Content Bridges

Let's Call It Google Life

Twenty-first century Internet life has revolved around many things Google. We Google each other. We Google for news. Google Adsense. Googlebombs. Googlaritmentic, I called its ad revolution.

For much of the last century, it was about Life. Life was the premier pictorial  chronicler of American life, from its founding in 1936 through much of the century, a living reference, encased on many bookshelves across the country. Think moonshots, Walker Evans, Marilyn Monroe -- many of the iconic shots stuck in our brains -- come from Life.

Now Life -- itself a thin, throwaway weekly newspaper insert, hardly a shadow of itself-- and Google are mating.

Today, at the New York SIIA meeting, Time Inc CEO Ann Moore announced that Google will digitize Life photos, from 1936 on. (For more SIIA conference coverage, check out David Scott, John Blossom and Barry Graubart.)

Moore offered no details, but the announcement sets the mind alight. Digitizing whole mainly anonymous libraries is one thing, but both memorializing and spotlighting Life's riches is something else again. What's the economic model -- buy a reprint of the famous VJ day New York kiss ? Will Google be the photo repository, a preview of Google Base to come? Picture that.

Dow Jones’ Annual Reporting: Into Terra Incogdigito

Hold on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

That’s the message I got out of Dow Jones’ recent fourth-quarter earnings announcement. Sure, Dow Jones’ numbers were better than what we’ve seen coming out of the industry yesterday. But I noticed the news placed politely in paragraph six (of seven) in the Wall Street Journal’s own story: Dow Jones will no longer provide upfront quarterly guidance, opting for an annual outlook. “This change is consistent with the company’s focus on long-term performance.” 

Indeed. It’s a good idea, and you can bet Dow Jones CEO Rich Zannino would even prefer a quadrennial reporting, rather than annual. Why? While Dow Jones is among the leaders in rapidly re-thinking and restructuring the print and digital products it produces, its leaders well know that the restructuring is an open-ended one, one likely to take three to five years to work well. But it’s largely uncharted territory; let’s call it Terra Incogdigito, a place of potholed expressways and hazy destinations. 

Sure, what it’s doing makes a lot of sense – giving room and resources to  Consumer head Gordon Crovitz and Enterprise head Clare Hart -- to  re-org and meet changing readers’ habits. It’s become a joke around the WSJ newsroom how each Page One must have at least one How or Why head – pushing the second-day, analysis angle of the print product. Sure, editors may be pushing hard, but you know the message is kicking him. Compare that push, which may be a bit too pushy at times, to most dailies, which still believe they are newspapers of record. They believe they announce the news – news that has already been announced by MSN, the Huffington Post and DayLife the day before.

But Dow Jones has little illusion. Rich Zannino told an SIIA audience today that he hopes to move his company from a 70%+ print revenue reliance to less than 50% -- without reducing print revenues. (For more SIIA conference coverage, check out David Scott, John Blossom and Barry Graubart.)

Big Pharma Targets Newspaper Readers....Those with One At Least One Heart Attack

Hey, who says newspapers and their editors have lost credibility? Just because print circulation is in the tank, online readership is woeful and the half-life of 50-something daily newspaper journalists seems to be halved every week, that doesn't mean some people don't keep their respect for the mythical Lou Grant.

How do we know? Big Pharma tells us so. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis are spending more than $100 million marketing Plavix, a prescription drug that reduces the risk of blood clots.
And according to a great Stuart Elliott column in the New York Times, they know how to reach their market. Using both TV ads (yes, Tivo mavens, they're still being produced) and print (!) ads, Saatchi & Saatchi has lined up the archetypes to which would-be customers will respond.

You know, hockey coaches, construction foremen, school principals, ER nurses...and newspaper editors. In fact, the ads' newspaper editor (actually an actor; hard to find a photogenic editor) rules the mythical "Daily Herald". What do all of our role models have in common? They are all “formidable in their worlds.” Now formidableness, that's a world I've often heard awestruck reporters use as they described their own Perry Whites.

But still, it's nice for the profession to get a little respect at this anxious-making time. Or it would be if we didn't know more about the target market for Plavix: "anybody in their 50s or older who’ve had a heart attack” and is worried about blood clots.

That's according to Justin Harrington of Saatchi and Saatchi, who went on to say that if the target audience was younger, an editor would have been an inappropriate occupation to include.

“Our audience, being older, still believes in the evening news and still believes in the daily newspaper,” he said.

Given that the average age of a newspaper reader is now 56, we see that S and S has done its research. Now it's up to all those "Daily Herald" editors out there to watch all those alarmist headlines out there -- global warming, Middle Eastern nightmare scenarios, Google announcements --- so they don't hand out second heart attacks and kill off the audience prematurely.

