Gawker Media’s Nick Denton knows where the money isn’t

An awfully provocative comment about the news industry from Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, taken from this Q&A with Advertising Age:

People — particularly if they’re under 40 — have news priorities other than those of the editors of The New York Times or producers of the “NBC Nightly News.” A new tablet from Apple — or last night’s episode of “Gossip Girl” or the adventures of the hipster grifter — is a bigger deal than the latest petty scandal in Albany. You think that’s a damning indictment of modern society and a recipe for idiocracy? Fine. Start a nonprofit to cover all the local-government news you think a healthy society needs. But don’t expect advertisers — or commercially-minded publishers or readers, for that matter — to share your interests.

Here’s where newspapers need to invest their resources

Of the seven strategies Mark Potts lays out for the news industry to adopt, two in particular stood out for me as of particular importance. His criticism of news sites that spread themselves thin by trying to appeal to all readers is one that bears repeating. See if you agree.

I’m excerpting them here, but I recommend you read the entire post.

Vertical products: One of the most broken things about the newspaper business is the “all things to all people” model. By trying to do a little of everything, newspapers don’t really do anything well—for readers or for advertisers. New products that focus on specific, vertical audiences should be the wave of the future, but so far they’re barely even a trickle (let’s see—there’s Gannett’s MomsLikeMe franchise, and then…not much else).

New forms of advertising: Banner ads are so…1997. Interstitials, pop-ups and intrusive ads are so…obnoxious. Classifieds are so…dead. Meanwhile, Google is making money off of local search, other non-newspaper companies are pioneering things like click-per-call and pay-per-click, and various startups are perfecting cheap ways to create and sell local ads. Could it be that newspapers are having trouble making online advertising revenue grow because they’re selling the wrong kinds of online ads? Hmmm.

Be accurate or be irrelevant

A friend of mine announced that Kentucky Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra might be shut out of this Saturday’s Preakness by owners looking to enter additional horses in order to prevent the filly from making the field, which is capped at 14 horses.  When I responded that I’d heard a radio report that Rachel Alexandra would be running, he was incredulous, and showed me a story in today’s St. Petersburg Times to verify his information.

“Right,” I responded with a tinge of smugness. “That was from this morning.”

To settle the disagreement, I quickly found an update on ESPN.com, which confirmed the radio report:

Wall Street Journal to launch micropayments service

The Wall Street Journal plans to start a micropayments service for individual articles this fall. Let the echo-chamber pooh-poohing begin! (Quote below is from Jeff Jarvis; emphasis is mine):

So if the Journal brings on micropayment, I fear for them that they’ll lose doubly. They’ll lose my subscription. They’ll lose my even occasional readership and the ad revenue that can come with that. They will, in a cruel irony, replace digital dollars with micro pennies.

Or, conversely, WSJ could increase readership by allowing the purchase of individual articles without the need for a yearly online subscription. Time will tell.

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.

Gina Chen’s open letter to newspapers

Gina Chen of Save the Media has an outstanding post today that tells newspapers what she as a consumer expects from them.

 Here’s Chen on:

Wanting original, well-reported articles:

While we still have a newspapers, don’t fill it just with 6-inch stories and snippets of yesterday’s news. I’ve read those already online. What I haven’t read already onlineis enterprise, a well-written profile that really digs deeply into a person, investigativepieces that expose government waste, inequity and greed. The short, shallow story isn’t going to save newspapers.  And if that’s all I get in the print, honestly, I don’t need the print at all. …

… There’s really no excuse for running most feature wire stories these days with a few exceptions, such as movie openings or some science and technology pieces.  And if you must run it, please make sure it has some additional information to localize it. That can be as simple as: Can I buy the product here? Is the trend happening here? What’s the local impact.  And, please, please, don’t tell me you don’t have enough reporters because you’ve laid them all off or cut their hours or furloughed them. That may be true, but as a consumer, I don’t really care. …

… Every reporter should be doing enterprise reporting on his or her beat. Some stories may be simply noticing a trend in a community; that’s fine. Not every story has to be Watergate. But there should be many stories that tell me something I can’t get anywhere else.

On integrating print and Web:

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.

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.)

Michael Kinsley writes, Jeff Jarvis applauds

The interweb was abuzz today over Michael Kinsley’s Washington Post op-ed, “Life After Newspapers.” And perhaps no one was buzzing with more buzzy glee than the BuzzMachinist himself, Jeff Jarvis.

Jarvis’ post “Kinsley nails it again” (as in another nail in the newspaper industry coffin?) praises the Slate cofounder for his dismissal of government subsidies as a solution to the industry’s woes.

Jarvis, if you didn’t already know, is no fan of dead-tree media. Among his pronouncements: