Category: Analysis

Google’s new newspaper advertising service shows an adaptation to new markets and willingness to listen to business partners that goes beyond anything I’ve seen from them before.
Everything about the service shows that they’re paying attention to the folks who’ll be distributing their ads: not making the service a full auction, but giving the papers a chance to accept bids for ad space; giving media the ability to review and decline proposed ads for any reason; and the creating ability to forge connections with an entirely new set of advertisers who may never have advertised in print.
Print advertising is a complex business. In broadcast, if a particular saleable minute doesn’t optimize its revenue, that opportunity is lost. Although publishers often have space that will run unsold, they can also add pages to accommodate more advertising. As the daily deadlines approach, it can be a judgment call whether to accept a particular ad.
What’s less clear is the long-term effect. Even with these safeguards, Google’s new service may put further pressure on newspaper margins by increasing the pool of competition. The basic economics of the newspaper business are like most media, with high fixed costs and low variable costs. When there’s competition, this almost inevitably leads to vicious price-cutting, often below the cost of production. They don’t call it a newspaper war for nothing. Traditionally, the discounts flowed to readers. In the current circulation, they will have to flow to advertisers.
For this service to work for publishers, they will have to hold the line on prices, formats, and client relationships.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Every six months, we hear from the Audit Bureau of Circulations that newspaper circulation has declined yet again. This isn’t exclusively bad news.
While some of the circulation decline is due to the continuing slow-burn generational crisis, some it appears to be due to needed corrections in the composition of newspaper circulation.
At an NAA conference this summer, I stated that if I were the publisher of a daily newspaper, my first move would be to clean out my circulation and focus on quality, rather than quantity. Alan Mutter over at Reflections of a Newsosaur seems to be headed in the same direction. Many in the industry understand this what look like extra-lousy circulation numbers are the result of clearer thinking by newspaper publishers.
The web provides publishers with the opportunity to segment not only their audiences, but their news. It’s important to stop thinking about fulfilling your promise to your advertisers and fulfill your promise to your readers. Think about what well-defined audience will be reading the paper edition in ten years, and aim for that market today. The online edition becomes the way to micro-target neighborhoods and communities that are poorly served by major metro dailies, as well as a way to promote the stories that genuinely matter to a regional audience.
As a former magazine circulation manager in a couple of well-run publishers, my first encounter with a newspaper circulation department was a rude awakening. What I found was a mass of poor direct marketing practice, bad CRM, and just plain junk circulation ginned up to meet the ratebase. A great deal of the junk was kind of shoved into place to maintain circulation numbers that were the heritage of a different era — when newsprint was a lot cheaper, and a man didn’t feel fully dressed unless he was wearing a hat.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Conde Nast’s acquisition of Reddit resonates all kinds of trends that are remaking the online publishing business.
Syndication: We’ve been saying for some time that publishers need to build sites that take advantage of syndication: “Deconstructing the Website”. The increasing prominence of aggregators like Digg, and maybe now Reddit, makes this more urgent.
Aggregation: Publishers need to aggregate as well as syndicate. This is a big untapped opportunity, but one that publishers must explore with technology partners. Reddit’s acquisition may give it an opportunity to provide aggregation services to news organizations. Conde Nast is owned by Advance Publications, which has 25 daily newspapers that could benefit from exploring aggregation.
Social Media: OK, the social media aspect is kind of a no-brainer, but the intersection of social media with syndication and aggregation is a key segment for publishers, and one that I’m exploring in my upcoming report on “Networked News”. Digg made this market famous, but this is a style of aggregation that should go beyond a single company.
Consolidation: We’re predicting continued consolidation in the Internet business, but it may seem counterintuitive to see a large, private, traditional media company acquire a Web company at this late (and expensive) stage. This isn’t anything on the scale of News Corp. buying MySpace, but it shows that you can’t count anyone out of the next phase of consolidation: either as a buyer or a seller.
Web 2.0: Reddit’s not all AJAX-y and bounded by rounded corners like most Web 2.0 sites, but it shows that lightweight database applications that transcend traditional single-site-oriented economics can reward their creators.
My recommendation to Reddit’s new owners would be to not seek false synergies in focusing on integrating Reddit with Conde Nast, but to their advertising, editorial, and financial resources to build an outward-looking business that can partner with other publishers, especially in the news business, to help them compete with Digg.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