Selling Stuff, Buying Time

The newspaper industry news sounds more like a swap meet these days than a founding institution of the American republic. Every day, you hear a publisher offering his wares on the street corner of the day, whether that's talking before analysts in Las Vegas, offering big picture strategic views to New York journalists or in the barrooms of the industry get-togethers in Orlando or Chicago. Hey, wanna buy my assets?

Call it strategic selling, to put the best face on it. What it is, simply, is selling stuff to buy time. To buy the time to get from this fairly awful here, of budget-cutbacks-without-end-and-no-big-new-revenue-in-sight, to a there that captains of the industry and their increasingly dissprited armies hope will surface. A there, of increasing niche and digital revenues, revenues that may support a sophisticated, experienced news operation post-2010. There looks at least that far away.

So here we have auctions of the moment. McClatchy surprises everyone and sells off its largest paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune just before year's end. It gained a big tax write-off against gains. As importantly, it dumped a slow-growth enterprise. McClatchy's here-to-there plan: concentrate on fast-growth markets, whose growth mitigates the structural downturn in print, buying maybe 2-3 more years than its peers stuck in slower-growth markets. Dow Jones sells off a half-dozen of its community papers. The New York Times parts with its broadcast group, recognizing that broadcast TV (average viewer age of 60 as compared with newspapers' own relatively youthful 56) will only drag it down. Tribune grasps at the few oddball offers tossed its way for its once-mighty portfolio, probably trying to figure out how best to sell off its 25 TV stations to get some capital -- and buy time for its print and Internet properties. The list goes on and on.

Selling stuff and buying time isn't a whole strategy, but it's a partial one that makes sense. We're seeing an intensifying of restructuring and partnering, from Dow Jones, the Times, the Post and the Yahoo and Google deals on. And we'll see lots more this year. In the meantime, news companies are trying to build as much of a war chest as they can for the battles of the next several years.

Me and Demi...and Remembering Jim Batten

The estimable Michael Wolff skewers the billionaires who would be 21st Century newspaper moguls in the latest edition of Vanity Fair, its cover graced by Demi Moore. He well captures the banalities of our times. In the piece, Michael noted some of my research on historical newspaper trends and quoted me, "The principle of free speech owes at least as much to department stores as to the First Amendment."

It's worth providing some context to that remark, which I shared with Michael at a Chicago meeting. I use that quote often and attribute it in tribute to Jim Batten.  Jim served as CEO of Knight Ridder in its golden age, from 1988 to 1995, the year he died, way early in so many ways, of a brain tumor.

I don't remember the year I heard those words tumble out of Jim, though it was probably around 1990. It was in Miami at a Knight Ridder editors' meeting. I remember the small assemblage was shocked when they heard it. Our first reaction: Jim, a long-time editor before ascending into the corporate executive ranks, was making light of our papers' public interest reason for being.

Mercury News Catches “Localitis” Chill

Local, local, local. That’s the mantra the remaining newspaper companies are chanting, given the pains inflicted by a world that gets its national and global news instantaneously via TV, radio and the web. Newspapers have come to realize that they are often second-day players in the national/world news arena. The local, local, local mantra has made sense for a long time, but one that is now taking hold with a fervor as declining revenues result in slashed newsroom staffs and budgets.

So what’s that mean about newspaper Page One coverage of big national events? BIG, as in the President announces a surge/escalation of the Iraq War. Big News that all polls show is the #1 concern of the American public, big news that officially breaks in the evening, dinner time on the West Coast. In San Jose, it means….not too much.

Bannered across the San Jose Mercury News’ Page One on Thursday morning: “Governor scripts boldly for state.” Highlights box within the banner, including such boldness as “closing the state budget’s operating deficit,” “increasing tuition for university students,” and “repealing the state income-tax credit for teachers”.

Below the banner, the centerpiece story: “Arctic Attitude.” It’s three columns wide, big thermometers gracing a graphic and a subhead saying, “During Cold Snap, Residents Told to Bundle Up Pets, Plants, Selves.” Yowsers, it is going to get down to 27 degrees.

Apparently, though things may be heating up in Baghdad– if you read the smaller print. The one-column headline offers this analysis: “Bush Bets His Legacy on Risky Iraq Strategy,” a New York Times story. Inside, on Page 3, the Nation/World focus page focuses on the Iraq story, with a profound focus on Tom Lantos, a Bay Area congressman now in charge of a key oversight committee. Little depth about the first big story of the year.

