Screw the core

Q: How can we save newspapers?

A: We cannot. Nor should we want to. Newspapers are a form, as impermanent as any form. The important part of what they delivered is the information, and there are many ways to deliver that information.

Q: But what about the watchdog function newspapers serve?

A: Again, you’re confusing form, both in terms of a printed product and the organization of a business, with the outcome. There is more than one way to serve as a watchdog, and people in the public are both willing and able to. And because I say we can’t save newspapers does not mean we can’t save news organizations.

Q: OK, why didn’t you say that before?

A: That wasn’t the question you asked.

Q: Fine. How can we save news organizations?

A: Three words. Screw the core. Newspapers and local television stations have been trying to work out plans that achieve two mutually exclusive ends: increasing revenue for their core products while expanding the reach and profitability for their online and other ventures. As is the case with any plan aimed at achieving two mutually exclusive goals, these ventures have failed. The answer would then seem to be choosing one of these goals and pursuing it.

Q: Then why not say “screw online” and focus on the core?

A: Some organizations have done exactly that. In the short-term, it will likely hold profits at a reasonable level, but as a long-term strategy, it’s doomed to failure. In March, CNN reported that more adults get their news online than from any other source. That number has increased, and there’s no reason to expect that trend to reverse. So by giving up online ventures–which almost no news organization is really suggesting–would be a possible short-term success and almost certain long-term death sentence.

Q: So why can’t news organizations do both?

A: They can, but they can’t do both well, nor can they do it profitably.

Q: So you’re suggesting shuttering print and broadcast operations?

A: No.

Q: But you said “screw the core.”

A: That’s not a question. And yes, I did. But I didn’t say “Burn down the core.” What I meant was that news organizations can no longer afford to keep re-investing in an outdated medium. Stop re-investing in the core and start investing in other ventures. Consider the newspaper. There are dozens of pages, filled with ads, stories and briefs. Each of those has to be produced, placed on a page by a person, printed and then delivered to a final destination. It’s an inefficient process, but one with an end result some people (though fewer and fewer) like very much. When it was inefficient but still the best way to disseminate information, it made sense to invest as much as possible in it. Now that it is no longer the best way, it no longer makes sense to invest in it. Some people still use it. While it can still be profitable, it should still exist. But the act of printing the paper is not the important part, nor should it be overly romanticized. The gathering and dissemination of information is the vital function, something that can (and should) be done in multiple ways.

Q: But what about profits? The core is what’s sustaining many news organizations.

A: If you can call it that. By choosing a “both/and” strategy instead of an “either/or” strategy, news organizations are far behind the curve when it comes to creating effective structures to report and digitally distribute the news. Yes, the core business is still making money, but by creating radically smaller organizations designed to aggressively report and distribute content based around one topic, news organizations could both keep costs low and pursue new ventures with lower start up costs. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, sometimes it seems that the only people who haven’t figured out how to adapt news gathering and distribution to the digital age are the people working at news organizations.

Dan Gillmor spoke about citizen journalism and the fact that some people commit random acts of journalism without ever really meaning to. Two great examples are the London Underground bombing and the Hudson plane crash. Both of these had iconic images taken by cell-phone cameras, and those were pictures a journalist wouldn’t have been able to get. The Hudson photo, in particular, isn’t just good because of what it’s of, it’s a GOOD picture.

But talk to a journalist and you have a better than 50 percent chance of hearing what a crock most citizen journalism is, and how news gathering and writing should be left to the professionals. Sure, some of it is useful, but for the most part, it’s just crap, people pretending to be reporters and not doing a very good job at it. How many of them would do a good job covering a city council?

And that perception is proving hard to change. Sure, some papers use community correspondents and columnists, but they have low expectations for them.

There are plenty of great community-focused blogs out there. Baltimore Crime, a sometimes controversial one, comes to mind. It links to other sites, aggregates content and gives a list of murder victims in Baltimore–always a hot topic in that city. It’s not perfect, and I won’t pretend it is, but it is a private person running a blog about part of life in a community. There are other examples, too, you just need to look.

My somewhat audacious proposal: rather than ghettoizing their contributions as citizen journalism, news organizations need to reach out to them and put their work in the same place as the other journalism. The only people who care about who produced it are the journalists and former journalists who want to protect their craft from what they see as competition.

