What made me think after my last post with Carlos (# 11) is that while it is a discussion about business, and we’re not talking face-to-face (which has it’s liberties in either being honest or rude – you pick) it’s still another human being at the end of the line that may have challenges in business like me that are not always fun. It was that “take a deep breath” approach that I wanted to leave our conversation, and not to have a continuous “I’m going to win this point no matter what” post that we’ve all seen before.

Ideas are one thing, but the execution of the idea is a totally different animal. I see the potential in digital, but I don’t have to look people in the eye and tell them they no longer have a job to make that transition. Others may not want to give up the printed page yet, but possibly will miss out on the digital lifeboat (my opinion) for their survival if they wait too long. And some will jump in with the right answer but fail because the implementation was wrong, and visa versa.

The next part of the solution isn’t constant debate, but feedback and reports from people who are trying new things in the real business world. In front of customers, readers, and staff. How’s it working, what would they change, who’s got a new idea from within. Real world stuff in action, taking the hits or getting some wins. The “here’s what I’d do” needs to be replaced by “here’s what I’m doing, and here’s how it’s going”. If this site is nothing than a debate, a defense, or a warehouse of feel good stories then it may become nothing more than the time waster none of us needed.

Martin, thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts, opinions, and ideas.

If we can help, we’ll help. Maybe make a little cash on the side to keep the stress level down.

From their website:
We at The Printed Blog believe that there will always be a readership for off-screen, printed media- but in order for that media to survive, it must leverage the best information technology has to offer. Through the integration of online social networks and web-based syndication technologies, The Printed Blog is tapping into the wellspring of brilliant bloggers that has revolutionized collective media. As our society moves towards individualized information, The Printed Blog has the courage to respect our readers. We recognize the value of what individuals have to say, we publish the information they create, and provide them with the information they demand.

Why rely on a handful of outmoded sources, when you know there is great content out there? We know you are writing, learning, DIGGing, and sharing – this isn’t about the newspaper, this is about you.

here’s the link:
http://www.theprintedblog.com/company.php

But it’s not a newspaper problem, it’s a general formal organization problem. The phrase works as well with “senators, auto executives, our last President, school principals, University Presidents.”

If you put a qualifier in front of it, as in “SOME” “self-important etc” it’s a useful statement about reality.

But disruptive technologies lead to disruptions in the communication ecology. People who have to spend most of their day in a bubble have a very serious signal v noise problem. It”s the echo chamber effect that explains how good, smart, hard working people can make really bad decisions.

The good news is that a discussion such as this one might help amplify the signal from the ground to cut through the noise up in management circles.

As for your prediction.

Once the focus on the “interests of prospective readers” is changed, versioned Print + web + delivery trucks can pretty much deliver the same customer experience you describe.

Epaper, kindle’s and whatever comes along will be great for serving niche markets and identifying fans.

10,000 Kindle subscribers for the NYT is still a tiny niche of 46 million page views on the web. Maybe it will grow to 100,000 or 200,000 with the next release over time. At a $9 monthly subscription fee that could turn into a nice revenue stream.

But newspaper don’t have time. Mostly because of debt obligations.

Netflix destroyed Blockbuster. In ten years, Google reinvented advertising. The trick is not where it’s going to end up. The proximate problem is how to get from here to there, and still maintain the position you’ve earned over the last 100 years.

Here’s a place where we do agree “why this basic approach wouldn’t work for every article with highly relevant and, therefore, effective text ads served instead of poorly targeted, irrelevant banners.”

Until the computer algorithm is developed, this might mean a much closer relationship between the team that positions content and the team that places advertising.

As for counter intuitive, I would counter that purpose of discussions in a context of intellectual honesty is to get from intuition to an operational definition of what’s going on so that people who have to can make better predictions of the consequences of their decisions.

That’s why agreeing to disagree creates so much value.

Hope your drop-in session went ok.

On ‘things that make sense,’ my experience is that it’s a poor approach in the modern web where ‘counterintuitive’ is my watchword. It makes sense that Yahoo’s approach of advertiser-centric/big media would be more successful than Google’s user-centric/advertiser-restrictive/long tail approach. But that’s not the case at all. Google, to the surprise of all the ‘experts’ is just killing every other competitor. It’s not even close.

Can’t say more. Gotta set up for my 4pm drop-in session on – you guessed it – using social media.

Cheers.

The New York Times or an outside publisher, I’m sure which, produced a book on Obama’s campaign, or something close to that.

They set a pub date of “President’s Day.” From what I understand about publishing that probably means that the books are well advanced in the channel. The books were printed, probably in boxes at the stores.

Consider how many more books would have been sold and what the increased profit to the Times might have been if the book were offered on the website, with ads that were presented on the web near every article about the inauguration, and sold directly from a logistics firm that was contracted by the Times.

I am only looking at this from the outside, so I am wrong in details. But in any case it is a good example of finding the audience, using excess talent to innovate stuff for them, and sell it to them at a low cost with a good profit.

But the internet is not the future of newspapers, except as a way to make the production of newspapers faster, better and cheaper. The internet is infrastructure. It is Telephone +TV + Search + a big filing cabinet + and the best way to buy and sell stuff every invented.

The confusion comes from the fact that newspapers were the infrastructure for regional information for many, many years. Infrastructure is a good business.

Journalism for many newspapers is a nice to have, not a must have. Some local reporting + rewrites for the AP and other services, filled most of the news hole most of the time for most of the newspapers.

The enormous benefit of the internet for newspapers is that is now much easier to identify the interests of their viewers. By doing smart analytics they can analyze which viewers are going to which article. As geo location comes on line it will be easier and easier to learn where they live.

Given the most recent advances in web offset printing re versioning etc, that means that versioned editions can be placed in physical neighborhoods.

Assuming that the buying ad functionality is made dirt simple, that means that a completely new market of local advertising is now available to support Print.

Social media to create community, not for newspapers. People on the ground are already creating communities on the net faster and larger than any newspaper could do.

Social media carefully monitored and measured to continuously improve your understanding about what your viewers think AND where they live.

That makes lots more sense, because then you can innovate new stuff to sell them. Given the eyeballs on most newspaper website, that means the elimination of unnecessary sales channels that are slow and expensive, lower prices to the customer, more profit to the newspaper.

Randy articulates a critical disconnect that newspapers need to understand and resolve in order to survive when he says:

…newspaper companies must accelerate their development of innovative products that meet the news and information needs of consumers in multiple formats

.
In the world of social media, there are no consumers. There are users, lurkers, trolls, contributors, hyper-contributors — all kinds of people, but virtually no consumers. Sure, all these people buy stuff. But if you think of them as “consumers” you might as well close up shop today.

If you don’t understand what this means, I commend the following to your edification:

Cluetrain This 1999 book/website nails 95 theses to the front door of the Internet. Two of the authors are now fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center. (Thesis #74: We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.)

Clay Shirky’s ‘Cognitive Surplus’ Presentation Video of NYU professor explaining the importance of participatory media. (“Even a 4-year-old knows that a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”)

This thinking is primary to social media. And it is, in general, consonant with the kinds of suggestions that people like Martin and MichaelJ have been making.

The real problem, IMO, is that “the newspapers” seem to think of themselves as being in a position to determine how business on the Internet is going to work. Not possible.

Banner CPMs will continue to fall, search advertising will continue to gain in share. That newspapers are on the outside looking in at search advertising indicates how badly they misunderstood the Internet. If a newspaper website is anything, it is an aggregation of data that people want to get at.

A decade ago, Cluetrain accurately predicted the importance of a relevance-based approach on the Internet. Google’s stellar success proves it out. Newspapers have done what to position themselves for success in this new arena? That’s what I thought.

Final word: stop talking the talk and start walking the walk. Don’t sell ads, build community. (You remember that, right?)

PS. First comment here, so hoping the tags render.

Not at all – I just thought it was interesting that there’s a rogue operation underway. There’s hope for the old patient yet!

Vin, thanks for excellent stats backing up my contentions.

Michael J.: Great suggestions. As I say from time to time, print is not dead. I especially like #6, and intend to return to the subject of “cafe-sized conversations” in the necessary social networks built around news.

One thing that I’d completely missed until just now: This project is NOT from the NAA. After years of wan attempts at promotion from NAA, it looks like the industry is self-organizing around a different center.

Despite the missteps of this particular execution, that can’t help but be a good thing.

I really like #8 and #9. Both think about “the product” in new ways.