Hey, I’m all for local, but this Page One borders on the classic Dacron Republican Democrat newspaper parody done more than 20 years ago by the National Lampoon people. After this crossroads election, after the acknowledgment of harrowing comparisons to Vietnam, after all polling shows Iraq is the #1 issue on readers’ minds, the Mercury News tells me it’s going to get below freezing?

I’m afraid this Page One is the textbook – political science and journalism – definition of provincial.

Frenemies! Can't We All Just Get Along?

Frenemies, indeed. What was wrong with good, old-fashioned "co-opetition"? This shameless huckstering (apologies to Sir Martin Sorrell) in Internet business neologisms gives analysts a bad name.

But still, okay, friend or foe? Declare thyself, Google. (And Yahoo, MSN, and the rest of you.) It's a good question on the Old Media side, and fairly silly one on the New one. Take this L.A. Times interview with David Eun, Google's new face to Old Media. Good questions by Chris Gaither, but unremarkable responses, really recitations of positions we've heard over the years. It's not like Google and Yahoo have big war rooms (but they do have those gigantic white boards, don't they?), spending endless hours trying to figure out to pry loose newspaper revenue. But you know, if it happens, it happens, the will of the Internet gods, apparently. Laissez roulez les bonnes revenues.

Take Google's latest foray into newspaper ad brokering. The 90-day test, involving 66 newspapers and 100 advertisers, is going swimmingly, according to Google in this WashPost account. How many ads, well, at least several inquiries a week at the largest papers. Not much impact if you're churning about 50 billion bucks of ad money a year, as the newspaper industry is. But to Google, plus revenue. And enough to herald Stage 2 of the test, or beta, or whatever they are going to call it. This first-stage test involved one hundred advertisers. Google supposedly has more than 300,000 (400,000?) advertisers in its ad programs. When and how might it open those floodgates, at least partially?

For newspapers, it's a great short-term idea. More revenue from advertisers newspapers haven't thought it cost-effective to sell to. Back in my days at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press as managing editor, I recall suggesting that the ad department contact The Red Balloon bookstore on Grand Avenue. Great, little kids' bookstore, a 3.2-mile drive from the paper (according to Google Maps). The ad director said The Red Balloon was too small a potential to waste sales time on. Cost-of-sales. That's why dailies have tapped so shallowly into the local ad pool. The ad programs of Google and Yahoo -- and especially their metrics-driven self-service model -- take a deep dive. So newspapers can well pay them a 20% commission should the "test" become a program.

But what happens in the program stage? "Migration" is what's on everybody's minds. NYT Veep Todd Haskell opined in the Post story that the Times would upsell advertisers brought to them by Google, making them Times' customers. Wow, that's big of Google -- not only providing new revenue cheaply, but also turning over customers to the publishers. But wait a minute. When The Red Balloon, or any of other 300,000 want to test more ad possibilities -- radio, contextual ads, podcasts, magazines -- will they use Google, which is beginning to support all those choi ces, and providing a real-time console to track all ad spending, or will they want to fuller relationship with the Times? Sure, Google is staying to the Times: Have a shot at winning the customer. They know that the evolving customer proposition is in their favor.

So is the Google newspaper ads program a case of getting a nose into the newspaper ad tent? Sure it is. Remember Google is a learning organism. And when its time to pack up the tents and move on, guess who plans on leading the caravan?

Nine Questions About Wall Street Journal's Redesign

I give Gordon Crovitz credit. Since being appointed head of Dow Jones consumer division in February, he's moved quickly to meet the onrushing train that's plowing into the newpaper industry. His plan, dubbed Journal 3.0, aims to take an alternate track to the future. This year, he's moved to re-org the DJ Wires, the WSJ Online staff and the WSJ print staff to meet the realities of the day. Having done some "restructuring" of my own, I don't imagine it was a wholly popular process within. This week the new Journal debuted.

Nine questions coming out of the redesign that aims to use the WSJ website to tell you "what's happening now" and the paper to tell you "what the news means":

1. Is there a better metaphor for the amazing shrinking American newspaper industry than the slimmed down Journal, which lost its prized Column One story, and looks just too little?

2. Don't you just love the fact that the Journal's wacky editorial page, with its newly tighter space, refused to keep the letters to the editor (OTHER people's opinion) and instead shipped them off to the back of the Marketplace section? Memo to editors: re-org the letters reorg. The re-design is supposed to be about respect for readers.

3. Will the slick new Video Center, well-configured and easy to use, mean All-Walt-Mossberg-All-The-Time? Are we ready for that?

4. Isn't it fun watching non-TV people do ITV, brusquely asking interview questions to cover their nervousness, or looking as big as Max Headroom coming at you? Scale is still an issue, but fun for now.

