Rebuilding Media

On AP and Newspaper Cancellation

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:30:46 -0500

Earlier, I saw the AP having trouble if a group of Ohio papers didn't use it. Now, Jay Rosen points us to to a Wired pickup that links to this story from the MinnPost about Minneapolis Star Tribune sending the AP the requisite two-year notice that it intends to cancel. This after five other papers did so. Now, this doesn't mean that the Strib will necessarily drop AP. Sending notice ahead of a deadline is a common tactic. In fact, some lawyers routinely send out cancellation notices as a matter of course, to they can cancel in the event they do actually wish to cancel. And, Rosen also notes, The Spokesman Review is challenging the two-year cancellation notice requirement.

Nevertheless, it has for decades been a "given" that a U.S. newspaper would take the AP as a core component or important supplement of its news coverage. The MinnPost writer, David Brauer, talks of the damage to the area's news gathering if the AP loses the Star Tribune's participation (and fees). But he also notes that papers could use that money to pay for more of their own reporting:

If AP gets less cash and copy from the Strib and cuts its local presence, Minnesota’s news ecosystem could take a big hit. The wire service’s copy fleshes out local papers big and small; a diminished AP weakens a key line of defense for cash-strapped newsrooms.
Then again, non-metro editors around the nation were among the first to give AP notice; most said they’d rather save the coin for their own staffers (even as their publishers were thinking cash flow)

A Newsweek editor once quipped in an editorial meeting that "if we have two examples, it's a trend, three, a cover story." Well, now we have at least a half-dozen.

Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2)

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:56:15 -0500

(Continued from Part 1)

Violating the Principle of Supply & Demand

If the major reason for the American daily newspaper industry's demise were its stories contained too many dangling participles, then the industry could more easily comprehend its situation than instead hearing that the reason was it had violated the Principle of Supply & Demand.

The understanding of economics, particularly media economics, has never been its strong suit, except if the topic is how many tons of newsprint to buy, how many points a major stock market dropped, or how cut expenses to match revenues. Most newspaper publishers, editors, or journalists tends to equate economics as solely the science of government financial policy, household spending, Wall Street speculation, and petroleum pricing. They don't understand or have forgotten that a major branch of it is the behavioral science of Microeconomics - the study of how individuals make decisions to allocate their time and activities.

The main paradigm of microeconomics is known as rational choice theory or rational action theory, which states that individuals choose the best action according to their preferences and what constraints of supply, demand, time, and access face them. In it now lays the demise of American daily newspapers as we know them.

How did the American daily newspaper industry violate the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt the industry's core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 35 years? To understand how, both start and end at the roots of the newspaper industry.

Start in the European city of Strasbourg during 1605 when the world's first newspaper began publication. It used a technology developed there 164 years earlier by the metalworker Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented a device for producing innumerable copies of the same text. (Please keep that concept in mind, because it's now moldering the newspaper industry). The Supply & Demand equation for accessing daily changing information was then quite the opposite it is today: Consumers had little or no supply of daily news until the daily newspaper. So to produce newspapers, this adaption of Gutenberg's book printing technology spread quickly worldwide.

Some modern critics of newspapers say the industry is leaden and 'doesn't think outside the box.' They probably don't realize the historical irony that underlay their criticisms. The core of Gutenberg's technology was a box containing lead type whose impressions could print innumerable copies of the same thing. In that core is the inherent limitation that it produces the same edition for everyone. Although in the 19th Century steam and later electrical power speeded Gutenberg's technology and the introduction of offset lithography during the middle of the 20th Century eliminated its use of lead, the analog technology used to produce today's daily newspapers is still Gutenberg's. Indeed, today's analog printing technology still has the same limitation that it had in Gutenberg's days - it produces the same edition for everyone.

That technological limitation delineated the newspaper industry's editorial and advertising practices during the past four centuries. Because each edition had a finite number of pages and was printed by analog technology had to produce the same for everyone at once, newspaper editors had to select stories according to two criteria:

Stories about which the editor thinks everyone should be informed.
Stories that might have the greatest common interest.

Some editors may say there is no difference between those criteria. However, the criteria are discernible. The first one is the primary aim of American journalism, and includes the bulletins and investigative stories about which the editors think everyone should be informed. Those stories are a major reason why consumers read newspapers.

However, for reasons I'll explain below, many, if not most, of the stories that the editors select under this criterion vary greatly in actual relevance for individual readers. (For example, the top headline on the front page of a 120,000 circulation daily published Monday was 'Builder Gets OK for Road Change' about an access road bordering one of dozens of shopping plazas in a New York State suburban county with 160 miles of public roads and nearly one million residents.)

Nevertheless, the majority of stories in most daily newspapers are chosen according to the second criterion. These are stories that aren't bulletins, investigative, or enterprise, but which the editors think might have the greatest common interest among readers. (Some may even be page-fillers around advertisements, such as this example from the same daily: 'LUKASA (AP): Record cotton harvests have buoyed the Zambian economy.'). These second criterion stories vary even more in relevancy for each individual reader than do the first criterion stories.

Newspaper editors' use of those two criteria to select stories for publication has become so ingrained after 400 years of analog technology that few editors or newspaper executives are able to fathom any other possible or apt practices for story selection.

Moreover, they came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d'être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow's statement that "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail," the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg's technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the 'common agenda' for their community and likewise that their community's readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

From 1605 through at least the first quarter of the 20th Century, production of the same edition daily for all readers was unquestioningly accepted consumer because they had no other supply of daily changing information. It was the proverbial Hobson's Choice. But the situation began to change early in the 20th Century and has radically changed during the past 35 years.

A Sudden Evolution in Media Technology

Many media academics say that the inventions of radio and television during the first half of the 20th Century greatly increased people's access to news and information. That would be true only if you consider the addition of the handful of broadcast stations available within range of any person to be a great increase. The real increase in American's access to news and information began approximately 35 years ago.

The 1970s brought cable television (followed in later decades by satellite television). People who had access to only three or four television channels gained access to dozens, and then hundreds. Much like daily newspapers are in print, the original three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) were general-interest TV channels whose programming tried to satisfy all interests. However, the dozens and hundreds of new channels focus on specific topics (history or cartoons or comedy or shopping, etc.). If you're a fan of tennis and used to read a daily newspaper in hope that it would publish a tennis story that day, you can instead watch several channels each devoted 24 hours per day to sports, including one channel entirely devoted to tennis. Or if you love to cook, why be satisfied with reading a newspaper's recipe story when you now watch a four or five channels each devoted 24 hours per day to cooking?

The 1980s brought developments in offset lithography that made publication of 'niche' magazines economical. American newsstands that used to sell 20 to 30 titles nowadays sell hundreds of titles, almost all of which are about specific topics. Though these 'niche' magazines don't publish daily, their topical contents are often more satisfying to someone interested in that specific topic than was reading a daily newspaper in hope of seeing a sporadic story about the topic.

The 1990s brought the Internet access for the public. Ultimately more than 1.4 billion people worldwide, including two-thirds of the 304 million Americans, have gained online access to the Web sites of every of the worlds' newspaper, magazines, trade journals, TV channels, radio stations, broadcast networks, and more than 100 million other active Web sites about virtually every possible specific topic.