I’m a Print evangelist not a newspaper person, but the “sky is falling” stuff has been rampant in our industry for years, so a lot of it sounds familiar.

At any rate, I thought I would weigh in with what it looks like from the outside.

1. Newspaper companies are in trouble because of the massive debt they have incurred. The secular decline in readership has been going on since the 70′s. Profit was fine until advertising imploded.

2. The fact is that readers are a niche market. Most people view, scan, search Printed newspapers. Companies like the New Yorker have the best handle on the niche market of readers. Because of that fan base they seem successful with a read for free, pay for print, buy the stuff we make model.

3. The web is for talking, searching, and viewing. It is actually Telephone + TV +Search +a big filing cabinet+ the cheapest way to buy stuff every invented.

4. Print is for scanning, searching and reading for the mass market in phsyical space.

5. Since the real estate on the web is unlimited, the cost is going to continue to go down. Since the real estate in Print is limited, the cost can be stable. But it’s a location, location, location issue. If the Print is inserted in the right location with the right content, the advertising sell should be easy.

6. Newspapers should use the web to find and nurture tribes of fans. Data analytics are a big help. The number and quality of conversations started are a great place to start.

7. Once tribes and loyal fans are identified make stuff to sell them on the newspapers own website.
Why pay a publisher rent when the newspaper’s own website reaches the most probable buyers of a book produced by their staff. Given that the logistics of book printing and delivery have become trivial, publishing channels are a bug not a feature.

For the not readers, which is most of the audience, sell them posters, t shirts and tote bags.

8. Newspapers should consider the long tail of their content as a monetizable value. Consider replacing textbooks with targeted editions for students in K-12 focused on history, science, business, etc etc etc. Textbooks are another industry who’s value add is disappearing. Newspapers have massive under used capacity in their classrooms + they already give away copies of their editions as part of a “do good” program.

9. Reporters should be organized in teams of three to cover beats. Start with beats that are interesting to a potential fan base. Focus on that beat as a way to do business. Stop putting resources into following the news cycle. Devote the same place in the paper to that beat coverage.
As appropriate, print a special edition for the fans of that beat. As appropriate, print and sell and book covering that beat.

The same thing works for printing companies. Find your fans. Sell them stuff.

For instance, you claim that readership is increasing. Yet I’ve not seen any such claims that don’t conflate the DAILY printed circulation number and the number of MONTHLY online users. Is someone who uses a daily newspaper’s Web site once per month the same as a daily reader of print edition? Since when did daily newspapers become monthly publications?

Look at the data. For example, Nielsen’s six-month figures from March through August 2007 showed that The Boston Globe had 3.798 million visitors during an average month in that period. Does this mean that the Globe had a ‘combined audience’ of 4.158 million readers (360K in print and 3.798M online)? I ask because the same Nielson report states that the average user of the Globe’s Web site visited only 3.22 times per month (in other words, approximately once only every ten days), and saw only 19 Web pages and spent only 14 minutes and 19 seconds on that site all month long (probably less time than a Globe print reader spends per day).

Monthly user counts are rife with infrequent visits. In his critique, Martyn mentioned NAA data about NYTimes.com. Nielsen’s figures for that newspaper in period I mentioned above are 4.05 visits per month, and 27 Web pages and a total of 20 minutes and 20 seconds spent on the site all month long. So, on which of those 4.05 days per month should the advertiser place his ad in that daily newspaper’s Web site? Mixing daily and monthly usage data is mixing apples and oranges. Yet every claims I’ve seen that newspapers’ readerships and audiences are rising is based upon that misarithmetic. It’s disingenous and misinforms.

Likewise statements that online revenues are rising 20%, 30%, 40%, or even 50% per year. Sounds great but doesn’t withstand a peek behind the curtain. Newspaper online revenue has been rising 20% to 50% during each of the past ten years. The problem is it’ll have to continue rising at those rates (unlikely) for another ten years before it even starts to reverse the titanic monetary declines in print edition revenues. According to NAA data, for example, between 2006 and 2007 total online newspaper revenues grew 18.8% while print ad revenues declined 9.4%. Subtract the latter from the former and you can allude that it’s a net gain of 9.4% because online grew double the percentage that print did. However, the reality is the 18.8% online increase was from $2.664 billion to $3.166 billion (a gain of $502 million) while the 9.4% print decline was from $46.661 billion to $42.209 billion (a loss of $4.452 billion). The online increase would have needed to be 167% (rather than 18.8%) that year, just to keep the ship from sinking further. And the situation was almost certainly worse in 2008 and will likely be much worse in 2009.