David Card faults Google for providing a search engine without a lot of help for users. I didn’t have any trouble creating a custom search engine for a site where I’m a domain expert and integrating the results within my site’s templates, but David has touched on a general problem with Google’s efforts.
Documentation is spotty at best and the tools are designed for hard-core techies. I’ve been using Google Analytics for about a year, and I’m still learning interesting and useful things that I can do with it. I’m also discovering that many of the statistics don’t mean what I thought they did. I would love to make more use of Google Maps in some personal projects, but Google’s tools are too programmer-oriented and I haven’t had the time to seek out more polished third-party tools for map integration. Google Base feels like something you could do lots of fun stuff with, but I’m going to need more than an API to get me started.
In our most recent survey of online consumers, we found that about a quarter of the US online population is now creating its own content and the percentage of bloggers has more than doubled. When anybody can be a Web producer, it’s critical to provide tools that are both powerful and simple. Your core customers are now talented and curious amateurs and no longer programmers looking for an API. And perhaps you shouldn’t be depending on the kindness of strangers to serve your best customers.
Widgetbox gets this right with good-looking, well-presented tools that can be implemented without a lot of head-scratching. A big part of their strategy is to provide distribution to large sites looking to tap into the market of amateur Web producers who just want to solve a problem or have some fun. I wish Google made it this easy to get started with their tools.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review says that, rather than paying a billion dollars for the troubled Los Angeles Times, that the local zillionaires who want to buy it should start their own news-gathering organization instead. “Why offer a million dollars per reporter for the Times?”, he asks.
He’s on to something. There has never been a better time to start a news organization. Why, at a time when the entire concept of the newspaper is in flux, would anyone want to invest in such an enterprise, when they can have more influence over the agenda with a startup? Especially if you have a billion to spend. That’s what Phil Anschultz is doing with the Examiner, creating a national chain of free newspapers. That’s what Ted Turner did with CNN.
Everybody seems to be after a piece of this market, and I’m sure that everyone would have a different opinion about how to go about it. There’s more than one correct answer. My take: Los Angeles is a city of neighborhoods that are themselves entire cities. Each “neighborhood” is only marginally served by the LA Times product. If you focus on the low-hanging fruit, you could come up with a dozen or more communities that need and can support a real paper that focuses first on community news, and secondarily on the common coverage that unites Los Angeles.
And since you’re designing it from the bottom up, you should design it with the Web as your primary news platform and a print edition as your marketing and advertising vehicle. This is a strategy that has real economies of scale on the business side (production, ad sales, circulation). The only editorial economies would be on the share city and county coverage. This is a model that could also rock the Orange County Register in its home market, which is just as diverse as Los Angeles.
Just to be clear: This is nothing like the current wave of free tabloids, which seem to view the Web as unnecessary competition to their core business. And these online sites would be produced by professional journalists, not by amateurs or consumers. Although they would be invited to contribute. This is a model that is working in some communities today, but I don’t believe has been done in a major metro market.
The kind of bottom-up network is described probably doesn’t appeal to the heavyweights who want to own a prestige title like the Los Angeles Times. It’s probably going to take a scrappier millionaire to make it happen. Someone who likes the idea doing journalism more than the idea of owning a newspaper. Someone more like Charles Foster Kane, only less fictional.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

One of the most important things Web publishers can do to prepare for the future is to disaggregate their sites. It’s time to think of each story — and not your website — as your main product. This is the best way to reap the benefits of links from bloggers and aggregators.
It’s clear that not everyone has gotten the message. Last week, I was featured on the local TV news. I ran a story about the segment on a local news site that I maintain, so my readers could check it out. All I needed to do was to link to the story on the station’s website. That turned out not to be so simple.
The station uses a content management system provided by a supplier to TV stations. Their site had no links to individual segments or landing pages for the segments, because each clip was launched in Windows Media Player by a Javascript. I wasted about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to link to the story before I gave up.
I thought I had solved the problem by calling the reporter, who gave me the webmaster’s name (he had no contact info the website), and calling the (hard to find) main switchboard at the station and asking for the webmaster. He told me how to structure the link.
Even is if the link worked — and it turned out to be a bum link — this is one news organization that is not ready to be aggregated.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