Our decade has brought to those consumers online access with broadband speeds and mobility, plus access to novel forms of content such as Social Media and the tens of millions of short videos available on YouTube.com. Billions of people worldwide will soon have ambient access to a virtual cornucopia of content that can almost instantly satisfy any of their common or specific interests.

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about 'data smog'.

I've heard many experts say that the evolution in access to media during the past three decades has been the greatest since Gutenberg time. Yet the reality is that it's much, much greater. The effects this radical increase in the supply of news and information that is readily available to people will have on civilization, nonetheless any one industry, will be much, much larger than anything the invention of the printing press ever wrought.

The immediate effect has been that more than 1.4 billion people - one of every six people worldwide - gravitated online to use this cornucopia of news and information. There are now spending more time using it than they spend reading printed newspapers and magazines. (Although consumers who have online access still spend more time watching television than going online, online video use is growing at geometric rates. For example, Americans watched 12 billion online videos just during May, up 45 percent from the previous May.)

It would be ludicrous to state that the rise of cable and satellite television, topical magazines, and the Internet has not spectacularly altered how individuals choose, according to each's preferences, which information they consume and how (i.e., rational choice/action in microeconomics).

Likewise, it is equally ludicrous to think that the newspaper industry as it has operated for more than 400 years would not be extremely affected and stressed by those changes in not just how people can now access information but what types of information each person choose to access according to his preferences. This is why newspapers that have reacted merely by putting their printed content online are missing the point of the change.

After I posted the first part of this essay, an impatient reader asked, "Is it the Internet or not [that has caused the demise of the American daily newspaper industry]?" The real answer is more nuanced than either yes or no: The answer is, no, the fact that those daily newspapers' contents are now available for free on the Internet is not why American daily newspapers are dying. The answer is, yes, the fact that the Internet (aided by topical magazines and topical channels from cable and satellite television) provides any person an extraordinarily better and more articulate way to satisfy his individual interests than any generically-aimed product such as the general-interest newspaper can do is why American daily newspapers are dying.

Changing the ownership of American daily newspapers from primarily publicly-held companies to not-for-profit organizations won't save this industry so long as it continues to keep producing a general-interest product. Nor will purchases of publicly-held daily newspaper companies by tycoons (Tierney, Zell, Burkle, Geffen, et. al.) who are infatuated with this business save the industry so long as it continues to keep producing a general-interest product. Nor will adding multimedia or interactivity so long as the industry keep's producing a general-interest product. The industry's problem isn't its ownership, the Internet, or lacks of multimedia or interactivity. The problem is its general-interest product has become obsolete.

Why More than 1.4 Billion People Gravitated Online

Why did more than 1.4 billion people gravitate online during the past 16 years? That simply question is rarely considered by newspaper executives, even by some of in charge with running newspaper Web sites.

Most newspaper executives assume that people want to consume the same types of news and information that people had consumed in print except that people now want to consume that content online. This dangerous assumption is the basis of most newspapers' attempts to transplant their printed edition's content and editorial practices into their Web sites - the so-called shovelware strategy.

History, consumer behavior, and data about usage contradict that faulty assumption:

The consumers, not media companies, led adoption of Internet. During the 1990s, media companies followed millions of consumers onto the Internet. No media companies invented the Internet as a medium. Most media companies were surprised that millions of consumers were using it. Almost all media companies were reluctant to put their content onto the Internet (a situation that's still true in the magazine and broadcast industries). Most media company executives don't ask themselves why hundreds of millions of consumers who already had access to Mass Media in traditional offline formats gravitated to online? Those consumers have gone online primarily to access content that they cannot get from traditional Mass Media packages.

Many newspaper executives who cling to the assumption that people want to consume the same types of news and information online was in print think that a major reason why people are abandoning print and going online is because online is a form of traditional print on electronic steroids. Contents can be updated more quickly online than in print and the Web can provide multimedia combinations of texts and video that neither paper nor television alone can. These executives assume that hundreds of millions of people are simply shifting their traditional reading habits from paper to online because online can be more up-to-date and offer multimedia. However, the consumers disagree with that assumption. The vast majority tell surveys that newspapers and magazines are still much more convenient and easier to read in printed format than online (and that video is more convenient and easier to watch on television sets than on computer monitor screens). Few, if any, consumers who would have read all of a newspaper's printed pages ever read all of the newspaper Web site's pages. That's not because the site's navigation doesn't allow them to do so, but because they choose not to do so.

The data about usage clearly indicates that people don't go online primarily to consume Mass Media. Last month was typical: only three Mass Media organizations' sites ranked among the world's top 100 most visited Web sites [http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global]: the BBC (#46), CNN (#50), and The New York Times (#97). Moreover, the average user of the average American newspaper's Web sites visits it only 2 to 6 times per month, seeing only 2 to 4 story pages per visit, compared with the average newspaper's newsprint edition reader reading all pages and doing so 17 to 20 times per month (i.e., 4 to 5 days per week). Consumers don't use online they way they used print.

The clear reason why people go online is to find whatever mix of content satisfies their own individual mix of interests but that they aren't getting from Mass Media. This is why four of the world's top five most visited Web sites are Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines (YouTube.com is the fifth site) and why those same search engines in languages other than English constitute 24 of the world's 100 most visited sites. The majority of Web users visit newspaper sites only a few times per month but visit a search engine multiple times per day.

Newspapers or other Mass Media companies that each produce a common product for all users direly need to understand that people are not going online to receive a common package (even one with multimedia added to it). They are going online to search and find the contents that the common package does not regularly give them. This is why most of the 1.4 billion people online primarily use search engines and to find content other than Mass Media content, rather than going online to use Mass Media online.

Everybody doesn't have the same interests

The average supermarket in America contains 45,000 different types of items (meat, produce, canned or bottled goods, etc.). However, imagine that you instead walked into a 400-year old market where the clerks hand you and every other customer an identical bag containing exactly the same mix of some 50 items and they tell you it contains what the supermarket's manager thought you and everyone else should or would like to eat. Despite its venerable history, would you shop at this market again?

If you had access to another source, even multiple sources, that could readily supply you with your own choice of the unique mix of items that match your individual needs, interests, and tastes, would you continue to use a 400 year-old source that continued to give everyone a generic mix of things? No, and that answer is the same when the items are the news as it is with supermarket items. With today's cornucopia of access to news and information, few Americans are patronizing newspapers anymore, particularly the young adults and young people who have grown up feasting on that cornucopia.

More than 1.4 billion people have gravitated online because they are using access to it - plus older portions of the cornucopia such as 'niche' magazines topical television channels, and even now cherry-picking parts of newspapers' Web sites - to satisfy their own uniquely individual mixes of common, group, and specific interests better than can any newspaper editors' guesses of what interest them can.

Why shouldn't they now that they can? People will naturally gravitate towards whatever medium, or mix of media, can best match their own individual mixes of interests. They didn't have many choices to do it 30 years ago, but they surely do now. Though those billions of consumer may have to hunt and gather from many sites to get the contents that match their individual mixes of interests, this is what billions of them are now doing. They are abandoning traditional media that deliver the same content to all of them - and no medium does that more than does newspapers.