What, she wanted to know, could she do to save the small, local paper that covers the town her college is in? Buying advertising, of course, would help, but most of the students come from elsewhere, and there’s only so much money for advertisements, anyway. She buys what she can. And she subscribes, of course, for what that’s worth.

There are some variables I don’t know: who owns the paper (chain or individual), how big the circulation is, etc. This isn’t a solve for X kinda thing. Every successful paper is successful in its own way.

And anyway, that isn’t the interesting question to me. I want to know: What responsibility, if any, do outside institutions, both public and private, and citizens have to newspapers? Papers are, of course, private businesses: they exist to make a profit for their owners. But they also serve (or SHOULD serve) the public good by keeping people informed and contributing to a lively discourse about current events.

Having worked at papers that made money (sadly not many of them nor much money) and lost money, I can’t think of a single publisher who would accept help from someone outside. Of course, I also don’t know any publishers who were lining up for a newspaper bailout, but plenty of them were.

As much as we should all be concerned with keeping local businesses afloat, I don’t think anyone has a moral obligation to buy something bad or even support a poorly-run business. And face it, so many newspapers have been badly run for so long that it’s hard to have sympathy for their owners. The people who work for them and lose their jobs, sure, but not the owners. They, for the most part, did this to themselves.

The PR person’s point about good journalism being essential to a democracy is well-taken, but the news media no longer has (if it ever really did have) a monopoly on good journalism. So what can a private citizen do to help save a newspaper? Probably nothing. But he or she CAN do some things to help save journalism. Start a blog about your town. Take it seriously, attend council meetings and write about what’s happening. Don’t be a town booster or a knee-jerk contrarian. Be fair. If you see something egregious happening, write about it. Same goes for something great. Share it with your friends. Encourage them to write something or to at least share it with their friends.

So how is going to competing with a newspaper going to save it? It won’t, probably, but it might keep them honest. And it will do a few things for you: First, it will give you a new appreciation of what it takes to put out a newspaper. And second, it might help keep the idea of journalism and the spirit of public-mindedness alive. Which is why you wanted to save the newspaper in the first place, right?

Well, the media is full of those these days, from Dean Singleton to Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch just told Rueters that people will be paying for newspaper content on the Web, saying premium content will be available and widely-accepted.  That’s easy for him to say: people already pay for the premium news that the Wall Street Journal offers.

But would you be willing to pay for the gossip columns in the New York Post? I’ll admit to reading them occasionally, but I wouldn’t pay for them.

In fact, what kind of premium content does Murdoch think newspapers will be able to offer? Media companies are shedding editorial jobs at an alarming rate. That means fewer people to report and write those premium stories.

I’m the first to admit there’s no good business model about making money online, though some people have interesting ideas.

But those are least something approaching a plan. They have actionable steps, goals and metrics.

Both Murdoch and Singleton have promised new and exciting content without ever saying what it would be. They’ve both also cut jobs. Those two things aren’t compatible.

Very few media companies have figured out how to charge for their content, and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. How about trying something different?

But he’s wrong, too. Start-ups filled with people who’d be using social media and social networking tools don’t really need someone to show them the way; they can just trust their people to do the right thing. But large media companies, ones that have resisted social media (at least somewhat), do need a voice and they need a person pushing reporters and editors to understand what they need to do. They also need people — dedicated people, not catch as catch can like so many other newspaper projects — to help train the staff.

I know that I’m biased, since my job is just that, but even if it weren’t, I think I’d see the necessity. No one needed to explain Twitter to me, but I know that other people need help. There’s a whole range of experience in newsrooms with regard to social media. Some people just get it, others want to ignore it.  We need to get everyone comfortable in this new space, and putting one person in charge of doing just that makes sense.

He really likes a plan from the New York Times to allow people to buy sponsorships. I wrote about the other plan from the Times last week.

Sponsorship is a fascinating idea, and Outing suggests some cool things that people could be willing to pay for.

And that’s exactly what we need. Too many publishers and CEOs are looking backward to models that were tried and failed in the mid-90s. Instead of trying to do the same thing in a different way, why not try to do something different?

So I’ll ask: what novel ideas do you have to make newspapers profitable, and how would those ideas work?

