Category Archives: Media

The News of the Death of My Employer is Greatly Exaggerated

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This is kind of odd: one of the bloggers for Business 2.0 linked (via del.icio.us) to a Valleywag gossip piece about the "stay of execution" that Business 2.0 got from the honchos at Time Inc.  Apparently Business 2.0 was scheduled to be shuttered after the September issue, but there’s been an 11th our reprieve from the suits in New York.

I subscribe to two magazines, Wired and Business 2.0, so I was a little surprised to learn that one was on the chopping block.  Actually I think I was more disappointed in myself for not knowing this than I was surprised that the magazine might be shut down.  After all the magazine business isn’t much better off than the newspaper business.

Anyway, it had to be kind of weird for a writer at Business 2.0 to link to his own professional Mark Twain-like, "the report of my death is an exaggeration" moment.  I just hope that the magazine lives as long as Twain did after that quote.

Media Future?

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Faces of Faith in America, this year’s project for News21, a journalism initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, offers a glimpse of new media applications for tomorrow’s journalists.  I especially like the Data Road Trip which displays data about different statistical extremes on a map of the U.S.  For instance you can click on a county in Arkansas that has the highest per capita rate of divorce in the country and it pops up a window with a one paragraph overview, some stats and an embedded video story.  Very nice.

Found via Boing Boing.

Want to Help Save a Newspaper’s Butt? The Greensboro News & Record is Hiring

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The Greensboro News & Record is hiring a Digital Media Director.  From the job listing:

The (Greensboro,
NC) News & Record, the Piedmont Triad’s leading daily newspaper for
more than 100 years, is seeking a results-oriented, innovative Digital
Media Director to lead News & Record Interactive, the digital media
division of the News & Record. The Digital Media Director is
general manager for the digital media department with a key focus on
leveraging our content into new multimedia platforms and revenue
streams. The Digital Media Director is responsible for developing the
strategic direction of the department, maximizing revenue
opportunities, increasing profitability and supporting the growth and
development of the interactive staff. As a member of the Company
Leadership Team the director works collaboratively with other
departments and reports to the President/Publisher. Successful
candidates have a minimum of 2-3 years management experience in digital
media and a minimum of 5 years mid-management level experience with
P&L responsibility. Bachelor’s degree required and a MBA is a plus.
Candidate must be highly conversant in digital media, able to work
effectively in team-based environment with creativity and resiliency to
adapt to changing business or market demands.

I’m tempted to throw my hat in the ring.  Okay, I don’t have "2-3 years management experience in digital media and a minimum of 5 years mid-management level experience with P&L responsibility."  But, hey, I did start an online publishing operation for a b-to-b publisher back in 2000 and it did pretty well.  On top of that I’ve successfully uploaded three videos to YouTube (there’s your digital) and I’ve thought long and hard about doing my own podcast.  That’s gotta count for something, right?

If you want to throw your hat into the ring with Lex and John then update that resume and send it to the N&R by August 17.

Winston-Salem Journal Needs to Edit Email a Bit More Carefully

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Journalemail
Long ago I signed up for the Winston-Salem Journal’s email alert service.  I don’t know if I also signed up for their advertisers’ messages or if it’s part of the package when you sign up for the alerts, but a few months ago I also started receiving those alerts.  Well, a couple of minutes ago I received one of their advertising messages for Harris Teeter and there’s a slight problem.  They apparently forgot to change the "From" field of the message because instead of saying something like "JournalNow.com Special Harris Teeter Prize Offer" it says "JournalNow.com Breaking News: WFU coach Skip Prosser dies".  (Click on the image to the left to see a screen shot of the email).

The death of Skip Prosser was a big and tragic story here last week and it’s unfortunate for the folks at Harris Teeter that their ad message is being associated with a mistake that I think everyone will find tacky at best.  More likely Journal readers will find it highly insensitive and the kind of mistake that just shouldn’t happen.

Update: I just received another email from JournalNow apologizing for the first.  Here’s the text:

Moments ago, you received a very unfortunate e-mail from JournalNow.com.

The e-mail was supposed to contain an advertising message sent by JournalNow for Harris Teeter.

While the message did contain the Harris Teeter information, it also came to you using a “From” line that had been used last week on a Breaking News message: the death of Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser.

This juxtaposition was completely inappropriate and inexcusable, and I’d like to personally apologize for the mistake. No disrespect was meant to Skip Prosser or his family.

JournalNow, not Harris Teeter, takes full responsibility for the error. I will assure you that every effort will be made not to have anything like it happen again.

Mark C. Anderson
General Manager
JournalNow.com

I received the first email at 12:39 and the apology at 1:08.  That’s some good response time, which leads me to believe that they probably caught their mistake even before the first complaint hit their email server.

Oh, and Esbee points out in the comments that the contest ends December 26, 2006.  That means that either the Journal ran the wrong ad art or the ad rep for Harris Teeter is in seriously deep doo-doo.

Is it a Blog if You Call it a Blog?

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The Winston-Salem Journal just launched a new Harry Potter "blog" called the Muggle Report.  I put quotes around the word blog because I really don’t know if I’d call this thing a blog.  I’d lean more towards calling it a micro-site rather than a blog for two simple reasons:

  1. It doesn’t have an interactive feel to it.  No comments enabled, at least that I could find, although they do have entries from a contest they ran asking kids to write an article predicting how the book series would end.  That’s pretty cool but not really a function of the "blog".
  2. To me a blog is something more than a static information site.  It usually reflects the personality of the folks posting information and has a dialog (see above) within its walls.  This site feels like a one-off tied to a big event (the release of the last Potter book and the release of the latest Potter movie).  I suspect that it will have a short life and will then be archived, which to me says its more of a special interest site.  A real world analogy would be the difference between a magazine that is run in every Sunday paper and a special insert like the Pro Football preview that is inserted in the Sunday paper at the beginning of the football season.

Now is it that big a deal what they call it?  Probably not, but just like I wouldn’t call Time magazine a book I wouldn’t call this site a blog.  Of course if it grows legs and keeps going, with the writers and readers engaging in a constant dialog about all things Potter (think of it as a Potter Book Club debate) then it could definitely be termed a blog. 

Blog or no blog, I’m still left wondering why no comments?  I’m willing to bet they’d get a bunch of traffic from that younger audience that every paper in America is pursuing.  They might even get their average reader age south of the AARP line.

The Local News Food Chain

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Until pretty recently I would have
told you that the way local news flows online is as follows:

  1. Local news outlet breaks a story
  2. Local blogs pick it up, provide commentary, go nuts, etc.
  3. Local news outlet reports online reaction to the story they reported, thus
    creating a "local reaction story"
  4. Start over

Lately, though, I’d say that the information flows both ways.  Here’s a
classic example:

  1. Winston-Salem based blogger Esbee gets a comment on one of her
    blog posts that asks if she’s heard anything about a flurry of break-ins in the
    Sherwood area.  The commenter had pasted in the text of an email that was making
    its way around the community.
  2. She hasn’t, but she writes
    a separate post     with the comment in the body to see if anyone has heard
    about them.  She also checks the police calls and finds some
    corroborating information.
  3. She gets comments asking her to remove the address that police provided,
    although it’s really just a block number AND it’s public info that’s on the
    police website.  She does remove the address but points out that it’s public
    info.  The last comment on her post says, "How the hell did the Journal miss
    this?!?!Now that I look through, there are like 5 "investigative support" things
    at that address, too! Do they actually look at this stuff, or do they wait for
    the police to spoonfeed what the police would have us hear?"
  4. Today the Winston-Salem Journal runs this
    story     with the headline, "Police report multiple
    break-ins in Sherwood Forest area"

I’m willing to bet that the Journal reporter came across Esbee’s post and
then did what reporters are paid to do, which is dig into it. I’m not saying
this is a bad or improper thing, I just think it’s a natural evolution of the
form and I only write about it because I constantly hear people say that blogs
are a bunch of narcissistic ramblings written by people with nothing better to
do.  Obviously I disagree.

I IM’d Esbee about this and she pointed out
that the real food chain was:

  1. Email or comments are sent to blogger about a community issue
  2. Blogger looks at it and finds the story viable (i.e. not a hoax)
  3. Blogger posts, which generates more comments and feedback and fleshes out
    the story
  4. Media picks up the story

I think she’s right, and sometimes there’s even a little bit of personal
experience involved just like I had with
the allegations
against a teacher at my son’s school. But the main point is that local blogs
provide another avenue for community information to be shared, and in the
atmosphere of shrinking budgets and reporting staffs that newspapers are
operating in they would be foolish not to follow the leads that the blogs
provide.  When you think about it, how have news operations traditionally gotten
their stories? Tips via email, and phone calls, press releases from companies
and institutions, monitoring the police scanner, etc.  How is monitoring blogs
any different?

