Content Bridges

The Newest Barbarians, Toting Spreadsheets

Sam, I get it. You're being aggressive. When you add to Randy Michaels' aggressive talk about cutting newspaper size and staff that "I promise you he is underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge," you seem to be proudly announcing that the newest barbarians may well be inside the gates. I'm not sure who that impresses aims to impress -- your employees are fairly shell-shocked already -- but it does capture attention.

What I don't get is why the aggressiveness seems to take us back to 1980 rather than forward to 2012? (Though 2012 may seem even further away to Zell and Michaels than it does to Hillary Clinton.)

It's little surprise to keen observers of the new Tribune that more draconian cuts had to be on the way. Zell relied on this trading acumen, and luck, to create an auction for Newsday, and that netted him tens of millions more than most people will tell you the paper is worth. The Cubs, Wrigley Field and cable network assets are next, but the deepening downturn in the industry (and as of Friday, maybe the cyclical economy as well) tell us that those asset sales may not even be enough to get Tribune through 2009.

What is surprising is that in publicly announcing cutbacks, Randy Michaels, Zell's radio guy-turned-Tribune czar, is focusing on, of all things, PRINT.

Take his notion of how to make the papers more readable and sell more of them.

Michaels saying the papers will become more USA Today-like, with:

"a new look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research: charts, graphs, maps, lists."

Wow. Great solution for 1992 perhaps, 10 years after USA Today turned the newspaper world, Pleasantville-like, from black and white to color. The problem with that is that USA Today is essentially flat last several years in circulation, and it's got a national base and multiplicity of hotel/travel programs to keep the numbers up. The biggest innovation of the last couple of years isn't the color weather map on USA Today's back page; it's Google's ability to map everything and anything, instantly -- at the customer's fingertips and choice, 24/7.

Which takes us to the bigger news that Tribune figured out that the problem is one of ratios, now believing that a 50/50 ratio of ads to news is right.

Michaels' reasoning:

"If we take, for instance, the Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio … the smallest paper, Monday and Tuesday, [would be] 56 pages. That would be substantially larger than that day's Wall Street Journal. We don't think that's a bad value to the consumer. And we think that by doing that, and then by being able to produce less editorial content … we can save a lot of money by producing the right-size newspaper.

Let me hear that again. You're going to decide how much editorial content to produce by seeing how much will fit into the new downsized papers? You're going to ratchet down the amount of editorial content (and staff), leaving the decision of what you are going to give your print readers essentially in the hands of print ad buyers?

Surely, we can make good journalistic arguments about the folly of that. Journalism's never been mainly a quantitative business. But let's look broadly at "product." Would Randy Michaels, who rebuilt Clear Channel on a low-cost model, let the amount of radio ads sold determine how much programming listeners got? I don't think so; you've still got to have a consistent product for listeners or readers.

Readers are already fleeing newspapers -- and I'm talking about decades-long readers, not the young whom the industry too often blames -- because they see every day that less is less. This change, however it looks on a spreadsheet, will only hasten that decline.

That's a decline that is, at this point, inevitable anyhow. I give Michaels' credit in publicly announcing some thinking about how to justify cuts, but he could have put it more simply. People and paper are our two biggest costs, and we don't have enough money to maintain current levels of spending. That's less fancy, but more to the point.

What we'll soon see is "daily" papers becoming, uh, less daily. Monday and Tuesday editions are a sinkhole, with the latest evidence here, as MediaNews looks to those days as "quick-read" editions. Those days could soon be dropped completely, at smaller operations here and there. Anyhow, the whole notion of a daily newspaper is now obsolescent. It has taken way too long to get to 24/7 newsrooms and news output, but that's what the national players -- from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC -- have adjusted to. Even TBO.com, in Tampa Bay, has made a centerpiece of its new "Continuous News Desk" and committed a couple of dozen people (print, broadcast, web) to making it work.

The old daily paper is being -- as we watched Hillary Clinton's concession on Saturday and its instant analysis on TV and web -- replaced by the web.

(News) Time, Time, Time: What's Become of You

It used to be simple: today's paper and birdcage material. We published the paper, and never looked back, almost literally. The trusty librarians could dig through yellowed files, should we need to find something written some time back. But we relied more on our memories, or those growing stacks of papers in our offices and cubicles.

