Content Bridges

Bridgin': Ads, Access, Innovation Links

Why It's ALL About Ads: Another sign of the ad-dominating future. Google is dropping pay-by-viewer video downloads on its site, in this Bloomberg report. With YouTube ad monetization, the wave of its future, this consumer-pay business is just a distraction. And Rupert's talking about taking down the WSJ wall in comments soon after the sales agreement. Which in turn could push competitor FT.com to do the same. I'm in agreement with Larry Kramer on this one. It's better to do a segmentation strategy of milking sub revenue for the Journal while using Marketwatch as the free online (and Fox Business Channel partner), as I wrote last week.

Why It's ALL About Access: Making the rounds recently is a quick five-pager from McKinsey, entitled "What Online Readers Want From Online News." Lots of consultant speak packed in -- "brand promiscuity," "digital cynics," and "citizen readers" -- but the points made are clear. They reinforce much of what we're learning about web news reading. Access -- finding lots of sources easily through an easy-to-use interface -- is number one with readers, polling up the 50% percentile range. Quality's the least valued, at 20% and less. The study reinforces the need for news publishers to both get into best content wrappers -- online and on the phone -- and to better understand that digital use isn't at all the same as print. Worth taking a minute to register, for the report, here.

Why It's ALL About Innovation: The Knight News Challenge's next deadline is coming in a couple of months. The Knight Foundation is one of the few good funding sources for innovative online journalism. I've written about its first set of awards -- lots of good potential there. Next deadline is Oct. 15. I think it's a great chance for younger and older (okay, experienced) journalists to get together and put together projects and winning business models. Link here.

Bridgin': Taking the NYT Private, Pegasus News Sold, Impact of Twin Cities Layoffs

Putting the Times in a Lockbox: Protect the Times by taking it private says Business Week's Jon Fine in a column. He figures assets sale of about a billion could defray a $5 billion cost of doing so. Take a look and run your own numbers here.

Pegasus News Sold: Busy summer. In the midst of Murdoch Madness, I missed the sale of Mike Orren's Pegasus News, which I mentioned in this morning's post to TV-station owner Fisher, of Seattle. Well-covered here by Peter Krasilovsky's Local Onliner, here. I've been picking up many signals that local broadcasters are amping up their web efforts -- going competitive for the same advertisers and readers that local newspaper sites thought they could "own". At this point, broadcasters get about 2% of their revenue from online, about a quarter of what local newspapers are getting -- but that gap could close within a couple of years. Taking the Pegasus News approach -- and platform -- is one more step in that direction. (Addendum: More from Pegasus on sale here.)

Twin Cities Layoffs Give Peek in Staff Cutbacks: As the names of those who took the Pioneer Press buyout become public, some have pointed out an interesting phenomenon. While early buyouts took out some of the most senior staff, the new ones also take out younger, though highly experienced people. In addition, librarian positions are becoming obsolescent. While Gannett's turning librarians into database managers -- focused on find and displaying publicly available community data -- most papers' are just buying out or laying off the librarians, an uneconomical "nice to have".

Anyone keeping a total of the number of years of journalistic experience lost this year in buyouts?

In addition, here's further numbers on the decline of reporting strength in the Cities. The Pioneer Press newsroom, which will be down to about 160, post buyouts/layoffs, for now, hit its peak in 2000 at 243.1 FTEs. Even in 1987, the paper had 210 FTEs in the newsroom

Bridgin': What About the Times?, PCM Cashes Out

What About the Times? The chill Rupert Murdoch sends through downtown New York is now blowing north toward the midtown HQ of the New York Times. The Times, too, has a two-tier shareholder system, with family controlling the company. But if Murdoch's super-sized offer could topple one two-tier system so unexpectedly, could it happen with the Sulzbergers and the Times?

That question has been on the lips of many watching the Dow Jones/News Corp saga, including New York Times reporters. Like all working journalists in the trade, they know the ground is shaking underneath the entire industry. What once seemed unshakable -- the Times itself -- now seems vulnerable, like so much of what we all have taken for granted.

