will remain frequent. While I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to try out, the Times execs will need to readjust their expectations for their online readership stats when they go forward with this plan.

I know I don’t visit the Times Online every day, but will if I hear about a good movie review, interesting recipe or perceived trend story of the day. It’s in those quirky features that the Times may lose its foothold as a must-read with those “frequent readers” in question. In fact, it may have to question it’s entire content strategy.

To see what I mean, take a look at the Times’ most emailed list. Those are the sort of stories – in addition to the occasional style or column – that these “frequent readers” have sent to them or find via Google. They aren’t occasionally visiting the Times to catch up on city government news – they’re coming from all over the nation and the world to read about those outrageous New Yorkers taking their four-year-olds to get pedicures or see what Tom Friedman has to say about China.

These sort of stories, while interesting, may not have enough utility to a reader to warrant a subscription or regular fee. You can get the headlines from somewhere else – the rest is just gravy. Not everyone wants to pay for gravy. The Times learned that before when they did their two-year freemium plan called TimesSelect, which limited access to opinion pieces and other online features. They shut it down in 2007 because, surprise surprise, closing off part of your website kills your search engine optimization and web traffic.

They will get smaller traffic numbers. They will fall in online metrics stats when compared to other sites. They’ll need to be ready for that – and the (further) drop in online ad revenue that goes with it.

They may also want to reconsider the kind of content they produce if this “frequent reader” base depletes. They may have to largely abandon their online bread-and-butter in that most emailed list. If those formerly frequent readers try to stay below whatever the monthly visit limit is, they may want to use their tokens on something more substantial than, say, a trend story about designer shoes for dogs. They may not want to pay – or ask their friends to pay – for the content they used to email or share so freely on Facebook or Twitter. It may be time to rethink whether or not those sort of stories should be written at all, especially if the Times ends up cutting staff again.

In the meantime, the rest of us in the newspaper industry are content to let the Times be the canary in the coal mine. We’ll see if they stick with it and if it manages to make money in the end, though even if it does work, it may not be scaleable for the small daily or metro. I guess we’ll see what happens in 2011…

A mess of recommended reading

I’ve had a bunch of links sitting around I meant to share forever ago, but they fell through the cracks. So if they seem a little late, well, too bad.

Cool Stuff

  • A lot of sites (Cincinnati.Com included) have been running with the idea of expanding data coverage on local crime, but the Knight News Challenge entry named Homicide Watch D.C. has a great idea to do more than that by  putting a focus on the victims instead of jut the crime. While such a database would be meaningful tot he community and become a valuable news resource, I think it would be tough to keep up in the long run.
  • Ethnic media’s four-step model for the news industry’s future – Ethnic press has a lot of evolutionary tendencies that could be taken to heart by more general interest new providers – honestly, what they suggest here should have been done all along.

End of year/2010 Stuff

The Twitter

  • Why Twitter Will Endure – David Carr explains the inherent usefulness of Twitter – and how because of its utility, he believes it will outlast its competitors once the novelty wears off.
  • The Use of Twitter by America’s Newspapers – A detailed analysis with lots of data on how newspapers use Twitter. While I’m still unclear as to how they determine a paper’s overall rank (does it evaluate all the paper’s accounts?), it is interesting to see which paper’s interact the most, as opposed to blasting out updates all of the time.

The “lost” generation of journalists may be my own

In a recent post on Reflections of a Newsosaur, Alan Mutter lamented a lost generation of journalists among those coming out of college right now. He was right about the lost generation, but I think he has the wrong people in mind.

Instead, I think of my own age group – those too young to have ever experienced the heyday of newspapers and too old to live on hope alone.

Sure, there are a lot of journalists coming out of college right now (or in the last year) who will never be able to work in a newsroom as most of us know it, but I think they are better off than one might think. They’ve been trained in multimedia, they’re inexpensive, flexible and are far better prepared to become “new” journalists (mojos, start-up reporters, bloggers) because they never learned the bad habits of “old” journalists. Best of all, idealism is on their side.

No, I believe the truly lost generation of journalists may be my own.

A few days ago, Pat Thornton, an industry blogger and founder of Beatblogging.org posted that he left journalism. In the time I’ve read his work, Pat has always been full of ideas for the industry and he really believed it would change. For him to give up is really saying something.

As Thornton noted, “Maybe I would have been better able to withstand the upheaval in journalism if I had known the good times.”

And he isn’t alone. In response to Thornton’s news, a former classmate of mine, Meranda Watling, tweeted, “I want to believe journalism can make a difference. I haven’t given up yet. But I’m not sure how long idealism sustains you.”

I know this feeling of near hopelessness isn’t confined to our “gap generation” of journalists – but we are victims of some seriously bad timing.

We got to work just as or just before the bust started. Many of us attended journalism school in the late 90s/early 2000s, just as those schools were starting to rethink their focus on the web. If we learned anything about it there, it was half-baked, at best. Some of us got further training on our own or on the job, but many just got laid off (if we got jobs at all).

Consider this: Of all the very talented journalists I knew in my days in Kent State student media – 18 of 25 right off the top of my head are no longer in the business due to layoffs. From my experience, most newspapers killed their young first.

Even those who have managed to stay employed don’t have it so great. We, like everyone else, wait around for the next shoe to drop.  Every potential mentor and helpful editor has lost hope – or their job. If there are older journalists still working alongside us, we tend to catch a lot of the animosity over the widening technology gap.

Like Pat, we have been frustrated watching traditional media flail around looking for a business model, many ignoring much-needed changes in favor of doing what they’ve been doing for decades. Maybe we try to push change and just end up more isolated. Maybe we gave up a long time ago and are just going through the motions.