Pre-Internet, the readers did the same. Some newsprint lovers nursed stashes of old papers, some containing precious articles, some big stories worth keeping, some untapped treasures to be gotten to some day.

In the first 10 years of the Internet, that's begun to change, but slowly. News publishers early on recreated the doorstep/birdcage divide. Soon as they figured out they couldn't charge for today's content, they felt compelled to charge for something. Hence, archives. Walled-off and searchable, but through separate interfaces, at per-article and bundled costs. These products have created good revenue streams, but not major ones. That's what has led both Time Inc. and the New York Times to unbuckle their archive belts and open them up to the public.

As Dan Gillmor sagely pointed out as the Times announced the freeing of the archives (and the termination of Times Select), the Times seized the opportunity to become the publisher of record, instant world news, everywhere, a real platform for 21st century growth. Local news publishers are now scratching their own heads, wondering if they can become the publishers of record for their metro areas and communities, and whether they'll be similarly (though on a smaller scale) rewarded. There are many edges to that argument, and I won't go into them here.

But I do want to point to what I think is a set of breakthroughs in how we think about and access those yellowed pages (what colors do pixels turn?). It's a simple timeline, and I think we'll see it become mainstream, and as much a part of news consciousness as the empty search rectangle has become.

Consider three timelines, pioneering Topix', the BBC's and Google's.

Freakonomics Signing Another Sign of Times Select's Short Life

Reason #44 (at least) Times Select will have a tough time surviving.

This week, the Times proudly announced a new blog. This one's by the Freakonomics partners Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Basically, they've brought their Freakonomics blog to the Times. In an interview, Dubner said he was happy with the Times' home, and agreed to it with an important term: that it not be put into Times Select, firewalled away from public access.

"As much as I love The Times, I didn’t want to be part of TimesSelect,” said Mr. Dubner. “That would have been the only deal-breaker," he told the New York Observer.

So you can see the handwriting growing larger here. The Times is smartly moving beyond its stable of high-end staff columnists, picking and choosing intriguing voices on the web and stamping them with the Times brand. This may be the first "outside" blog licensed by the Times, but expect others to soon follow. In fact, the Times has appointed an editor, Melissa Lafsky, previously of The Huffington Post, for the blog, and we would presume work beyond solely Freakonomics.

That's an essential long-term strategy for all significant news players on the web. Most writers, and I believe, many reporters, will become free agents, contracting with major distributors like the Times, search aggregators like Yahoo, MSN and Google, and niche sites of many kinds.

As they do that -- and as the Times competes for their services -- Dubner's insistence on being on the open web would be heard often. The fact that Freakonomics is out on the open web, and Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd are not has got to further fry them. So let the countdown continue.

Times Select's Fate & All Access: Throwing Stuff Against the Wall?

THIS WEEK'S (SEPT 18) TAKE on Times Select termination here>

ADDENDUM: Yes, the Times' numbers were predictably low when published Wednesday, ad revenue down 5.7%, revenue down 3.7% and operating profits off 2.7%, apple-to-apples with last year. (The operating profits number is a correction to what I had reported earlier.) I'm buoyed a bit though by CEO Janet Robinson's apparently getting it about mobile: She talks about building “an innovation capability to anticipate consumer preferences and creates ways to satisfy them. Mobility is at the heart of the group’s activities.” (Good quick-run down on the numbers and announcement on paidcontent.org, by David Kaplan, here)

The New York Times numbers will be out in the morning. They won't be great, judging from the revenue carnage we've seen in the industry. Interestingly, we'll probably see some new numbers on Times Select, the Times' experiment in online subs. When Martin Nisenholtz launched it about two years ago, he told me that his goal was $10 million in new revenue. He hoped, he said, to be able to pull half of that into building up the Times website, hiring innovative people to do new things to grasp the promise of the Internet. Well, it looks like recent numbers tell us that the Times is close to those numbers. Only 31 per cent of Times Select members have been fully paying customers -- at about $49 a year -- with the rest being print subscribers who get access to Times Select as a perk.

But multiply out the paying subs and you get to about $10-11 million. I don't know how much of that Martin has been able to invest in the site, and how much has helped the Times cope with print ad downturns. Certainly, we look to the Washington Post for greater innovation -- Local Explorer, blogs, local user-gen experimentation, useful and welcoming City Guide -- more than we do the Times.

And now PaidContent.org's Staci Kramer reports on a NY Post story that the Times is re-assessing Times Select, given the Times' recent official non-thumb's up thumbs-up: “While TimesSelect is very popular and we have certainly met and exceeded our goals since it began in 2005, we continue to evaluate the best approach to our business.” Times Select has been controversial from its birth on, putting up a wall in front of 20+"selected" columnists. The program has effectively kept Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman from the great ocean of Internet discourse, a loss to the Times' centrality in the political discussions gripping the nation. It's also meant a foregoing of ad revenue. How much?

Well, let's figure that the Times could add 40 million page views per month, if it freed its columnists (and some other walled content) including some multimedia from the shackles of Times Select). Let's say it monetized those views at a paltry $25. That would mean about a million dollars a month, or annually $12-13 million, more than Times Select.

So maybe the money could be made up.

But the rub is that the Times Select play is about more than revenue. It's about holding onto as many of those high-paying print subscribers as long as possible. That print subscriber money is essential to the Times' bottom line, even as print revenue is increasingly challenged. Currently, 28% of the Times' revenue comes from circulation, higher than 20% or so average of the newspaper industry.

Whether the Times keeps Select or tries other ideas, it's got to be clearer with its customers about what it is offering us. Last week I took the four-page "All Access" insert out of the Times, hoping to be impressed.

I liked the idea of All Access. It had all the earmarks of the modern age -- a "Have It Your Way" approach to news publishing in the 21st Century. The message seems right, but I think the delivery is still flawed. Or let me put a better, more charitable face on it: It's a work-in-progress.

One friend described my assessment of All Access elsewhere as being "a tough grader."  Tough love, and especially this week when the Times has suddenly become our all-important national paper, with the Wall Street Journal on the road to compromises that threaten its value to the democracy.

All Access is an important idea, and it gets introduced at the same time the Times is significantly pricing up its single-copy and subscriber pricing. Sunday moves from $5 single copy to $6 and daily moves from $1 to $1.25, with at least some subscriber pricing up as well.

Those are good hefty percentage increases. They are part of a strategy to provide more and more to subscribers -- Times Select columns were the first lure. 

But what exactly is the All Access pitch?

Bringing Google Checkout to News Archives?

Google Checkout has been one of those stealthy projects, seemingly in permanent beta. But we've always known it could be a potential force -- and competitor to Paypal -- as it gets connected with more of the matching and mating that Google Search does.

Lately, I've been noticed the Google Checkout logo popping up in the right-hand column paid search results. It says to the consumer: here's not only an ad, but you can easily buy here, through your new friend Google Checkout. Potentially, a huge competitive advantage to advertisers (who may be fourth or eighth in the rankings -- Google is really selling prominence here) and of course to Google, which will take a share of each and every transaction.

Now, on Google, the content world is separate. Search on Archives, left hand nav of any News page. You'll still the first-gen look there. Some archival stories are free. Others run anywhere from $2.95 to $7.95, as publishers and their representatives try to recoup a little of their investment in producing those stories. You can see prices from the New York Times, Lexis Nexis, Proquest, NewsBank, Access My Library and many others. But the action now is this: click through to the publisher or aggregator and use its e-commerce system. Not only does the consumer pay; he or she has to master a new interface, add a credit card, etc., etc., etc. Wouldn't it be easier if Google just offered a Google Checkout option?

Of course, and you know it will. We just don't when. And many content sellers will of course say yes. After hemming and hawing, the volume of traffic and the prominence offered will be irresistible. That's why Google is becoming Syndication Squared. Matchining all content to all advertising and taking a Ma Bell-like cut of it all.

Paid Circ That Seems.....Free

Paid print circulation still pays the bills. I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year, mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5. That differential explains why prestigious, long-standing, paid circ vehicles like Time Magazine are just about giving away their product......while calling it paid. Anything to keep those print readers and that print rate base as high as possible, 'til that $5 zooms into double digits and beyond.

The offer I got today:

• 56 weeks of Time at the "Welcome Back" rate of $19. (Yes, given my overflowing NetVibes RSS reader, it's hard to find time to read Time.) 19 bucks against a cover price of $252.45 for the same 56 issues! That's a 92.5% discount.

But that's not all:

• FREE GIFT: The ULTRASONIC Laser Level
• BONUS: 6 Additional Months of TIME (when you pay now)
• TIME  Archive at www.Timearchive.com, featuring 80 years of coverage, for free.

