Why Pogue, Mossberg & Swisher Are Leaving the NYT & WSJ, Part II

With the imminent shift by David Pogue (The New York Times), Walt Mossberg (Wall St. Journal/AllThingsD) and Kara Swisher (AllThingsD) to new ventures, I had some additional thoughts about the significance of those moves.

Mike Maney, who tweets at the_spinmd, responded to my first blog post  on the topic, saying, "Not sure I'd say lots of people still open their paper to read. Which is the core of the 'why' IMO" that Pogue, Mossberg and Swisher are leaving.

I agree but I think people do check out the Times and the Journal on their apps and from those papers' websites. Soon, after checking the headlines on nytimes.com and wsj.com, people are going to have to remember to click to the other URLs to find out what Pogue and Mossberg think about the latest cosnumerish technology.

Of course a click or two, especially if bookmarked, is not an arduous, time-consumer process (not like it was with dial-up service -- for those old enough to remember dial-up). But we leave in a one-click world where requiring a couple of clicks to purchase an item may cause people to give up.  (I can't imagine what my grandmother would react if she she had learned that a couple of clicks represent too much of an obstacle to purchase, considering she had to take buses to get to the store to buy something only after trying it on, and then travel back again when she returned the item.)

I do think Pogue, Mossberg and Swisher are replaceable in a way -- I mean, we all are, after all. But I do think it will be more difficult for their replacements to establish themselves just as it will take a while for Pogue, Mossberg and Swisher (I'm not going to refer to them by an acronym).

As it is, one can make a case that the tech reporters getting a lot of attention these days are not the tech reviewers but those who cover startups. That said, consumer tech reviewers will always be important because we need someone to tell us which device is better -- the iPhone or the Galaxy.

No matter what, I think the continuing fragmentation of the media is a lose-lose proposition for reporters, these publications and the readers. 

This fragmentation makes it more challenging to reach a mass audience. It takes more effort to reach more reporters, who themselves reach smaller audiences. (These audiences may be more engaged than traditional print newspaper readers, but they're still harder to reach.) It takes more time to research and contact reporters...which means we need to spend more time overall to reach fewer people at a time. It's pretty much a similar story with social media, too. Don't get me wrong, you've got to reach people on different platforms -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, blogs, and forums, etc. -- but it can take more time to reach increasingly niche audiences.

That, I believe, is the point to keep in mind in terms of the implications for Pogue, Mossberg, Swisher and the rest of us.

Does the Departure of Tina Brown from the Daily Beast Portend a Less-Than-Rosy Future for Online-Only Journalism?

The news that Tina Brown is leaving the Daily Beast, the online-only news site she founded in 2008 isn't big news, outside of Manhattan. The fact is that the Daily Beast wasn't getting much attention in the first place. Even with the merger of Newsweek's reporters and content, the site sometimes known as News-Beast has been less successful than the Huffington Post or the less serious BuzzFeed.

Its web traffic dropped 15.4 percent in August to 5.6 million unique views, according to a Wall St. Journal article about Brown's departure.

In Manhattan publishing circles, there had been a cult of Tina based on her tremendous success as the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, but less success on TV and, now, online.

But the news of Brown's departure should be considered big news not because of Brown but because of what it says about the possible future of online journalism. I find it interesting that no has (yet) has declared the online-only model of journalism to be dead.

After all, the common wisdom is that print journalism is dead or at least dying, that it's difficult and expensive and outdated to publish news on paper, and that the answer is online-only journalism.

The fact is that online journalism is much tougher than many realize. Let's face it, 5.6 million unique viewers can be more than the numbers of viewers tuning in to some network or cable shows -- so the challenges isn't just finding an audience.

It's generating enough revenue.

Since most people expect news to be free, raising revenue is a big problem -- for online-only as well as print journalism. Perhaps even more so for online-only because print can charge subscription fees more easily (you don't expect to walk up to a newsstand and walk away with a copy of the New York Times without paying for it) and print can charge higher ad rates, too.

My point: having an online-only business model is not a guaranteed formula for success -- and neither is having a print component a surefire path to failure. What's important is the point of view, the value of the journalism that you can offer your readers, and in turn attract the kinds of readers that draw significant advertising dollars.

By the way, the merger with Newsweek was not successful, and while I do think the Newsweek merger was a distraction to running the Daily Beast, I believe that with or without Newsweek, the Daily Beast was always on the same trajectory.