It is foolish nowadays to base an industry on the assumption that a common package of content will satisfy people who now have a cornucopia of more specific supplies from which they can more articulately and precisely satisfy their interests. Any assumption that producing a common package of content will satisfy all people is a form of the Emperor's New Clothes:

All people share few common interests. What topic could possible interest everyone? There are very few such topics. The weather? Perhaps a national, regional, or local disaster? People share remarkably few common interests. (How few will vary by country and language: The 5.5 million citizens of Lithuania likely share a higher number of common interests than do the 5.5 million citizens of the multiracial and multi-ethnic American state of Missouri.)

Some people share group interests - people who live in a municipal district, parents who live in a school district, fans of a sports team, people who play golf, etc.

Each person possesses myriad specific interests, such as a hobby, favorite author, favorite actor, favorite places, an activity, a type of food, musical band or recordings, etc.

And each and every one of us is a unique mix of common, group, and specific interests. That mix is what makes us individuals. Gather ten people and you'll probably find hundreds of specific interests, only some of which some of those people share and very few of which they all share.

Moreover, the true relevance of any topic can only be judged by the individual and according to his own unique mix of interests, not by an editor who thinks he's choosing what's relevant to that individual's or everyone's interest.

It is unnatural to expect that the same package of content will satisfy all or even most of them on any day (even if those individuals are from the same country, region, or town).

Traditional data about newspaper usage supports this. Thirty years ago, surveys showed that the average reader of an American newspaper containing 30 to 100 stories would read only five to eight stories. The plurality of those five to eight stories, perhaps three or four, will be the bulletin stories or other stories about the few common interests. One or two might be stories that match that reader's group interests (such as a sports team or school lunch menu). The reader might also be lucky enough to find a story that matches one or two of his specific interests. Those numbers haven't significantly changed despite efforts by a generation of newspaper editors; the only difference today is that there are fewer and fewer average readers.

That is another indication that the limitation of Gutenberg's technology - producing the same edition at once for everyone - is a fundamental problem that cannot be incrementally solved by subscription price incentives, more stylish typography, or shorter stories. Neither can it be solved by shoveling it online

A Massive News Distribution Problem

What makes the limitation of Gutenberg's technology and the editorial practices it engendered all the more disastrous this century is that specific stories which match any individual's interests might exist but may simply not be delivered.

For example, I am a soccer fan who subscribes to The New York Times, but that newspaper hardly ever publishes stories about soccer unless a story has political implications or occurs during the immediate days leading to the World Cup championship or immediate weeks leading to an Olympics. Nevertheless, I know The New York Times newsroom has plenty of soccer stories. Years ago, I was the executive who sold it the Reuters soccer wire at the request of that newsroom, which probably also receives the Associated Press's and Agence France-Press' equivalent soccer wires. That newspaper receives dozens of major soccer stories every day; it even has stories about the Turkish Third Division, Swiss inter-cantonal matches, and the Korean intercity leagues. The problem is that The New York Times prints only one edition at once for everyone, which means its sports editors choose stories according to the greatest common interest in New York, which this time of year means baseball, tennis, and golf stories.

Soccer is the world's most popular sport and there probably are hundreds of thousands of soccer fans living in the 17 million population New York City metropolitan area. Indeed, there are probably more soccer fans living in New York City than the total populations of some European countries' capitals. But those New Yorkers won't see soccer stories in The New York Times because of the limitations of that newspaper's editorial and production practice. The same is true with almost every other American newspaper.

At root, this is a massive distribution problem. Stories about which specific people may be interested exist, but aren't being distributed to them by newspapers due to the limitations of a technology that was invented when horses were the only form of transportation on our streets -- Gutenberg's analog press technology. That limitation is proving to be the Achille's Heel of the daily newspaper industry. It might not have been a problem when the newspaper industry was the world's only supplier of daily changing news in text formats, but it's a massive problem today.

The American newspaper industry has failed to adapt its technologies, products, and practices in an era during which consumers have an overabundance of both of other suppliers and supply of daily changing content. The industry has failed to change when consumers' supply did. It violated basics of the Principle of Supply & Demand. The industry itself is now failing because of that error and inertia.

Corollary Effects Compounding that major failing are several corollary effects of the Principle of Supply & Demand:

One of the most obvious corollary effects when the Supply & Demand equation switches from scarcity to surplus is the value that people give and the price that they are willing to pay for declines. Today's cornucopia of supply has forced the value of the most common forms of news and information to plummet to values and prices so low that it's no longer even economical for newspapers to charge consumers for it anymore. Some publishers claim that consumers have simply become habituated to not paying for content. Those publishers are ignorant about economics. The consumer might have paid half a dollar for a printed newspaper years ago when it was his only source of daily changing information in text format, but simply won't give it that value and pay anywhere near that much now that he has online access to every newspaper and other news source in the world.
Another obvious corollary is that control shifts. During a scarcity, the seller of information controls the transaction, but the buyer controls during a surplus. Control is no longer solely in the hands of publishers; it is now shared by the consumers and the publishers. There are still some publishers who claim that content is 'king', but we now live in digital republics.
The overabundance of suppliers of news and information, nonetheless the supply, leads to another corollary, one that might seem to be counter-intuitive: the 'good enough' beats perfect. The overabundance of suppliers leads to competition that actually lowers the threshold of acceptable quality. When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., 'high production values') as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality. Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least 'good enough' to watch. The production of higher quality delays distribution and widespread usage. This corollary runs against the grain of traditional Mass Media organizations, which tend to delay release of their content until it is perfect, but the effect of this corollary is an observable phenomenon.
• A related corollary is that, much like high production quality, completeness is no longer necessary. The competition among an overabundance of supplier means that withholding a story until it is editorial complete can become counterproductive; the first to release even the partial story wins play and the traffic. A partially complete story that informs the public now is more valuable than a complete story later. Similarly, stories that may never be complete and hadn't had value in earlier times now may have value. For example, a half dozen police cars and a police helicopter surrounded the post office across my street for a quarter hour and then departed. There wasn't any story about this subsequently in my local newspaper, not even when the paper published the daily police log. When I asked the editor why, he told me, "It didn't develop into anything, so it wasn't news." I disagree. It certainly was news to anyone within earshot of all those police cars and the police helicopter circling the building. In my city, that's probably one or two thousand people who wondered what it was about. Years ago, they and I would have probably shrugged our shoulders, resigned to never knowing what that turmoil was about because if the newspaper wouldn't publish the answer then no one would. Instead, we visited local bloggers' sites for the answer (i.e., a false report of a hostage taking) because the bloggers, unlike most newspaper editors, know that people nowadays expect to have access to even information that is incomplete.
Another counter-intuitive corollary is that the overabundance of suppliers means that establish brands are less of a defense. Unlike traditional forms of media, the Web's lower costs of entry and its worldwide reach means that any small company - even a start-up - can trump an established brand. I've heard many traditional media company executives say that their traditional brands will ensure their company's place online among Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and YouTube. They forgetting the irony that all those brands are startups that are trouncing traditional media brands. A more specific example for newspapers may be The Guardian apparently has eclipsed The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Boston Globe as what most American liberals online read each day. Although that British daily circulates a negligible number of printed copies in America and was unknown to most Americans ten years ago, 59 percent of The Guardian Web site's 20 million users are outside the UK and the overwhelming majority of those are from the U.S. The number of that newspaper's online readers who are Americans likely equals, and now probably exceeds, the number of The New York Times Web site's readers who are.
Another corollary is that consumer's cornucopia of access to news and information means that brands functionally stop being 'silos', and despite their owners' wishes. Traditional newspaper publishers want their publication to be their readers' sole source, want their readers to use only that brand. However, the more than one billion people who are online are readily mixing brands. They are hunting and gathering stories content from multiple brands, simply because they have access to all brands online. The user of the average American newspaper's Web site, who visits that site only once every four to 15 days and sees only one or two pages per visit, isn't visiting a Web site only once every four to 15 days and seeing only one or two Web pages on that day. Data from the same firms that track American newspaper Web sites' traffic (Nielsen and ComScore) show that this average visitor uses the Web daily and will visit half a dozen or more Web sites on any given day.
Likewise, and this is the most important corollary effect upon daily newspapers, any newspaper's traditional packaging of content automatically unpackages when placed online. The average newspaper online becomes reduced to only its core competency - which means local news. The print edition of a daily newspaper traditionally contains international, national, regional, and local news about government, politics, sports, and business. A person might read, for example, the printed edition of the Willimantic Chronicle for that package of news. However, the same person is very unlikely to visit that newspaper's Web site to look at international, national, or even regional news. Not if that person has ready online access to every other newspaper in the world. Instead, he'll most likely visit NYTimes.com or CNN.com for international and national news about government and politics, ESPN.com for international and national news about sports, WSJ.com for international and national news about business, and the Web site of a regional newspaper for regional news. He'll likely theChronicle.com only to read local news, something which no other source produces. The same is true with most other American daily newspapers' Web sites. More than 1,200 of the 1,439 dailies have less than 50,000 weekday circulation in print. Unlike the national or even regional dailies, their core competency is local news, and it is overwhelming for that people use their Web sites. The effect of this corollary begs the question of why the majority of American newspapers bother to put international and national news (almost all of which is from the Associated Press) onto their Web sites, and it brings into question the future of the AP's business model.