One thing I’d like to see is that if a paper does
pick up a lead from a blog that perhaps they reference the blog in their
article. If nothing else it would give readers an opportunity to get the back
story and it would acknowledge the contribution that the blogger is making to
the community. Another reason I’d give is that newspaper folks have complained
for years that local TV newscasts get most of their stories from the newspapers,
so I’d hope that newspapers would be sensitive to the same issue with the
bloggers.  On the other hand maybe they take the view that if the TV folks
aren’t going to give them credit for story leads then why should they give
bloggers credit?  The "kick the dog" theory as it were.

Side note: I
just noticed that Esbee’s been removed from the Journal’s blog
page.  Since Life in
Forsyth is easily the most informative blog focused on the Winston-Salem
area I’m a bit surprised by this.  I certainly hope it’s not because she wrote
this
a while back.  That would be a bit like biting the hand that feeds if you ask
me.

Lenslinger I Ain’t

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A couple of weeks back the youngest’s little league team won the AA league championship and I actually managed to film most of it for posterity’s sake.  Normally when I film something I promptly forget about it and it falls into the Lowder Film Archive abyss, which houses too many unlabeled tapes to count.  This time I decided that I’d take some initiative and create a little movie to share with the rest of the youngest’s team and in the process I learned a few things.

  1. When you’re filming a sporting event you need lots of tape and batteries.  In an effort to make sure I made it to the end of the game with tape and battery to spare I filmed only the at-bats of both teams, while lots of play in the field went undocumented.  I made it to the end of the game but let’s just say that there wasn’t a lot of context in the final version.
  2. I don’t have the steadiest of hands.  My little Samsung DV-8 was fluttering like a butterfly in the wind.
  3. Digital video chews up a buttload of memory on a computer.
  4. My computer’s processor, which seemed like such a screamer when I confined myself to work related stuff online, was sucking some serious wind by the time I finished my movie project.
  5. Synching video and audio is trickier than you’d think.  My transitions between scenes were a little, uh, stark.
  6. This video stuff is F-U-N.
  7. This video stuff is H-A-R-D.

By the time I was done I had a 35 minute movie that I copied back onto a DV-8 tape and then burned DVD copies on our recorder in the living room.  For whatever reason my computer’s DVD/RW drive won’t copy to DVD-R formatted discs, of which I have a gazillion, so I decided to utilize the recorder attached to the TV while we watched other stuff on Tivo.  I sent a copy of the DVD to the team’s coach to make sure I had all the kids’ names right in the credits and to have him get word out to the rest of the team that the DVD was available IF he thought it was any good.  He emailed me a couple of days later saying he thought it was great and to let me know he was going to email the rest of the team parents so they could contact me directly to request copies.  I’ve since sent out seven copies and I’ve already gotten back one really enthusiastic "thanks" and I have to say it’s about as gratifying as anything I’ve done in a long time.

So I may not be a Lenslinger yet, but I might be looking at a career switch in the near future…nah, it’s too damn hard.

Yadkin Valley Times

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I came across a new blog/website called the Yadkin Valley Times which is written and hosted by Andy Mathews the former editor of The Yadkin Ripple.  What interests me the most is that I found the site via a story in the Triad Business Journal about the publishers of some small newspapers in NW North Carolina who resigned after their papers were purchased by Heartland Publications.  The  Biz Journal story used Mathews’ post about his interview with one of the publishers in its reporting, so for those keeping track you have this progression:

  1. Editor of small mainstream paper starts his own online news venture (looks like he’s using WordPress)
  2. Said editor interviews publisher of his former paper (and the Elkin Tribune) about the publisher’s resignation.
  3. In its story about the resignations a mainstream business news publisher cites material from the new online news service.

Add to this mix the fact that another mainstream paper in the area, The Winston-Salem Journal, just did a front page piece on how Yadkin County is struggling with the tension between residents who want to keep the old conservative "country" flavor of the county and those who want the county to evolve into a more cosmopolitan area.  Then the Journal’s managing editor, Ken Otterbourg, writes a post in his blog about the print piece and ties it to the story about the publishers resigning.  If you look at all of these pieces together you have a nice snapshot of the todays media lifecycle.