I suppose I can use the level to measure the tectonic changes shaking the publishing industry.

I should note the offer is labeled: "For Senior Citizen Use Only."  Like an AARP pitch. I'm flattered but the MSN Life Expectancy calculator gives me another 42 years of life expectancy.

It's an offer that's hard to resist, and I won't. That archive can come in mighty handy for research.

Free Washington Post Archives Reminds Us It's a Free, Free, Free World

Let's say you're at the mall. You want to buy, of all things, a newspaper or a magazine.  You're willing to plunk down your 50 cents or $3.95, as usual. But a friend tells you to put the money back in your pocket. Just check out the store around the mall corner -- they're giving newspapers and magazines away for free.

That's the between-and-betwixt archives world we're entering into today. The Washington Post is making its archived articles (from some time in 2004 on--here's a Bill Clinton search) free -- if you find them through the new Google News Archives and then link back to its site. Locate the same article through the Post's own archive, directly from its own site, and you are asked to pay $3.95 per article.

Now consider what the Wall Street Journal is up to.  If you are a WSJ.com subscriber, you get any articles within the last 90 days for free, then are asked to pay $2.95 per article.  That experience hasn't changed on wsj.com. But search for same articles, apparently as much as 10 years old, through Google News Archive. If you're a subscriber, you get to those for free.

What's going on here?

Testing.

Now, the advent of Google News Archives, with its promise of massive new attention to archives, offers a great test ground, as I noted at launch. Publishers can see what kind of traffic is driven by what kinds of articles. They can then monetize that traffic on their own sites, multiplying it in value with behavioral tracking as they perfect such tracking. They can try to turn some first-time visitors into customers, building lifetime value. How many? At what yield? To what content? Those are all the question that publishers would love to have answered.

The testing isn't brand new of course. The New York Times opened up its travel and health archives, among others, over the last couple of years, creating better ad-friendly destination areas.  A few sites, like the Chronicle's SFGate have long offered free access to archives.

Already, in talking with publishers, it's clear that Google News Archives is beginning to have an impact, at least in traffic. Not a big one for most sites, in the 5-15% plus-traffic range, with lower conversion rates (turning the archive link into a sale). Some very low-trafficked archives have seen an increase of as much as 3X in traffic, which tells you something about how little marketed they have been in the past.

The testing is inevitable. After all, most of the signs on the wall point to free, free, free. As a young alternative weekly (Willamette Valley Observer) publisher in Eugene, Oregon in the 1970s, I remember to sticking to paid circulation too long. Other alternative weeklies in larger cities had begun moving to free.

We were bedeviled by the same paid/free questions news publishers have today. Will the advertisers value free copies and continue advertising? If you give journalism away, doesn't it cheapen it?

Those are fine, abstract questions.

Today the handwriting is on the wall, though. Look of course at the Google/Yahoo/MSN distribution models. Look at AOL's decision to forego a huge access revenue stream and go free. Look what happens to the wsj.com traffic when advertisers sponsor a free day(s). Look at the growth of the Metro free dailies, the new Examiner chain and the boom in free, college newspapers. You can add much more to that list.

What is it about free that publishers don't understand?

So these testing moves and others make sense. At the Wall Street Journal particularly, you can see a broader question, one that is surely to be  in the mix as the Journal's new
3.0 corporate news strategy project, led by editor Paul Ingrassia, moves forward. Observers have speculated to what extent wsj.com itself will become a free site, allowing its page views to multiply, though foregoing subscription revenue.

Don't expect the company to give up that sub revenue soon.  Gordon Crovitz, president of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group and publisher of the The Wall Street Journal, tells Content Bridges that "while we're making more Journal content available outside the subscription wall on a selective basis, such as via bloggers, we're delighted with the highly profitable subscription model for the online Journal." It's a great model most of you probably remember: money from readers + money from advertisers = a big, happy newsroom.  Unfortunately, the Journal's success with it online is a lonely example for news companies.

Expect to see a lot more "selective" content testing, a lot more combining of current news and archive products, lots of new attempts to find more customers and offer them pinpointed, useful and lucrative-to-publishers advertisers.  Most of all, expect the publishing world to free itself up as the distribution juggernauts like Google put hidden content front and center of hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.