The reason why that 'unpackaging' corollary is particularly important for American daily newspapers is that most of them have deviated far from their core competency of reporting local news. That is the second of the two fundamental causes of American daily newspapers' decline and potential demise. It will be the subject of the next part of this essay later this week.
Why America is the Epicenter of the Daily Newspaper Industry's Decline

By the way, why has America become the epicenter for the demise of daily newspapers in post-Industrial countries? Its sheer scale and technological advancement are why. During the past 30 years, more supply of news and information has risen there than anywhere else in the world.

Among the post-Industrial countries, America is the most populous and linguistically homogenous. It contains more people than the next three largest post-Industrial countries (Japan, Germany, and France) plus Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Denmark combined. Although India and China are each more populous, neither is post-Industrial; the majority of Indians and Chinese do not have access to Internet or to anywhere near as many channels of television as Americans do (2,218 broadcast stations and more than 150 broadcast and cable networks. It's been estimated that approximately one-half of the world's more than 175 million active Web sites are in America.

Nowhere in the world have more consumers gained more access to a supply of daily changing news and information in a common language than in the United States. The country's advancement and homogeneity aids its newspaper industry's undoing.

Transforming American Newspapers (Part 1)

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:59:55 -0500

Ignorance isn't bliss to the dying. Witness the pathos of American daily newspaper companies. Most have finally begun to realize that the deterioration of their businesses isn't cyclical but grave. Yet few, if any, understand why. Almost all grasp for the reasons.

Some attribute their grave condition to advertisers suddenly switching huge portions of spending from print to online - an excuse that ignores more than 30 years of declines in those newspapers' printed editions' circulations and readerships. Some others attribute their deterioration to not having transplanted their content into online quickly enough -an excuse that ignores not only the dozen years they've spent transplanting it but how their online editions are now read even less frequently and less thoroughly than their printed editions.

Most of the print newspaper experts who diagnose these companies' condition still prescribe stale nostrums such as more consumer focus groups, subscription price incentives, more stylish typography, or shorter stories. Meanwhile, most of the experts who diagnose these companies' Web sites prescribe balms and accessories such as giving blogs to reporters, adding video, or having the readers themselves report the stories. American daily newspaper companies have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they've even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.

I'll declare the real reasons. There are but two and neither has anything to do with multimedia, 'convergence', blogs, 'Web 2.0', 'citizen journalism,' or any ancillary topics you may have heard presented at New Media conferences this millennium.

Nor is either of the real reasons advertisers' abandonment of printed newspapers. Their abandonment is a symptom, not the reason for the decline. Contrary to myopia of many newspaper executives, advertisers aren't newspapers' primary customers. Although advertising revenues may be sunshine for newspaper executives, the roots of their business are readers. A newspaper with readers will attract advertisers but a newspaper without readers will not. Readers ultimately support and sustain the newspaper business.

To understand the real reasons why the American daily newspaper industry is dying, first understand why more and more Americans are no longer reading daily papers and how their abandonment of newspapers has been wrought by changes in their own media economics. Also comprehend why the epicenter of the newspaper industry's problems in post-Industrial countries is America and exactly how grave the situation is there.

The Fate of American Daily Newspapers

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won't exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies -- namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal -- will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily. Further layoffs of staffs by those newspapers' companies cannot avoid this fate - not so long as daily circulations and readerships continually and increasingly decline. (Layoffs are becoming little more than the remedy of bleeding that was used in attempts to cure ill patients during the 18th Century and cannot restore the industry's health.)

'Hyperlocal' news startup companies, whose services will be delivered not on newsprint but online, might replace many small dailies, but not most, and certainly not before the printed products' demise. The deaths of large numbers of daily newspapers in the U.S. won't cause a new Dark Age but will certainly cause a 'Gray Age' for American journalism during the next decade. Much local and regional news won't see the light of publication. (America alone won't suffer this calamity. Many other post-Industrial countries' newspaper industries will suffer or, at best, skirt a version of this disaster.)

Is the Situation Really That Bad?

Last year, the most authoritative newsletter covering the American newspaper industry intentionally went out of business. The Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter, in a front page editorial entitled 'Passing the Inflection Point,' co-publisher Miles Grove, the former chief economist of the Newspaper Association of America, politely stated:

"The market momentum guiding the future of newspapers is especially brutal in the larger markets. Many have already passed the point of opportunity as it is too late for newspapers that have not successfully adopted marketing practices needed to support the core product and integrate with alternative distribution channels ...For those who have not made the transition, technology and market factors may be too strong to enable success."

Last month, Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert put it more bluntly in a Reuters in a story about the dwindling number of equity analysts who still covering the deterioration of this $40 billion industry:

"If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself."

Among the largest American newspaper companies, the losses of equity have been titanic. On the August day in when I write this, stock in the Journal Register Company is trading for less than four pennies per share, down from $3.25 a year ago, a loss of 99 percent. Any of the buildings housing any of its 22 daily newspapers is worth more than the company's current stock market capitalization (currently $1.4 million). Journal Register reports that it has $77 million in assets, $719 million in liabilities, and lost $102 million last year. Standard & Poor's, which downgraded its rating of Journal Register's stock to junk, has now withdrawn any rating of it. Meanwhile, stock in Gatehouse Media, which publishes 97 dailies, is trading at 57 pennies per share, down from $22.00 two years ago, a 97 percent loss. That company faces delisting by the New York Stock Exchange and the equity research firm Morningstar this week declared its stock to be essentially worthless, valuing the fair price as zero.