Now all we need is for some turkey at one of the local TV stations to decide they need a "war room" like CNN’s "Situation Room", hire a 20-something woman to stand in front of a large flat screen monitor and then do 45 second broadcasts of her surfing around local online sources and in the process have her tell us what we’re seeing.  Heck they might even have her play a Youtube video shot by a local citizen who happened to be in the right place at the right time, which of course might lead them to lay off all their camera folks (sorry Lenslinger).

In all seriousness I am interested in what Mathews is doing with the Yadkin Valley Times, if for no other reason than it might be an early sign of what could be a promising development.  That is, with lots of professional journalists hitting the streets as their former employers struggle with legacy businesses, we might begin to see more and more of them plant their own flags in the ground and start their own publishing concerns.  After all they don’t have to sell that much advertising to match their old salaries, and if enough of them do it and then create a kind of co-op that they can pitch to advertisers (the former city hall beat reporter teams up with the former sports reporter) then they might create some legitimate competition for their former bosses.  That would be kind of cool to see.

Into the Belly of the Beast

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I had a cup of coffee this morning with Kim Underwood at Chelsee’s.  Kim is the Winston-Salem Journal’s online guy and we had a great conversation.  After coffee we walked over the the Journal’s building he gave me a tour of the newsroom and introduced me to a few folks.  Someone asked me if I was going to write about the layoffs last week at the News & Record and when I said I wasn’t sure she said something to the effect of "you should, especially since you haven’t been shy about writing about us." 

Good point, but my reply to her was that I didn’t feel as comfortable writing about internal goings-on as "public facing" events.  For instance I have no problem critiquing the newspaper’s web re-design because I’m the audience and my opinion matters as much as anyone elses.  On the other hand, I don’t work at the newspaper, don’t know the financial situation, don’t know the personnel situation and so I don’t feel qualified in evaluating the specifics of the layoffs. (For what its worth, I took a similar tack last November when the Journal had their own layoffs.)  On the other-other hand, if some of the stories coming out of the layoff action are true then I can say that in those specific instances the individuals who were laid off got a pretty rough deal.  Here are two specific cases that I know of:

  1. One N&R library staffer was laid off and he is getting ready to enter cancer treatments and is apparently going to need a bone-marrow transplant in the future.  I’d originally heard this as a rumor, but now Ed Cone has posted an appeal to help Marcus Green pay for the COBRA expenses for the procedure so I guess it’s true.
  2. One reporter was hired, started last Monday and was laid off at the end of last week. Four days on the job!  How the management at the N&R let that happen is beyond me. At best it’s poor management and at worst it’s callousness of the grossest kind.

As for the rest of the layoffs I don’t really have much to say.  It’s obviously a business call that the folks at Landmark felt they had to make, but it doesn’t make the situation any easier for the folks now looking for employment. 

In general terms one thing I’d like to see, just once, is a case where a senior exec takes a personal hit in order to save the folks working for him or her.  I’m not talking about the N&R here, I’m talking about all the companies out there who are downsizing in an effort to improve their financials.  Is there one CEO out there willing to say, "You know what, the buck stops here.  Before I lay off 30 people making $50,000 each I’m going to give up my $1.5 million bonus, and together we’re going to fix this business"?  Somehow I think we’re more likely to hear, "It’s unfortunate that we have to let go 30 fine people but rest assured that as your all-star CEO I’ve created a contingency plan to have those same functions fulfilled by 60 people in Bangalore for 1/6 the cost, which is why my $1.5 million incentive is returning a tremendous ROI."

Oh, and by-the-by, the folks at the Journal were really nice to me, especially when you consider that I’ve not always been so nice to them.  Either they take a more charitable view of we bloggers than many of their brethren, or they know exactly what I am: an opinionated person with enough ego to think that people might want to read his opinions, or seen another way, a guy who’s a few slices short of a full loaf and knows how to type.  Either way, they treated me well and I had a good time checking out their digs.

For My Friends (and Relative) in the Newspaper Business

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In an interesting opinion piece written for the Wall Street Journal online Walter Hussman, the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, makes the argument that newspapers are killing themselves by providing news on their websites for free.  He compares the circulation losses of newspapers that provide free news on their sites to the gains or less egregious losses of his paper and the Wall Street Journal (they both charge subscription fees for full access to news on their site).  He also throws out some numbers like this:

The Inland Cost and Revenue Study
shows that newspapers will generate between $500 and $900 in revenue
per subscriber per year. But a newspaper’s Web site typically generates
$5 to $10 per unique visitor per year. It may be that newspaper Web
sites as an advertising medium, and free news, just can’t generate the
revenue to sustain a valued news operation.

