It’s a follow-up to my previous E&P column, which advised newspaper CEOs on 11 key strategies to reinvent their enterprises. But since I didn’t focus so much on the money angle in that column, this time I tried to put my head around how the suggested adaptations by a newspaper company to survive in the digital age can be used to boost revenues.
There’s no silver-bullet solution (I only wish I was that smart), but I hope newspaper folks will find some useful ideas in the column.
One of the great things about Twitter, of course, is that when a big breaking news event happens, there are often witnesses on the scene with a cell phone who will post some quick tweets about what’s going on, before any reporters can get there. (You’ll remember the Continental jet that went off a Denver runway recently and one of the survivors tweeted about his experience.)
An incident a few days ago proved that’s not always the case. I woke up on New Year’s day and looked at the news on my iPhone to see what was new in the world. Top story in a bunch of places was a crazy bombing threat that shut down much of the resort city of Aspen for much of New Years Eve. By the time I heard about it, the bomber had committed suicide and there was plenty of mainstream media coverage of the story.
But I was curious to see if Twitter was a decent source of news and eyewitness tidbits the evening before, when the craziness was going on and police were roping off city blocks and defusing bombs. I checked out several services (including Twitter’s own advanced search) and looked through tweets sent on New Years Eve by people in Aspen. I was a bit surprised to find not much. Plenty of chatter about sections of the city getting roped off, but nothing from the tweeting witnesses that shed much light on what was going on.
So the local Aspen newspapers got a bit of a break in being the ones getting breaking details onto their websites as their reporters learned what was going on. Columbia Journalism Review has an article that lauds the papers’ coverage: “Aspen New Year’s Eve Bomb Threat Proves—once again—the value of a local paper.”
One of my new favorite bloggers, Martin Langeveld, mentioned one of his favorite new bloggers, John Thornton and his Insomniactive, where the Texas venture capitalist spouts off smart opinion and analysis of the newspaper industry. Great stuff; add Insomniactive to your RSS reader if you care about newspapers.
I was wondering how Thornton’s blog could have escaped my radar, but it looks like he only started posting stuff on media and news topics in late December 2008. So I guess I can be forgiven.
Along with Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog, now you’ve got an excellent duo of bloggers documenting the financial side of the newspaper industry’s spiral downward. I think Thornton is clearly the most pessimistic, and seems to think that the newspaper industry is headed toward a future of non-profit journalism. Also:
“You see, the online news outlets of the future are shaping up to be -– and it grieves me to say this –- a bunch of grubby, cruddy, marginally profitable little businesses. …
“Can some of these things make a little money? Sure, why not? It’ll be sort of like a Mad Max movie, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -– after the nuclear holocaust, plenty of assorted post-armageddon, beady eyed-sole proprietors with shopping carts and automatic weapons will do just fine — cockroach-like, and speaking in the broadest of relative terms.”
OK, maybe that’s too stark and depressing for you. Don’t read Thornton. Keep your head in the sand. … I’ll be reading, and I hope he sticks with news and media topics for a while.
Last night in Boulder (and not ending till this morning) we had one of our area’s famous windstorms. I saw reports of 80 to 90 mph wind gusts in some areas of the region. (I didn’t get much sleep last night due to the noise, as I’m sure was common for folks around town.)
So what was the first thing I did when I got out of bed? I looked for Boulder Twitter posts to see what other locals were saying, and if they experienced any wind damage. It didn’t occur to me to look in the local newspaper’s website, because I knew that I’d get a good picture of what happened via local tweets.
Lots of journalists have been pondering and pontificating on how to use Twitter to cover news, including me. Last night’s wind storm was yet another classic example. A traditional reporter looking for Boulder residents’ personal experiences could save a lot of time by finding local tweets to pick up tidbits, and contacting some of those Twitter users for follow-up interviews. That surely beats walking or driving around town interviewing people, or calling random residents on the phone.
Here are a few simple ways to find location-specific tweets, such as last night and this morning from Boulder:
Many iPhone Twitter apps have search features, which you can use for searching by location and/or keywords. I use Twitterlator Pro and love it.
I’ve just scratched the service. As Twitter use grows, it’s becoming an increasingly useful tool not just for people wanting to keep informed of fast-breaking news, but for reporters looking for eyewitnesses to add to their coverage.