Meanwhile, stock in the McClatchy Company, which publishers 30 dailies, has dropped from $74.30 three years ago to $3.78, a 95 percent loss. Stock in Lee Enterprises, which publishes 51 dailies, has dropped from $48.57 to $3.83, a 92 percent loss during the past four years. Media General, which publishes 25 dailies, has seen its stock price drop 83 percent in the past four years. Stock of The New York Times Company, which publishes 17 dailies, has dropped 75 percent during the past six years, from $51.50 to $12.98. Stock in Gannett Company, which publishes 85 dailies, has dropped 65 percent, from $90.14 to $17.40, during the past four years. Despite these results, Morningstar still calls newspapers, "the market's most overvalued stocks," according to the newspaper industry trade journal, Editor & Publisher.

The American newspaper industry's losses of advertising revenues have been so well reported elsewhere that I see no need to outline those here. Likewise the industry's losses of weekday and Sunday circulations, except that the industry maintains the façade that its overall circulation losses during the past three decades have been relatively minor. Weekday overall circulation was 62 million in 1970, dropped to 55.8 million at the turn of the century, and is approximately 53 million today. An overall loss of 9 million or 14.5% isn't paltry but doesn't seem that bad in the span of 38 years.

However, those absolute numbers fail to account for population growth during that time. The American population was 203 million in 1970 and 304 million today. Had the American daily newspaper industry at least kept pace with population growth, its weekday circulation should be 93 million today, not 53 million. The industry's weekday penetration proportionate to population dropped from 30.5 percent 1970s to 17.4 percent to today, a relative decline of 43 percent.

To combat news of these declines, the industry has stretching its yardstick of readership plus begun conflating daily print circulation and monthly online usage. Its readership estimates vary from 2.3 people to 2.5 people per printed copy, numbers which, if true, would also mean that the majority of people who read a daily newspaper don't themselves purchase it. More likely, the industry is stretching readership to mean the number of people who might live in a household where at least one person happened to buy or subscribe to a newspaper. But the other 1.3 to 1.5 people haven't necessarily read it.

An independent survey released this month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported that 46 percent of Americans a newspaper 'regularly', down from 52 percent two years ago and as high as of 71 percent in 1992. Moreover, only 34 percent say they read a newspaper 'yesterday', down from 40 percent two years ago.

Meanwhile, the industry has begun combining its Web sites' total number of monthly users and its printed editions' daily circulation totals - even though the average monthly unique user of the average American daily newspaper Web site use the site on only four to seven days per month. The resulting muddle of daily and monthly vastly overstates the number of people who use a newspaper daily, whether in print or online.

Despite those financial, advertising, circulation, and readership declines, an article of faith among newspaper companies has become that the cure lay online. The most widely prescribed remedies are multimedia (also called 'convergence') and interactivity (mainly in forms of 'Web 2.0' and 'citizen journalism'). The companies hope that adding those attributes to what their newspapers have always done will reverse their industry's fate.

Yet adding multimedia, convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0, and 'citizen journalism' to what their newspapers have always done aren't cures but merely balms and accessories. No matter how well intentioned those New Media prescriptions are, no matter how much more animated or responsive multimedia and interactivity can make daily newspapers, adding those will prove to be little more than analgesics.

The absences of multimedia or interactivity aren't why the circulations and readerships of American daily newspapers have been declining in relation to both population and households for more than three decades. Half of American newspapers' declines in weekday circulation and readership relative to population occurred before the Internet opened to the public in late 1991, prior to popular awareness of interactivity or multimedia. Although Americans nowadays expect all media to have multimedia and interactive attributes, the absence of those attributes clearly aren't the major causes of the deterioration of the newspaper industry nor will adding those reverse those declines.

So, what are the two reasons why the American daily newspaper industry's is dying?

The major one is simply that American newspaper companies have violated a specific part of the Principle of Supply & Demand when consumers' supply of news and information radically changed in the past 15 years. (I'll describe which specific part of the Principle in Part II of this essay). The other and more reasons why American newspapers are dying is because how far too many of them have deviated from their local roots (the subject of Part 3 of this essay).

The major reason alone is a mortal wound for the industry, but the minor reason exacerbated it due to a corollary effect of newspapers' violation of a Principle of Supply & Demand.

On ~~Friday~~ Sunday In the next part of this essay, I'll explain the major reason. I'll explain the minor reason in an essay early next week. And later next week I'll outline what the American daily industry might have done to avoid its demise.

NYTimes.com: More Californians Visiting than NYers?

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:37:41 -0500

... That's what Google Trends says. Like I've said, sometimes when you're poking around for other work, you find curious stats. Like, today, if you search "NYTimes.com" in Google Trends, it shows that more visits come from California than New York.

What to watch as The Sporting News launches free online formatted magazine.

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:13:34 -0500

Today was the first public edition of “The Sporting News Today.” This is a free, online daily version of The Sporting News, the weekly magazine that got its start as a bible for baseball fans.

The Sporting News has a rich history, starting publication in 1886. I remember my father subscribing in the 1960s. It was thick with box scores and stats for every team and every major sport. In 1977, when the Times Mirror Co bought the publisher for all of $18 million it had a circulation of about 356,000. By the time it was sold to Vulcan Ventures in 2000 for $100 million it had a circulation of over 500,000, but it was being threatened by the successful launch of ESPN Magazine, which had 850,00 circulation within two years of its 1998 launch.

The Sporting News was sold again in 2006, to American City Business Journals. Today the circulation is about 700,000, but at an annual price of only $14.97 for a new subscription—compared to about $61.00 in constant dollars in 1978.

Like many print publications, The Sporting News has been substantially affected by online content. Daily sports news has been particularly hard hit. The Internet is made for getting late night scores, accessing the scads of stats that even casual fans crave, following teams in far-off cities—and all for little or, most often, no consumer cost.

Like most other print publications, it has had an online presence. The Sporting News Today is something else though. It is a magazine formatted for the screen. But it is not like a Web site. It involves no scrolling. It is pdf-like, though it is not read with Adobe Reader. It is not the print edition read online, as with Zinio. To me each screen looked like a double page spread in a magazine—but with no need for a gutter. I sort of felt that I had spread opened the tabloid-sized magazine. You will note that each of the “double pages” has one page number.

By offering to send subscribers an email each day, readers so do not have to bookmark anything. Just click the link.

The content is vintage Sporting News: Right now heavy on baseball, but lots on football—professional and college. There is hockey, basketball, NASCAR, tennis. Even Little League World Series coverage is promised. And, with a nod to WEB 2.0, it will offer readers the opportunity to provide their own input: “You’ll get a byline, file to an editor.” (Actually, a clever spin on “Letters to the Editor.”)

No surprise, the business model for the Sporting News Today is, for the moment at least, advertising, though it was rather light for a first edition. The inaugural issue had a full page from SpeedTV.com, three half page house ads for Sporting News affiliates and a full page promotion for the revamped Sporting News magazine, which will become a bi-weekly. (Management expects to lose 100,000 circulation from current levels to the free online publication).