5. Where are the interactive, Ajax-able stock tables in the new Markets Data section, innovations already in place at Google Finance and in beta at Yahoo Finance? Google and Yahoo, in addition to Conde Nast, Time Warner and the Times are DJ's competitors to come online.

6. How come Marketwatch is such a minor player overall in the redesign -- Herb Greenberg's column on Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli didn't catch a refer, for instance  -- and a wholly separate presence from the new WSJ Markets online section? Is this calculated -- high market, mid-market segmentation -- or just an inability to figure out how to best integrate the brands yet?

7. "How now WSJ? " would be a good question to ask, as editors push the "How" or "Behind the News" angle on Page One daily a bit hard. It's a good idea -- pushing toward second day in a story that breaks the day before, but harder to accomplish than meets the eye. The Home Depot resignation was the Journal's first big chance, and while the headlining was in place, the lead story seemed more like an old-fashioned "paper of record" report. Still worth the push.

8. Isn't the home page of WSJ Online still looking a bit old and very listy, when online competitors, including DJ's own Marketwatch and MSNBC and Slate and Salon and even FoxNews, give you a better sense of play, of relative importance -- that thing editors do?

9. Doesn't the new Markets Data online section, heavily interactive and clearly a platform for more innovation, together with the New York Times similar play, mean a deathknell for local and regional dailies playing in the market data space, a space few have done well? It's another sign of the Europeanization of the U.S. press as we come to depend on national/global papers on a daily basis and look to local for just that -- local.

What's your question?

DIY Journalism Dawns in 2007

Do It Yourself or DIY helped build Home Depot, and it built one of Scripps' prime cable properties, DIY Network. Now it looks like a vanguard of journalists, fed up with endless downturn, moanin' and groanin' within Old Media, is blazing paths in DIY Journalism. We've had many websites that have re-purposed news -- from the early Snaps and Excites to the latter-day Googles, Yahoos and Topixs. Clearly there's been lots of gold in that re-purposed journalism, with a few trinkets trickling down to the journalists who produced the journalism, and their employers. Now journalists are seeing that the technology of web creation and distribution becoming more transparent, and they are starting their own businesses or moving to start-up websites.

This week's news tells us about the pugnaciously named Baltimore Bulldog. It's a project involving newspaper people and public radio people, with a nod to involving serious online ad expertise, to interactivity and to engaging community content. "The point is not to create a printed newspaper online but to do something that couldn't possibly be done on paper," says Sean Carton of the Bulldog.

On Jan . 23, The Politico, backed by Allbritton Communications, will debut in DC. It's a political inside-the-Beltway website/targeting paper. The talents come from Bloomberg, Time Magazine and the Washington Post.  And it is hiring on young reporters to add "energy" to the Beltway names -- Mike Allen, Roger Simon -- that will draw first readers. ThePolitico is trying to get the "online first" dynamic right and using the deep databasing abilities of the web for its political junkie readers.

Both new ventures show us the energy of DIY, a good antidote to these troubled times of layoffs, budget cutbacks and the-end-is-near gloom and doom. Clearly the underlying financial models for new ventures -- contextual ads, sponsorships, non-profit funding, angels, etc., etc., etc. -- are uncertain and ungainly. But combine them, with more than a dash of enthusiasm and sense that good journalism reaching readers who want to use modern media to learn and to know, and you have the beginnings of a future, rather than just the handholds of past glories.

Many journalists -- I've talked with several -- are dusting off business plans, seeking ways forward (apologies to President Bush and Ford Motor). In 2007, I think we'll see more of such efforts. Some will harness user-generated content, trying to artfully combine it with professional journalism. Others will be heavier on local knowledge, or local investigation. Still others will be portals of commentary and opinion.

It all reminds me of one of my first Internet epiphanies. Some time in the early '90s, I participated in a Knight Ridder session at Harvard (yes, that's one of the reminders of what a then-forward-looking journalism company could provide its people). Professor Jeff Rayport told us about this weird idea called "disintermediation." He drew out a top-to-bottom flow chart. At the top: a singer, say Springsteen. At the bottom, you, the music buyer. In between, agents, labels, distributors, retailers. He drew a looping line from Springsteen to you and said, that's the relationship the music buyer wants, to hear Bruce's music. Direct-to-buyer sales, or close to it, he said, was the promise of the Internet, and it would cause economic havoc and opportunity. That world has begun to develop, fitfully, and it's giving journalism fits.

DIY Journalism, growing, becoming sophisticated and increasingly networked, is one of journalism's futures. It is getting the news, gathered, written and analyzed by professionals, to the readers. Now all we have to do is figure out how to pay those professionals professional wages. Onward.