If you’re in the news business and still think Twitter is silly and/or a waste of time, and of little consequence to journalism, this should wake you out of your stupor:
Read his Twitter feed for a survivor’s experience of what he went through and saw — before any reporters could get to interview him and fellow passengers on the Continental plane that crashed on takeoff in Denver Saturday evening.
Also interesting: This short video of the founder of Seesmic explaining how he’s watching CNN coverage of the crash and a spokesman telling reporters there’s no information yet, while the tweeting passenger is spilling his guts already.
OK, so yesterday I tossed up a 100% unscientific poll to see what you thought would happen with the Detroit and Denver newspaper situations. Since we now know what the Detroit decision was (Thurs-Fri-Sun home delivery with papers for sale on newsstands only on other days), here are the current results. (Denver’s situation is in flux for another several weeks.)
The speculation ended quickly enough. Detroit newspaper executives announced today their plan to (they hope) survive the industry crisis with two newspapers intact by implementing the following in spring 2009:
Print the Detroit Free Press (Gannett-owned) on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays.
Print the Detroit News (MediaNews Group-owned) on Thursdays and Fridays.
Paid digital-replica subscription service on other days (part of home-delivery subscribers’ accounts).
Paid thinner editions sold on newsstands on other days.
Talk of “expanding digital information channels that provide news and information to a variety of audiences when, where and how they want it.”
Paid editions on the non-home-delivery days is a mistake. Younger people will not, for the most part, pay for these on the newsstand. So this does nothing to address the problem of newspaper print editions’ aging demographic (average age, over 50). The Detroit papers have a chance at reaching younger people (who will not subscribe for home delivery) if they make scaled-back FREE editions available at newsstands, coffeeshops, malls, libraries, colleges and universities, etc. That can increase overall readership of the off-day print editions, and serve as a strong marketing vehicle to get more traffic to the papers’ various websites.
I think Martin Langeveld is right in suggesting that instead of a Sunday edition, the Free Press have a “weekend” edition published and made available on Saturday.
The Detroit newspapers press release made much of a strategy to improve its websites and go after more niche markets on the web. That’s fine, but I spotted one tiny mention of mobile services. To hit the younger audience, mobile must be a huge part of the digital strategy. Smartphones (a la the iPhone) are about to become ubiquitous.
I’ve never been a fan of digital-replica editions. Giving that away to home-delivery subscribers is fine, but I think most folks will just read the web or mobile editions, which are designed for their respective formats, while digital-replica for a computer screen is an annoying user experience. I don’t expect to see much in the way of non-print subscribers paying for the digital-replica editions.
This plan is designed to have no layoffs in newsroom staff (but cost cuts in other areas such as production and circulation). I very much doubt the publishers will stick to that. I predict free off-day editions will come as a later decision; those will be thinner; and less staff will be required.
Overall, I view the reduction in home-delivered print editions as a necessary step in the evolution of newspapers in metro markets. But reading through the press release from the Detroit publishers, I don’t feel optimistic. Expect to see the announced plan tweaked fairly quickly, and the no-layoff pledge be temporary. (I hope I’m wrong.)
What an exciting (and yes, depressing) week it’s been in the newspaper business. The cities to watch right now are Denver and Detroit.
Denver: E.W. Scripps has put the Rocky Mountain News up for sale through mid January. No buyer: The Denver Post becomes Denver’s sole daily paper. Buyer: Who knows?
Detroit: We’ll know more on Tuesday (apparently), but speculation is that both papers (News and Free Press) will stick around, but be published in print less frequently, and the papers will move toward a digital-centric business model.
I really have no idea how this will turn out. But I thought it would be interesting to run a little poll and see what my fellow media and newspaper experts and enthusiasts think will happen. So take a couple minutes to take this poll, which I’ve created using my account from my wonderful friends at SurveyGizmo.
The Detroit question may be a little late in the game; rumors are that an announcement will be made about the newspapers’ future on Tuesday.
Aargh! I think I messed up the survey setup. After answering, you may only see results from the Denver poll. After I close the poll (soon), I’ll post the full results in another blog entry. (Do not take the results at all seriously!)