I’m not a design expert—I’ll leave that to my colleagues at Innovation Media Consulting Group. But the Sporting News Today will feel comfortable to readers who like the look of print and are put off by clicking here and there for do their online reading. The layout feels modern but grounded in print. How that plays may be generational—or not.

As a final note, it may be worth pointing out that while traditional print publications are downsizing, The Sporting News Today is hiring. Indeed, I got turned on to its impending launch by Charles Apple, it’s new art director, who was hired away from the Virginia Pilot newspaper. (Has anyone seen numbers on how many print journalists have been hired by online-only ventures other than self-funded blogs?)

There has been speculation in recent years on when we will get the first announcement that a daily newspaper will shut down its presses completely and switch to digital-only. There are still some big hurdles, like portability. But should services such as Amazon’s Kindle take off, allowing readers to take their digital publications on the go, then the Sporting News Today model may have legs and encourage a general interest newspaper to give it a whirl.

This is WSJ Breaking News Why, Exactly?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:15:17 -0500

Sure, Alex Rodriguez is a star, and it's a big deal in advertising and entertainment circles that he's signed with a given talent agency. But why exactly is this worth interrupting us on Monday evening (I'm signed up for general Wall Street Journal alerts, not every last smidgeon of entertainment or sports news).

WSJ.com Editors to DORIAN show details 7:40 PM (1 hour ago) Reply
__________________________________
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

July 21, 2008

New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez has signed on with the William Morris Agency. William Morris, the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based talent representation company, has a client list that includes some of the biggest names in entertainment, sports and the corporate world. For Mr. Rodriguez, the move marks the latest turn in his relationship with Scott Boras, one of baseball's most successful and controversial agents. Mr. Boras, who has represented Mr. Rodriguez throughout his career, said he will continue to represent Mr. Rodriguez in any baseball-related negotiations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121667673378471533.html?mod=djemalertNEWS

ContentNext, mediabistro and Math

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:40:33 -0500

Mediabistro blog FishbowlNY’s swipe at the valuation of Rafat Ali’s ContentNext, sold for a reported $30 million (including an earn-out over time based on performance) to the Guardian Media Group, smells at least a little bit of tit-for-tat over something Rafat wrote after mediabistro’s sale to Jupiter Media. Fishbowl says Content Next revenues in 2007 were $3 million, which it calls a “10+” valuation (I think they mean 10x), and ignores a few factors. Just as people during the mediabistro sale for $20 million plus a $3 million earn-out over two years quoted its revenues of a year earlier and ignored the 30-40 percent yearly growth as well as the inherent value of some of mediabistro’s assets (such as its list of more than 700,000 registered users, more than 10,000 of whom were paying members).

But even if CN’s valuation is lower than FishbowlNY is saying (they should, I think, subtract the earn-out to get a base value for the deal, which may be lower than $30 million) there are many reasons for it be high. One, as HighBeam and Newser.com CEO Patrick Spain noted to me on the phone yesterday, is the value of the core ContentNext audience -- media executives, decision makers with budgetary control. It also has a budding and growing group of conferences for which attendees pay hundreds of dollars admission to see even higher-profile execs speak (Murdoch, Cavuto...), a strong list of email recipients, high-profile business and financial advertisers it has cultivated and maintained for years, successful media properties in the U.S., U.K. and India (India!), a growing research component, and ContentNext Dex, a listing of media-tech stocks it has created and which serves as a technological bit of value. The participation of high-profile investor Alan Patricof, former WSJ.com GM Nathan Richardson as CEO, and, of course, editorial co-chief Staci Kramer, as well as a cadre of strong, international journalists who’ve stuck with the company for years, and a growing and successful sales team all adds up to value as well. The Guardian group, I’d say, bought the management as much as the company’s book assets, and I’d wager that the earn-out is larger than mb’s. Add, too, the U.K.-based Guardian group’s professed desire to go more international, the synergies with its other properties, the fact that it is a trust able to think and act more long-term than a typical public company, and there’s a lot of value to be wrung from its purchase of ContentNext beyond a typical times-revenue or even more cumbersome financial calculations, such as WACC. (I doubt there’s much if any debt on the CN’s books, and also doubt that capital structure played much of a role in the decision to buy it.)

I love mediabistro, where I’m proud to have serves as editorial director before the sale, and ContentNext, where I’ve helped in a couple different ways, and for the record my analysis here of both properties is from publicly available reports and discloses no private details. Mediabistro’s audience of media professionals is and was, like CN’s, worth a lot more than an average consumer audience. Rafat duly noted in his interview with Kara Swisher after his company’s sale that it does cost quite a penny to produce their brand of journalism: “We’re a news media business on the Internet, but we’re not a consumer Internet company. We will never be.”

While it’s impressive that he got $30 million for the company so soon after Patricof invested, and in the midst of looking for a second round of funding, one eyebrow raiser from the Swisher interview is the speed with which the deal took place: “It all came to be in three weeks,” Rafat says, something he repeats on ScribeMedia.org, which is, full disclosure, a partner in Naked Media.

Random News, No Preference

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:28:05 -0500

For the upcoming episode of Naked Media, I’ll be speaking with Patrick Spain and Michael Wolff, co-founders of Newser.com. Preparing one of the “fun” segments of the show, we went out on the street this morning and asked about a dozen people of all ilks where they get their news. Once again (as with our segment on Twitter), I’m reminded that we in the biz need to remind ourselves that “normal” people don’t focus on a lot of the things that obsess us. A number of folks who looked to be in their twenties and thirties said they didn’t bother with the Internet, and instead go for free newspapers or TV. Or perhaps check NYTimes.com and nothing else. Most didn’t know, whether they were looking at the Web or TV, what “brand” of news they were consuming, though some did refer to a specific TV channel by number (‘I watch channel 5”) or just “my email” or “The Internet” or, perhaps, “AOL.” No one in our non-car culture here in New York mentioned radio.

No one talked about the “experience” and only one guy (a ringer from Scribe Media who was happening by) talked about RSS feeds or doing any personalized aggregation, or using any new technologies. None seemed terribly able to say why they watched one channel or Web site over another. It all seemed rather random and haphazard, that folks just happened upon a channel, whether TV or Web, and stuck with whatever they were fed. Few expressed a strong preference for any news or information brand.

You can write and shoot and brand and produce your heart out. But whether your stuff gets seen might all come down to whether your bizdev folk got the headline on the AOL or Yahoo homepages.

You Can't Have it Both Ways

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:07:32 -0500

In spite of all the new ability to measure. digital media also present new challenges in figuring out what works. This thought gelled for me during a Naked Media discussion with Erin Byrne and Ben Ezrick, both leading digital strategists, he for Ogilvy, she for Burson-Marsteller. We watched the Bronze Lion-winning but fake JC Penney ad that has finally been removed from YouTube after getting hundreds of thousands of views. The commercial was since withdrawn from the awards, apparently.