Daily newspapers aren’t hurting because of misperceptions. Circulation and readership didn’t markedly decline in proportion to population during the past 25 years because of misperceptions. Advertisers aren’t increasingly abandoning newspapers because of mispercentions (online advertising and CraigsList aren’t fads). Publicly-held newspaper companies’ equity values and market capitalizations haven’t declined by 75% to 99% during the past five years — a period mostly pre-recession — because of misperceptions.

I’m glad that you support our industry. But don’t cherry-pick data. Stop using it out of context. Don’t conflate figures. The American newspaper industry has spent 250 years building its credibility. Don’t Baghdad Bob our industry when it needs a stronger defense. Your efforts may be well-intentioned, but your time would be better spent radically revamping the products you produce, because your customers (readers and advertisers) are rejecting those in ever-increasing numbers.

You are absolutely welcome to use my prior post on social networking: Building social networks around news.

I do take issue with Donna’s statement that readership is not the problem. I linked to Journalism.org’s 2008 “State of the News Media,” the charts in which paint a clear picture of the continuing circulation losses and in particular, the readership by age group showing the demographic skew that is at the heart of the newspaper problem. That readership skew is behind the relentless drop in share of total ad revenue that newspapers have experienced for the last 50 years, a drop that has become precipitous in the last few years, and that will not be reversed. That younger audience has not simply shifted to the online version of the same papers, as is made clear on that page:

“So does that mean that online gains make up for print losses? Not exactly.

“Unique visitors per month is the most frequently used measure of Web traffic. But clearly a visit or several in the course of the month (for free) is in no way comparable to the purchase of a single day’s issue in print.

“A second important metric is time spent on site. By the Newspaper Association’s calculation in the third-quarter, the average visitor to newspaper Web sites spent 43 minutes on them in the course of the month, a modest increase over the average of 42 minutes in the period a year earlier. But that works out to less than a minute and a half a day (and is a measurement of visits to all newspaper sites including the popular national ones like those of the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today). By contrast, a typical newspaper reader spends about 40 minute a day on a given issue.”

Obviously, that’s where the challenge lies. I’ve been clear in my posts that print is not dead, and I don’t think it will be, for a long time — but it can’t survive on a daily basis. The solution lies in moving, not incrementally, but strategically, to a more sustainable mix of online and print. I’ve put forward the view that the right model is an online first news enterprise with a weekend edition published on Friday.

Sorry you didn’t like the first ad we ran to help launch the Newspaper Project. I doubt we can change your opinion or get you to be less cynical about our efforts but we will certainly try. First, the audience data we used in the Super Bowl ad came from Nielsen and Scarborough. Yes, more people read a newspaper on Monday than watched the Super Bowl on Sunday. Second, I agree with you that the “Newspapers have unparalleled reach” message we conveyed in our initial execution is not a panacea for the newspaper industry’s complex challenges. But it’s a good starting point and in the next few weeks, you will see new print and online ads that take a very different approach. Third, we never said, nor do we believe, that the future of newspapers is all about print. On the contrary, newspaper companies must accelerate their development of innovative products that meet the news and information needs of consumers in multiple formats. Finally, all conspiracy theories aside, on January 7th, four idealistic yet somewhat frustrated newspaper executives sat in a room in New York for the first time and sketched out our ideas. On February 2nd, with a tiny budget, we launched a print and online campaign along with a website (www.newspaperproject.org) and more than 300 newspapers supported our efforts by donating space. As our work continues, we welcome your feedback on what we can to do stimulate productive discussion and debate about the issues we all confront. Maybe we can even get you to write a piece for us exploring your ideas about how newspapers need to embrace social networking.

Regards,

Randy
Randy Siegel
President & Publisher
PARADE Publications

We definitely can’t take positive efforts to the bank. But I am convinced that there are enough smart people in this industry that a solution can be reached.

A new business model will be hatched. And debates such as this will contribute.

Best of luck to you as well.