Thoughts on journalism’s future

Martin Langeveld took notes during a think tank in Washington, D.C. called “The Future of Context.” For the occasional wonky speak about “future-pointed contextual journalism” and “ecosystems,” here are a few observations/commentaries that struck me as fruitful for the future viability of the news industry:

• Advertisers can add context: blogs, newsletter to engage customers in conversation.

• Commenting needs to evolve into conversation.  This can be done by having reporters and editors step in, add context, ask questions, and moderate the discussion flow.

• It’s not the race to be first that counts — its who can become the convenor of the conversation around the story, and can make that conversation solution-oriented.  A collaborative beat blog is in fact a continuous conversation.  Again, we need to turn commenters into contributors and commenting into conversation.

• Radio has always been good at having conversations with its audience.  We are hardwired to learn best through conversations.  Newspapers in the past couldn’t tap into conversations very well, but now we can.  By focusing energy on making people part of the conversation and building community, we raise demand for our product.  (Steve Yelvington, Cox)

Behind newspaper website traffic numbers

Martin Langeveld pours some cold water on the Newspaper Association of America’s report that traffic to newspaper websites accounted for 43 percent of all Internet users in the first quarter of 2009, a 10 percent increase over last year:

Newspaper page views at 3.5 billion per month are less than one percent of total U.S. page views (386 billion in February). …

… As NAA does note, 43.6 percent of that audience visited a newspaper web site, but given that newspaper site traffic works out to only about 1.6 page views per reader per day, many of the newspaper site uniques are clearly represent one-time-only traffic. …

… In the light of the data as seen in context, it is ludicrous for them to be considering a tollbooth to make readers pay in some fashion (other than for carefully selected premium content) — any simple paywall barrier would serve to reduce their online audience share even more.  Similarly, any effort to prevent or restrict Google and others from aggregating content will backfire, since newspaper sites would lose substantial traffic in the absence of traffic driven by aggregator links.

The danger of comparing print to online

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to Martin Langeveld’s assertion that only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online. Dan Thornton counters with a compelling argument that the comparison between print and online readers isn’t very useful. And that the numbers Langeveld uses as the basis for his calculation may be way off:

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

The numbers don’t lie. Or do they?

Well, something doesn’t add up. When Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers, he found that newspaper Web ads were yielding an absurdly high CPM (cost per thousand page views) of $80.28.

I knew that number couldn’t be correct, as I recalled an instructive post by Ethan Zuckerman:

While highly targeted ads (an ad for roofing services in Pittsfield, MA) might be worth several dollars a click, most ads sell for a dollar or less a click, often much less. An ad that sells for a buck a click and gets 1% clickthrough is functionally a $10 CPM ad, which suggests that lots of ad inventory (the nickel-a-click stuff) selling at sub-$1 CPM.

Ryan Chittum agreed the number was ridiculously high and endeavored to come up with an explanation:

If print is dead, we’re all at the wake

If you believe the estimates of Martin Langeveld, print is outdrawing websites by a country mile:

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

 Not that Langeveld is advocating a contrarian’s course of action in response to the “death of print” meme:

The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession.  Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention.  While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to.  In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.

Journalists say the darnedest things

“From the moment The Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993 it has treated New England’s largest newspaper like a cheap whore.” — Eileen McNamara, Boston Herald

“The metaphor of content as a cascading stream means there is no unit — a stream is a stream, it has no discernible building blocks.” — Martin Langeveld, Nieman Journalism Lab. (Sixteen grafs later, he writes that a drop in the stream would be a basic unit.)

“Google and aggregators and bloggers are bringing value to you; they should be charging you for the value they bring.” — Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine (He loves Google so much, he’s written a book called What Would Google Do?) He then gets ripped by a commenter who makes a convincing case that Google isn’t bringing value; it’s bringing traffic.

“Say this much for Good Old Roy. The guy never has been afraid of heights.” — Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times. (The too-obviously foreshadowed punch line from the always-entertaining Shelton, after opining that UNC coach Roy Williams must have felt like he was on top of the world following his team’s basketball championship.)

I-News: the newspaper you print at home

Big ups to Martin Langeveld, who critiques MediaNews Group’s initiative to create a customized newspaper for delivery on your printer.

Among Langeveld’s observations about the folly of this endeavor, which is called I-News:

• The goal of reducing print frequency won’t be accomplished by shifting printing expense to consumers.  The price of reams of paper and printing cartridges will likely outstrip the consumer’s cost of a home delivered paper on newsprint.
• The system adds inconvenience at the consumer end in the form of printer management.
• It can already be done with FeedJournal, free, without a dedicated piece of equipment.  Why would readers want to pay for a narrower service that requires another appliance in their house?
• This method eliminates or minimizes serendipity, which is one of the things print still does better than digital delivery; it’s something consumers like, for both news and advertising content.
• Newspaper companies should be getting out of the hardware business, not into it, and especially should avoid investing in proprietary, dedicated devices like this.  (Although I’ve said that Hearst is smart to work on an e-reader, which is an entirely different animal.)

How to save the San Francisco Chronicle

It’s an ambitious, visionary plan: Merge the financially troubled San Francisco Chronicle with MediaNews publications in the Bay area to pioneer a groundbreaking move in newspapers. Martin Langeveld’s post at Nieman Journalism Lab proposes just that:

The Weekend Chronicle (or pick a neutral title, like Bay Observer), would be bigger, better, more thoroughly read and more valuable to advertisers than all the current separate versions your two companies are publishing. They should drop all breaking news and focus on analysis and features. Their biggest value to readers would be as a guide to all other media. …