The video shows two teenagers "Speed Dressing," timing themselves as they put on their clothes after undressing to "get away with it" in the girl's basement -- a message a Penney marketing manager has said the company would never condone. But the company has also gotten a lot of notice for the ad, which, as The Wall Street Journal points out , may curry favor with more urban teens, especially on the coasts. So, for a mass brand like Penney, they condemn the ad. But they, perhaps, reap the benefits of the branding in a measurable way -- hundreds of thousand saw the video before it was pulled, and it's now available on other sites. Ezrick, in the Naked Media segment, points out that neither Penney nor its ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, have yet completely explained how the ad got to be entered in the Cannes awards contest, nor exactly how people affiliated with them were involved in producing the video.

Both Ezrick and Byrne point out that Penney can't have it both ways: If they genuinely don't condone the video, they need to investigate and reveal how it came to be to the best of their knowledge. If they had something to do with it, they must say so, and, if need be, apologize honestly for any discomfort or harm they may have caused. But what they can't do is reap the benefits of the video going viral and also be upset while they gain brand awareness. You also can't, in a digital age, segment audiences as you could in a previous era, showing one ad to the coasts, say, and another to "Middle America." Perhaps digital media means everything is outed, eventually. And that means we have to be more honest, or at least more consistent.

Hard data confirms changes in Wall Street Journal’s news choices under Murdoch

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:52:09 -0500

I really, really promise that I will not be stuck forever on what might be seen as a crusade about the change in the editorial mix of The Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch took control. I don’t want to become the Ben-one-note on this as Lou Dobbs has become for his anti-immigration tirades.

Still, there is some news on the subject. I have written several times now about how the Journal has been devoting its front page to hot-off-the-press headlines that are essentially the same as what every other daily publishes: “Obama wins primary,” “Cyclone levels Sri Lanka.” This is a form of run-of-the-mill reporting to which the Journal brings little value added and, with earlier deadlines than most local dailies, perhaps less value.

But now comes some hard data—that’s what I like more than impressions—that does indeed confirm a substantial shift in the Journal’s editorial coverage since the change in ownership. The Project for Excellence in Journalism undertook a content analysis of the front page stories in the Journal for the four months before the December 12, 2007 date that News Corp. acquired control of Dow Jones, the parent of the WSJ and the three months following. Its finding was unambiguous:

In the first three months of Murdoch’s stewardship, the Journal’s front page has clearly shifted focus, de-emphasizing business coverage that was the franchise, while placing much more emphasis on domestic politics and devoting more attention to international issues.

The before and after change is most dramatic in several areas, as seen in PEJ’s chart I’ve cribbed here. Political news is up four fold, reflecting the intense coverage of the primaries that in the past election cycles would have received less space (if only because until recently the Journal rarely devoted more than a single front page column to any story). The full report at the Project’s Web site also compares the “new” Journal’s editorial mix with that of The New York Times, which Murdoch is keen compete with. There are still substantial differences, with the Journal devoting more of its front page to foreign topics, business and economics, less to politics.

Jack Shafer, writing at Slate’s Press Box last month, made note of the PEJ data, but chose to focus on his more generalized impression that the Journal may indeed be better under Murdoch because “it was swinging hard again in its traditional wheelhouse to produce great enterprise journalism.” He proceeds in identifying some examples, all, indeed quality reporting in which the Journal has long excelled.

This may be wishful thinking on Jack's part. I hope not. He has certainly identified some fine-- and traditional -- Journal pieces. But I'm speculating that perhaps they stand out because, as Jack notes, the primary season is over, and there had been no devastating earthquakes or cyclones for a few weeks, and the presidential campaign was in pre-convention simmer. Indeed, in the midst of these fine articles was the front page on June 4, as Obama wrapped up the Democrat's nomination. It struck me immediately as I picked up the Journal and The Boston Globe from the driveway that the Journal article was readily interchangeable with the Globe (and other dailies) articles. In my analysis, every day the Journal wastes newsprint with such headlines, photos and copy is a day lost to do the type of journalism Jack is rightly trumpeting.

I’ve mentioned before that I have great respect for Murdoch as a savvy businessman and as a risk taker who has made real contributions to the competitive landscape of the media.. My current critique is that the hot news approach is not a strategic direction that plays on the Journal’s long time strengths. To the contrary, it takes the paper on a path that daily newspapers should be trying to leave behind.

Ok. ‘Nuff said. I’ll leave this behind. If only Lou would move on from his obsession.

George Carlin, My Hero

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:43:50 -0500

My colleagues will forgive me for going a little off-topic (unless one thinks in the larger sense):

George Carlin is one of my heroes. Not for the routine that made him most famous -- the seven (later 10) dirty words you can’t say on TV -- but for so much of his work that, while making us laugh, also made us look at ourselves and was really social criticism: his poem about his hair and its length (“wear it to there or to there or to there if you dare!”) and the goofy news guy (“In Baltimore it’s 6:43, now for the 11 o’clock report!) making fun of the supercilious seriousness with which so many newscasters intoned to us, decades before The Daily Show.

Comedy is one of the few ways (along with music) in the U.S. to do social criticism and gain mass appeal, fame and fortune, and sneak it under the radar. Early on, and a little bit still, I did comedy, and may do more of it. I can well appreciate the courage Carlin had, the the strength of will and energy. It's bad enough to be standing in front of a hostile audience that doesn't give a damn and is ignoring you through a drunken haze at 2 a.m., or working to fill the pockets of a sleazy club owner who pays you $15 and a drink, if that. But to stand up by yourself on stage in those conditions night after night for years, and build up an audience, and then continue to take risks, not play it safe, get arrested as Carlin was but be unrepentant. Carlin finally got the attention of the establishment, including Congress, for his list of dirty words. I have to think he knew what he was doing, that he knew he wouldn't be sneaking under the radar with those. I noticed in the NPR obit quoting Carlin today that when asked his regrets, he mentions his and his wife's drug use, not because of any edict or strictures, but because of how he felt it harmed his daughter.

My wife gave me a box set of Carlin CDs as a present a few years back, and while I seldom listen, I do cherish them. I'm not a big collector of DVDs or books or spoken CDs -- who has all that shelf space, and how many would you really want to read or watch or listen to more than once or twice? But Carlin's work is an oeuvre that to me goes far beyond comedic laughs. I saw Carlin live, once, at a circle theater in the New York area, and marveled at his mastery, his timing, physical prowess, voice control, microphone technique. A video of a 2003 HBO special under the writer credit says: George Carlin. Not only was he a master performer with impeccable skills, but he also wrote his own stuff. I don't know if others ever wrote for Carlin, but I do know that a great number of top comedians, especially later on in a career, will have others contribute a lot.

Words. Carlin believed in them, in their power, forever playing around with meaning and hidden meaning, while slipping in the social critique. (One of his chosen oxymorons: Military Intelligence.) Today, I admire Carlin's seven dirty words routine more than I did when it first gained fame. I see it for the boundary pushing bit it was, following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce before him. And society in some ways has caught up to the man who was visionary in his own goofy ways: there are plenty of farts on TV now (watch the routine posted on Silicon Alley Insider, to see what I mean), and Jon Stewart says a barely bleeped "shit" on his show about every 5 minutes. (Granted, it's cable, but that means it's in, what, 85 percent of American homes?)