The Guardian is launching a print edition that is a product of their website, rather than the other way around. G24 is a 12-page A4 pdf that can be downloaded and printed by the reader. It is updated every fifteen minutes with information from the Guardian’s site. The Guardian’s goal is to reach the lunchtime and commuter audiences. It can’t hurt that readers use their own paper (or their employers’) to print the thing.
The idea of a automatically-updated pdf edition is pretty cool. The Guardian has already announced tha they are no longer holding stories for their regular print edition.
There’s a lot to like about this model, and G24 has some interesting potential as an advertising vehicle. At the Media Giraffe conference last week, I’ve begun hearing online publishers say, “Our online edition is for our readers, but we do a print edition for our advertisers”. The physicality G24 should come as a comfort to many of them.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

It’s exciting to see a social news aggregator from a major media company, and the new Netscape beta is a bold step in that direction.
I agree with David Card that it’s an aggressive implementation of current thinking in social news coupled with some new ideas — notably the use of editors. I also agree with him that the current implementation is something of a mess visually. It manages to be cluttered even though its information density is really low. Simplicity is more than a design cue of Web 2.0. It’s a hallmark of the new Web culture and a major visual trend in its own right.
The success of the project hinges on whether social news works for vague demographic groups. Digg.com’s take on daily news would serve an unmet need in the news marketplace, if they can keep a coherent audience identity as they grow. But the typical Netscape.com homepage user is (a) average and (b) passive. Can Netscape harness the interests of average, passive folks to produce a front page that is more compelling to other average folks than the ones produced by the editors at CNN, USAToday, and Yahoo?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

On Monday, I participated in a panel discussion that perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had in front of an audience. With several people who had run online news operations at one time or another — Bob Cauthorn (SFgate.com), Merrill Brown (MSNBC.com), and Lisa Stone (BlogHer) — we discussed what we’d do if we were the publisher of a medium-sized newspaper. One of the groundrules was not to criticize the industry, but to offer useful suggestions.
I’m not sure I heard anything radically new, but what I did hear was an emerging consensus on what news operations should do next: rededicate ourselves to local news, change the newsroom culture, get replace editors who can’t change, seek honest paid circulation, provide competitive customer service to advertisers, keep startups at arm’s length from the core property, and more.
What I began to understand is that while the coming decade is going to be filled with pain for news organizations who can’t change, it’s also going to be a lot of fun for those who are forcing change on the industry.
I’m beginning to wonder if one test of the validity of a strategy (necessary but not sufficient) is whether you’re excited to come to work in the morning while you’re implementing it.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

The striking feature of the projects for the New Voices grants for innovative journalism projects is the diversity of the media even more than the diversity of voices selected: blog, wiki, radio, datacasting, VOIP, and a web-based “wire” service. There were no podcasts, audio or video, on the list. I’m not sure how they missed that particular bandwagon.
J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism, selected the ten projects from 185 applicants to receive $17,000 grants for innovative community news.
Bloggers, and others who have been watching them push the boundaries of news collection and distribution are beginning to explore the use of other media to do their reporting. As with the blog revolution, they are exploiting the infrastructure that is already in place.
There’s nothing technically new about these ideas, and the systems they’re using are relatively mature. What’s different is the way they’re being used, and who’s using them. I anticipate that services like Google Video and YouTube will become repositories for primary news materials, along with amusing dogs and unfortunate accidents.
The biggest revolution here may be that news producers will choose the media (words, pictures, video, animation, audio, podcast, whatever) that is the best way to tell a story, rather than shoving every story into whatever medium happens to pay their salaries.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.