We can try to go on to other journalism jobs, but we’re up against experienced veterans put out of work by layoffs and kids right out of school who will work for (sometimes literally) nothing. Competition is a lot more fierce than it was even five years ago.

Eventually, my generation may have to leave journalism altogether. I know I’ve thought about it a lot, but I’m just not ready. News is too much a part of my life to take a backseat – at least, not until all the options run out. Part of me wants to stick around to see if it’ll ever be what I thought it’d be like – and another part admires Thornton for having the guts to give  up that ghost while he still has time to make a long career doing something else.

While I think journalism in some format will still be around for the long haul, I have to wonder how many people my age will still be around to contribute. More importantly, will anyone care?

Journalism and the Interwebs: A Reading Guide

I read a lot of industry blogs and they generally all boil down to two topics: complaining about the Internet (or complaining about people complaining about the Internet) and lamenting the future of news.  It makes it all a little tough to keep up with what actual issues we’ve settled this year and what’s still out there to be figured out.

Thankfully, the Nieman Lab Blog took the time to assemble what dominated discussion regarding the future of news this year and takes a look at what will likely be hot topics next year as the industry continues to reel and (hopefully) evolve.  Most notably, next year seems to be heading in a direction of looking beyond the industry itself to what the affects the changes in the industry will (or should) have on journalism education, politics and public policy.

And in the second camp of journalism industry blog posts, Paul Bradshaw reviews all of the complaints news folks have had against The Internets over the years in one fell swoop. From hating on Google to opposing blogs and user-provided news, he offers something of a summation of just how depressing some news execs can be when it comes to that which they don’t understand.

In online news, only the presentation matters

It the industry may finally be learning from our companions in social media and aggregation. We’re starting to see that users want things to be simple, up-to-the-minute, all in one place and, by God, they aren’t going to just read whatever we say they should.

I’ve been working on a project with Gannett that tackles the next phase of our websites’ design to reflect a lot of these observations. I expect the same is happening at news companies all around the nation. I can only hope we all don’t continue to make the same mistakes in designing around the often conflicting interests in content and advertising.

The past couple of weeks have seen the roll out of a few new looks and ideas for online news presentation that really seem to focus on the observed needs and desires of readers, while not ignoring how much the online medium has to offer. These three presentations, in their own ways, seem to fit what we know users want…and quite notably, they dared to design them without ad positions.

NewsPulse

NewsPulse on CNN.com is a great visualization of the idea many of us have had for online presentation. It’s s simple, sortable stream of stories by media type, topic and various measures of popularity. It is essentially Digg without the Diggs and a lot cleaner interface.

Caveat: As a front page web news manager, I hope some measure of importance of news could be factored in as a filterable option, as many people who’d use this product might not otherwise see “important” headlines because they would not be popular or in a topic area they would tend to read. Of course, the user should probably visit another site if they want “important” news anyway (zing).

Living Stories

Living Stories, the new presentation experiment from Google, the NYT and WaPo is exactly what online news should be. I can’t get over how amazing this presentation is and how useful it can be for following a complex, long-term story or topic (like the health care reform).

A Living Story gathers all news updates, opinion, multimedia and conversation on an ongoing story in one place, at one URL. The format is best suited to help a reader see the latest developments in a story, with a timeline of events, important documents and user comments in an easy-to-digest fashion. What I like best about it that it is customizable, cookied for returning visitors to pick up where they left off and easy to follow offsite via RSS and email alerts.

Best of all, if this project works out for all parties involved, Google will make this available to other sites. It’d be a huge improvement in what’s currently available on most news sites, including that of the WaPo and the Times. You can read more about the living story from Paul Bradshaw, who is similarly dazzled.

Real-Time Search

You might not consider it a news presentation, but Google’s real-time search is a perfect format for breaking news. It builds on Google’s already formidable search presence with live news updates on a searched topic from news sites and Twitter (with more to come). It isn’t exactly made for news, but it should be. Maybe if we spent more time working with Google as opposed to trying to fight them, we could get something really great out of a product like this.
We at Cincinnati.Com used Google’s real-time search to supplement our coverage of University of Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly’s departure for Notre Dame.  It’s an improvement over Twitter search (which we’d usually use) in a lot of ways because it allows you to see the latest news on the topic from blogs and news sites. I do wish that, like Twitter search, it allowed you to customize a geographic range…but that can always come later.

People read newspapers, but news execs misunderstand their loyalty

First, the good news. A new Scarborough  study finds that most Americans still read newspapers in some format. It found that 74% of American adults either read a print newspaper or visit a newspaper Web site at least once a week. That’s pretty good reach, which is nice, but it might not really matter. If advertisers don’t think that’s good enough – or if newspaper shareholders continue to remain unimpressed, readership doesn’t mean much at all in terms of survival.

Of course, we as an industry keep digging our own graves by prematurely declaring the death of journalism in columns and blogs every week. We really need to learn a lesson or two about message management.

Now the bad news. The people we as an industry rely on to make important business decisions (including keeping some of us employed) don’t have a clue how precarious our presence in the marketplace is without loyalty from readers.

A survey from the American Press Institute indicates a big disconnect between news executives and readers when it comes to judging the importance of the local print newspaper – and of those papers’ presence online.

One particularly appalling bit of info: 75% news execs think switching off their websites will drive people back to print newspapers instead of other websites. Readers, of course, say they’d simply go to another local news website, national news site or TV/radio. The execs seem to think this is still the boom era for newspapers and they still have a monopoly.

These people are deciding the future of my industry. God help us.

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