So especially interesting is NYT Public Editor's Clark Hoyt's Sunday piece raising that question publicly and urging the Times to tell its own story. How does the Sulzberger family trust work? What are the Sulzbergers thinking? What's their plan to deal with continuing downturn of the industry?

It's time to ask the questions, get some insight and start a public discussion now, before the next trophy hunter pops up, unexpectedly.

What Bruce Sherman Hath Wrought:  Remember Bruce, whose PCM bought big into newspaper stocks and then embarked on a path to maximize value. He started with Knight Ridder. Unfortunately, when he huffed and puffed, Knight Ridder folded like a house of cards -- and PCM exited without a payoff.

Alan Mutter reports on how PCM has exited much of its newspaper holdings, and quoting Deutsche Bank's Paul Ginocchio to the effect that PCM's stock dumping is a reason that newspaper prices are in the dumper. How much in the dumper? They've lost $15 billion in market value since 2004.

I'm less convinced by that argument than I'd like to be. It seems to me that the three-to-five future we can see for print advertising is by far the largest driver of the share decline.

Still, the story of PCM and its outsized impact on the trade is astounding.

Par Excellence: Can't get enough of the Par Ridder saga? Try this spot-on parody Par blog.

Bridgin': Innovation, Learning from 7-11 and More Twin Cities Pain

Participatory Journalism: Star Tribune Newspaper Guild members are voting as we speak on whether to call for Publisher Par Ridder's resignation. Sounds like a move we'd see out of Europe. Maybe that's what American newsrooms begin to look like as they reporters and editors increasingly see their own owners as an adversary and not as a protector. Meanwhile a flock of attorneys filed their final arguments this week in the court case alleging Ridder's theft of Pioneer Press confidential data should force his termination from Star Tribune employ.

(Addendum: July 18. The Guild's vote is in. Two lonely no's on the question of calling for Par to resign, 110 in favor. Story here.)

Across the river, another 15 jobs are being cut in the Pioneer Press newsroom (Par Ridder's had the unenviable task of cutting employees at both papers in the same year!). That will bring the newsroom down to about 165 people. When I had the privilege of being managing editor of the paper in the mid-'90s, we had something approaching 225 FTEs to cover the news.

What the Newspaper Industry Can Learn from 7-Eleven: In today's New York Times piece by Andrew Adam Newman, new Blockbuster CEO James Keyes, late of 7-Eleven, offers some convenience store tips that sounds like a prescription for the newspaper industry:

Among his strategies: "tailoring the product line to each store, relying heavily on data and automation, and reducing the size of the retail footprint."

Sounds like customized vertical websites, hyperlocal, following the clickpath and using less newsprint and more pixels.

How about inviting Mr. Keyes to the next ( Editor and Publisher, NAA, SIIA) conference? I'd like to interview him.

What's the Difference Between the Music and News Industries?: All kinds of punchlines to that question. I liked Richard Siklos' description of the music industry and its rate of change and innovation in a recent column in the Times:

What is astonishing about the music industry, versus other forms of media, is the amount of entrepreneurial fervor it attracts at every level — from indie labels to Web and satellite radio to fan sites and consumer electronics giants and mobile phone operators. This partly explains why Universal has at least raised the possibility that iTunes and the iPod might not forever be the only game in town.

In a nutshell, that's one of the key answers to the news industry's dilemma. Passion, and unleashing it. What's been astonishing in the news industry over the last decade is how stodgy the response to change has been, and how much great energy has been lost, drummed out of the industry and forced to join tech companies that only have a glimmer of the value of news. What the industry needs is a new burst of fervor -- backed by some publisher and editorial veterans paired with a new generation that sees the world of opportunity to digital news.

Bridgin': Bay Area Job Toll, Covering "Contractors", The One Billion Dollar Cubs?

---COVERING GOVERNMENT/COVERING BUSINESS: Worth checking out is a segment from WNYC's excellent media crit show, On the Media. Host Bob Garfield interviews Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: The Rise Of The World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

Scahill paints quite a picture of the privatized war going on next to the public one in Iraq. For those in the business, one point he makes gets to the very structure of reporting. Some reporters cover government, public policy and the war, he says, and others cover business.
But stories like massive government-funding of private business to carry on war fall in a sizable crack. The lines between business and public policy and between the Nation/World section and the Business section are now thin.