New Study Suggests Lessons for Online Journalism

According to a new study cited in today's NY Times, journalists need to rethink their online models.

Perhaps the most significant recommendation from the 139-page report, published by Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism is to change journalists', and their audiences', relationships with advertisers.

Times reporter Brian Stelter quotes Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report as saying: “We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers. We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.” 

Other recommendations include:

• Journalists must understand their businesses. The report makes the point that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.” 
• Journalists need to have a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment” in digital technology. (As a counterpoint, please note that the report itself was printed on 139 pages. Perhaps the authors should follow their own advice.)
• "Advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats." 
• Newspapers need to look past the traditional cost-per-thousands advertising model to offer creative ways to package ways to reach audiences. The study cites the Web site of The Dallas Morning News, which has a section for high school sports. A package deal for advertising on the section during a recent football season included print ads, a player-of-the-week contest and a banquet for players at the end of the season."

For corporate communications functions, this study -- The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism, published in the Columbia Journalism Review -- is useful in terms of helping guide clients to embracing a new way to look at media.  It's also interesting in that the reporting about the study shows limitations in the current model. For example, I'm a big fan of the Times' reporter, Stelter, but his article did not mention Columbia Journalism Review nor provide a link to the study itself. It just goes to show that we all need to think through how we make content available across multiple channels.

Meanwhile, here are the chapter titles for the extensive report. I plan to read through the report for future blog posts.


Chapter One News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism
Chapter Two Traffic Patterns: Why Big Audiences Aren’t Always Profitable
Chapter Three Local and Niche Sites: The Advantages of Being Small
Chapter Four The New New Media: Mobile, Video, and Other Emerging Platforms
Chapter Five Paywalls: The Price Tag for Information
Chapter Six Aggregation: ‘Shameless’—and Essential
Chapter Seven Dollars and Dimes: The New Costs of Doing Business
Chapter Eight New Users, New Revenue: Alternative Ways to Make Money
Chapter Nine Managing Digital: Audience, Data, and Dollars

One question: in an age of 140 characters posts on Twitter, was 139 pages a bit overkill?

Is the Register Citizen Setting the New Standard for Hybrid Print-Online Newspapers?

Interesting article from the New York Times, "Walk In, Grab a Muffin and Watch a Newspaper Reinvent Itself" about the Torrington, CT Register Citizen.

In a town suffering from the recession, the Register Citizen has taken several steps to remake itself, including:

• Developing a new slogan: "Digital First.. Print Last."
• Moving into a new building "designed to mirror the open, collaborative culture of the Web."
• Inviting town residents to participate in the paper's editorial meeting, offering coffee and muffins at the Newsroom Cafe and bringing in a new level of transparency to the paper.
  
• Embraced a new business plan "based on making The Register Citizen’s Web site a magnet for all things local and thus an attractive place for advertisers, sponsors and others who can replace declining newspaper subscribers and advertisers."

This type of community engagement seems to be working both with readers, especially online, and with advertising, which now comprises 17 percent of total ad revenue.

It's still at the experimental stage. But the Register Citizen could be a model for other papers. Since the paper is owned by the Journal Register, which owns 300 other papers, we just might see the modeler extend to other local papers.

What Can We Learn From the Possible Merger of Salon

The news that Salon.com is looking for a possible partner, "Who Wants to Buy Salon.com? Anyone?" raises some interesting points about online media's business, namely:

• It's not only print media that can generate million-dollar annual losses. Salon has lost $15 million over the last five years, including an estimated $5 million in 2010.
• Driven by the need to generate the revenues necessary to sustain a journalistic operation, Salon is shifting its coverage from politics and news to softer, shorter lifestyle coverage. The problem: we already have a lot of sources for lifestyle news while we have fewer sources for traditional news coverage.
  
• Standalone media properties can't hope to compete against media conglomerates -- even today. That's the lesson, too, to be drawn from the recent Newsweek-Daily Beast merger.

On the other hand, the FT recently scored a success with its iPad app subscription, "Financial Times iPad app scores success: Paper increasing its digital-only subscription base at a rate of about 500 a week, with strong growth in US," according its competitor, The Guardian. But while that's good news, it's still not self-sustaining.

One thing for sure, 2011 will continue to see pressure on traditional and online media.