Without getting into the details (read his piece if you want the details) he goes on to conclude that the decrease in revenue leads to layoffs in the newsroom, which is essentially killing the newspapers’ Golden Goose:

Collectively, the American
newspaper industry spends $7 billion on news and editorial operations.
This includes everything from copy editor salaries to sports travel
expenses. In addition, the Associated Press spent about $600 million
world-wide in editing and creating news. By offering this news for
free, and selling it to aggregators like Google, Yahoo and MSN for a
small fraction of what it costs to create it, newspaper readership and
circulation have declined.

These declines are accelerating.
In 2004 and prior years, industry circulation declines were usually
less than 1%. Since March 2005, these declines have been 2%-3% per
year. With declining readership comes declining ad revenues, which are
followed by layoffs.

The newsroom layoffs are most
troubling, as less news with less quality, context and details results
in more declines in readership and later, declines in advertising. If
the $7 billion spent covering news becomes $6 billion, and later $5
billion, it is not just the newspaper industry that gets hurt.
Journalism will be diminished in America with less investigative and
enterprise reporting; indeed, less reporting of state houses, city
halls, school boards, business and sports. Clearly a lot is at stake.

It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news.

I think there are some very valid points to be made about newspapers charging a subscription for access to their news, but I think Mr. Hussman is being short sighted, and here are some reasons why:

  • Ad dollars have only just started to migrate online.  Online advertising is still a relatively immature business and old-line advertisers, agencies and publishers are just now figuring out how to best buy and sell ad inventory.  The online piece of the advertising pie is going to explode and the newspapers that put up a paid wall around their online operations will probably suffer in the long run.
  • Web sites are a hell of a lot cheaper to run than printing presses.  When the online advertising takes off the margins of the online operations will make the print guys green with jealousy.
  • The "newsroom" is going to look very different in the future.  I think the trend towards a professional staff of writers/editors managing content submitted by semi-pros in the community will continue.  Operations like the Greensboro News & Record are beginning to show that members of the community who have a vested interest in stories are more than willing to provide content for free, or really cheap.  Editorial operations should actually get bigger as a percentage of total head count in the future.

These last three points are a real stretch, but since I have no vested interest and everyone knows I’m not that bright I’m going to make them anyway.

  • I think that offset presses are going to eventually be replaced by digital on-demand presses that do small runs for micro-markets.  Think of all those neighborhood editions on a smaller scale.
  • With the digital production I think you’ll see micro-market ad packages being sold. The ad rates will be higher on a cost-per-thousand basis, but they will be more attractive to advertisers because they’ll offer more neighborhood-specific targeting.  For instance, if you’re a restaurant wouldn’t you be willing to pay $30/thousand to reach the 5,000 people who live within a 5-mile radius of your restaurant than $10/thousans to reach the entire 100,000 newspaper circulation?
  • This type of production might necessitate a new distribution model, i.e. using the US Postal Service for home delivery from Mon-Sat.  Not sure what would be done on Sunday, but the reason this might happen can be found in the direct marketing industry. Direct marketing companies already do household-level prospect targeting using digital production and the USPS Zip+4 database.  You know those Money Mailers you get in the mail all the time?  That’s advertisers buying space in an envelope that they know will be delivered to only select neighborhoods they want to reach.  The newspapers could offer similar targeting.

    You could argue that readers want their paper first thing in the morning, but honestly how many people use their local paper for breaking news?  They get that on TV, the web and radio.  The local paper is for depth of local coverage.  I’d be willing to bet that most people would be okay with reading the paper over dinner rather than breakfast.  Also, because the number of home subscribers is trending down, quickly, it might not be cost effective to have dedicated delivery people who drive around delivering papers door to door. If there are only two deliveries per street how much can a delivery person reasonably expect to make?  On the other hand the mailman is delivering one way or another so why not piggy back?  Obviously the USPS isn’t the only option, but I think it would be interesting to look at it. I’m still not sure what you’d do about Sunday delivery, which is a rather large hole in my thinking.

These are just some of the reasons that I think Mr. Hussman’s conclusions are right in the short term, but not the long term.  The media environment, of which newspapers are but one part, is dynamic.  Mr. Hussman is right to challenge the current thinking in the newspaper industry, but I think his strategy will ultimately limit his newspaper’s growth potential. 

(Cross posted on Lowder Enterprises, LLC).