As newsrooms re-invent themselves for the web, and beats change, smart editors will look at how better to cover the world as it exists today, and not on how it used to be.

---THE COMMUNITY IMPACT OF NEWS CUTBACKS: It's easy to get lost in the blizzard of job cutback announcements, across the nation. The S.F. Bay Area has been among the hardest-hit (craigslist impact, high broadband adoption, more competition, etc., etc.), with cuts at the Mercury News (another 47 this month) and the Chronicle (100 whacked in late spring) grabbing the headlines.

But what's the real impact? It's the news readers don't get, or get late, or get from a reporter who doesn't really bring much experience to the reporting. The thousand cutbacks lead to more than a thousand cases of inadequate coverage.

For one view of the Bay Area cutbacks, check out Grade the News' John McManus' take on what the cutbacks have meant, with good detail. He quotes one reporter:

"We're all doing the best we can," the journalist says, "but I think I speak for a lot of us when I say we're acutely aware that we're failing the readers. We're not given the resources to succeed."

McManus writes of missed stories, faulty copyediting (a result of regionalized copy desks) and overall poor reader service. He recounts the story of John Bowman, the San Mateo County Times (part of Media News' Bay Area operations), who quit his post as executive editor due to the cutbacks. "What was unthinkable two years ago is now standard operating procedure," Bowman told him. For Bowman's own ongoing take on the poor shape of American journalism, check out his own new blog, Spin Ditties.

---AS THE TRIBUNE TUMBLES, CUBBIES EMERGE: In a little more than a month, we'll see the Tribune shareholders officially bless the Sam Zell deal and then by year's end, the deal should be done, as regulators wave their wands. Then we'll see lots of pieces moving. The one that's public is the sale of the Cubbies. With the prediction that the lovable losers will be the first U.S. sports franchise to go for more than a billion (Manchester United went for $1.45B), Fortune outlines who's willing to take the Cubs off Zell's hands.

The best quote is an old one in the story's lead, from the Tribune columnist Bob Verdi:

"I don't know why we bought the Cubs. We already had a perfectly good company softball team."

Bridgin': Missing Leaders, Curing Newsroom Glooms, Adam Smith Revisited and the Meaning of "Walter Reed"

LOOK WHO IS MISSING? Where have all the news people gone, long time passing? Check out the PC Mag's "50 Most Important People on the Web." Lots of innovation, hipness, Second (and maybe Third) Lives, iconoclasts, naysayers, billionaires....but not one news industry person among them. Isn't it time some news innovators joined the engineers, pontificators and even politicians? Surely, there's enough intellectual power to power someone newsy into next year's Top 50 list, to join the likes of Steve Jobs, Nick Denton, Meg Whitman, Michael Arrington and Tina Tequila.

SALVE FOR NEWSROOM GLOOMINESS: With all the cutbacks, outsourcing, offshoring and predictions of more and worse to come, it's no surprise that those inhabiting newsrooms are a little down, a wee bit depressed. Of course, those of us who came out of them would smirk and say, what's new. Glass half-empty or half-full? Standard newsroom response: Yeah management owns all the glasses and they should fill 'em up.

Still skeptical (okay, cynical) journalists, who tend a bit to the dark side produce the journalism we use daily. For those intent on reforming the trade -- and bringing a bit of light in -- Leonard Witt's PJNet.org (for Public Journalism) is worth a read. In today's post. Here's his first recommendation:

The Readership Institute has done studies and finds that as a group newsroom cultures tend to be passive/ defensive or aggressive, defensive types, neither of which are conducive to change. So issue number one. Change your attitude. Become offensive and aggressive.

Twelve more good -- and maybe more doable -- ideas follow. Post them in a newsroom near you.

ADAM SMITH AND NEWSPAPERING: I forgot to point out what I thought was a milestone "Red All Over" column in the Wall Street Journal by megacapitalist Steve Rattner. It ran in mid-February and did a great job of laying out the financial straits newspaper companies are in. When Rattner wrote isn't news to anyone reading this blog, but his message to the WSJ audience is an important one.