Jeff Jarvis makes that point (and more) more eloquently that I could.

I’m much more concerned about what Singleton wants to give away. He’s expecting to create a rich site filled with user-generated content and other information, but no local news stories.

Putting aside that the company should being doing their best to create context, including using that user-generated content; or arguments about the actual worth of most local news these days; or even questions about how much user-generated content there will actually be, this sends the wrong message. It tells readers that their content is less valuable than content produced by trained reporters.

In some cases, it might be, but not all the time. In fact, to some people, the user-generated content is more important than the latest on sewer rates or the zoning board. It shows life in the community, and it also can help to break news. It isn’t secondary anymore. Having a user base that’s dedicated to documenting their community and talking about issues that matter to them isn’t optional, and it isn’t secondary to the local news that’s being written by staffers. It’s a vital part of any news organization’s future, and giving it (or appearing to give it) second-class status is a mistake.

Some salient points (I’ll let you read the whole thing if you want to):

• Everyone NEEDS to make profit, but only strong businesses will. In other words, just because you run a media company, it doesn’t mean you automatically deserve to make money.
• The micro-payment ideas might be great for publishers or companies like Google, but not necessarily for journalists.
• And this quote, from Freakonomics: “Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news.”

The founder of Spot.us has a lengthy post on PBS‘s MediaShift Idea Lab blog with some insights on the start-up’s first six months.

The big takeaway? Readers are less willing to pay for the quick-hit, short journalism that dominates so many newspapers these days. They want something in-depth, well-reported and that presents original ideas. Big-think analysis pieces (like the one I’m writing now?) aren’t as popular.

So what say you? Find any interesting media analysis today?

It strikes me as a quintessentially New York solution, in that it reminds me of a taxi’s meter. And it might work for them. Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff that there needs to be a balance between too small a free period, which would drive people away, and too long, which wouldn’t get much revenue.

The Times is in a strong position, as they already make a lot of money from online ads. But not all local sites are. It could be that their sales staff isn’t good at selling online ads, or their advertisers don’t understand the value, but they aren’t able to claim much revenue from the Web.

So you can see why executives at local papers might be tempted to follow suit. But before we rush, lemming-like, to implement this (actually!) new idea, let’s have a think about it.

The Times is in a really great position in terms of content. They have fresh, constantly updated stories from all over the world, covering any topic you can imagine. You could spend hours roaming around the site, and, indeed, some people do. They also have hundreds of journalists filing stories. Do you?

Say you’re a mid-sized local paper with about a dozen reporters filing stories every day. You’ve convinced them to file early and often for the Web, and they’re doing that. On a good day, you add a few dozen stories during the day, covering breaking news, crime, traffic and local government. That appeals well to your base of readers, but your base is much smaller than that of the Times. And how long would it take to read all those stories?

Revenue models aren’t one-size-fit-all, as we should already know. This metering plan MIGHT work for very large, national papers with rich archives, lots of fresh content and many different topics to choose from. But for smaller papers, ones that have to compete with television stations or other media sources, it might end up driving people into the arms of their competitors.

There are other models out there, which might fit better. (And I hope to talk more about some soon).

Smarter people than me are weighing in, but I think I might be able to add something to this conversation, since I’m training the staff at The Gazette on using social media.

My two-line social media policy:

If you’re using an account for work purposes, identify yourself as an employee of The Gazette.

If posting something would embarass you or the company, or call your professional reputation into question, DON’T POST IT.

That’s it. I give out pages of best practices, too, but those two get to the heart of the issue. Just as we would have never in the past expressed a political preference, we should refrain from doing so now. if it seems like common sense, it kinda is, but it still bears repeating.

The biggest issue people seem to be taking with the WSJ policy is that it shuts down transparency. It forbids staffers from discussing how a story was reported, written or edited. Bad advice, and among the reasons so many newspapers are failing at social media. When there was one edition a day, the story was all that mattered. Now, reporters need to be transparent at all stages. How they source and write the story is important, and so is the discussion afterward.

Rather than grasping and trying to control something (since no one’s been able to control falling readership or declining revenue), newspaper executives need to trust their reporters, calm down and embrace social media.

I can’t close any more eloquently than Patrick Thornton did.

Just use common sense, and common sense says not being social on social media doesn’t make much sense at all.