I was told today by a well-known comedian and satirist that Carlin last year at a show seemed old and tired, not on his game. I've seen a news report that he was performing to get out of tax debt. Both may be true. But neither can remove the wealth of humor and wisdom he left us.

The Real Threat to AP

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:07:40 -0500

There’s a lot of grumbling and retorting about the AP’s attempt to then sort-of retreat from making bloggers either paraphrase or take down their pickups of material from the venerated wire service. But there’s a more immediate problem that runs deeper than complaints from bloggers like Michael Arrington, Jeff Jarvis or Jeff Nolan.

A few weeks back the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on "On the Media" talked about how newspapers in Ohio were reaping great benefits trading material, and linking and cross linking. More importantly, she said she was no longer reliant on The Associated Press for her stories from the region but instead was getting the original versions direct from the other sources around the state rather than paying “a big chunk” of her budget, about $1 million for rewritten AP stories. Picking up directly, on the Web, and putting other papers’ stories directly in the newspaper was also better quality, she said, and readers were noticing:

“I mean, we've always had access to news from all over the state. It was just, you know, it went through the AP mill. I frankly think we're getting better, more distinctively written stories because they're not going through the AP mill.”

If local papers skip the AP, that means the core constituency is in revolt. That will potentially be more corrosive than the fight with the blogosphere over fair use. "As long as there are are two papers to trade articles, the AP will exist," one rake at the wire service -- where I worked for seven years on the international desk and as a foreign correspondent -- quipped to me once. But what if the members form their own cooperatives and cut out the AP as middleman?

I’m not saying this will happen immediately. AP, whose core business is the not-for-profit cooperative dues of member newspapers, has offered to cut its rates starting next year. Newspapers, despite ad and circulation declines for decades, have been notoriously slow moving, and many will be reluctant to pick up content from papers they might think of as competitors; the AP has given them the cover they sought to do so less blatantly. But the economic pressures are only increasing as revenues and readership decline more precipitously, and any success in Ohio could be the thin edge of a wedge. “We've set up this little cooperative,” said the Plain Dealer editor, Susan Goldberg. “I don't know how it'll work in the future, but right now it's working really well.”

Add to that AP’s deal to have its direct results placed higher in Google than member papers, further pissing them off, and newspapers will look harder at the Ohio example. We're talking months or perhaps years, certainly not decades. The example could spread nationally or internationally.

CEO Tom Curley has been leading the AP into a future in which an increasing share of its revenues comes from sources other than member dues, such as direct photo revenues, Web content services and broadcast fees. But the transformation may not be fast enough. AP doesn't have the luxury of Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters in which news gathering can be supported by financial terminals that really bring in the bucks.

AP should own the Web. It has its roots in the trading and sharing of information. It gets a significant chunk of revenue from providing the backbone through which others pass content. It coded and tagged and parsed content with everything from category codes to prioritization markings, and ways to match text and photos decades before those practices became fashionable for everyone. But culture and old habits are very hard to change, and I fear for the company's viability hope it can work out a more creative win-win solution for all.

The Coming Collision With Mobile Carriers

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:56:24 -0500

UPDATE: A carrier exec gives a rebuttal.

= = = = =
Spend almost any time with people in the mobile (meaning mobile phone) content, advertising or applications industry, and you’ll surely hear something about how the cell phone carriers are making life more difficult for them. At the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York today:

Rene Rodriguez of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.: “We still often don’t even know who our users are ... Targeting our users in arena, our fans, and I have no access to that information” because the carriers refuse to share it.

Gene Keenan, VP, Mobile Strategies, Isobar (ad agency holding company): “In some instances we can’t target as well on the mobile phone as online [because demographic information such as age] is held pretty closely” by the carriers. And, he says, he isn’t allowed to give content away, even though many brands want to, as part of a marketing or branding campaign.

Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company: Carriers are making it tough to bring content to consumers for free (because they see it as competition to premium content. “We created 20,000 songs, 15,000 artists in Europe ... We created a great platform for everybody ... You share it with us, we’ll share with the world. The artist wins, the consumer wins. We hope some of that love wears off on Coca Cola.” But it’s not easily done.

And on and on, like at a recent iBreakfast where Randy Haldeman of Apptera says that mobile so far is about 99% spam free, because the carriers block it, but they’re responsible for whatever spam there is.

The arguments I’ve heard in favor of the carriers are:

*They can’t just enable everything on their networks, make it an Internet-like free-for-all, because they need to protect the golden goose: voice communication. They can’t let a bazillion people sending rich ads and video and pictures clog or freeze the network and endanger their biggest most important task. They’ve invested a lot to build their networks, which are not government-initiated with multiple agnostic redundancies, as is/was the Internet, and also have to recoup that investment.
* When I said content creators are complaining about the amount carriers charge for their content, one carrier exec said to me that there is no real reason content makers should be able to charge for the same content multiple times on different platforms. Not sure I understand the argument, but it is what he said.

Regardless of the arguments, though, the tide is, I think, turning away from the restrictive nature of carriers, their locked phones and their plans. Not only is Google Android coming, which will create open standards for cellphones on new network bandwidth (if I understand correctly), but the Supreme Court has allowed a case to go through that will challenge restrictions on unlocking phones. Add all the voices of the Mobile Marketing Association and friends, and you’ve got quite a clamor for more openness and fewer restrictions. Government policy here in the U.S. allowed cellphone networks to develop as competitive fiefdoms, rather than a blanket network with a single standard, and we’re paying the price for that today, with all the restrictiveness, confusion (quick, tell me the rules of your mobile plan, in detail), plethora of mismatched services and devices, and the U.S. lag in many ways behind other countries.

Future of NYTimes

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:46:54 -0500

Twittering Argyle Executive Forum call on Future of NYTimes. Twitter.com name: DorianBenkoil. Or feed is in right column of mediaflect.com.

Taking Ballmer Too Literally

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:56:07 -0500

There's a discussion on a listserv (remember those?) some of us here are on as well as some Internet discussion about Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer's remarks that paper media will go away in 10 years. Only he doesn't say that, exactly. He says it's immaterial whether it's 8 or 10 or 14 years. The exact timing isn't his point.

He also doesn't literally mean, I would guess, that all ink on paper production will cease in toto, full stop. Horse and buggy still exists, as do books made by hand, despite the invention of the press and moveable type. But his point in a larger strategic sense is, I think, well-founded. That the lion's share of media -- media that matters in a larger, societal and business sense -- will be delivered over an IP network, at least in the industrialized world. Who can refute that, honestly? Newsprint and fuel costs rise, we're choking on garbage and need to recycle, our forests are becoming denuded. Meanwhile, the technology of the next next next generation Kindle and Sony reader and iPhone and e-paper and tablet computer will all be better better better, and eventually get good enough that people will be comfortable opening their flexible, reaable (and listenable and watchable and networked) thin, bendable screen (or goggles or mini-projector or who-all knows what?) as they do a newspaper or book today.

People love books and magazines and newspapers not because they're ink on paper, but because they're right now the best technology around: quick, easy, never need rebooting, easy to fold, put in a bag, read in nearly all conditions, don't need power, etc, etc. If the IP device technology approaches those attributes, it will be immaterial on what surface people read, and the cost- and other pressures I mention above will move folks to digital (or IP, if you prefer).

Sure, some glossy magazines will still give a "luxury" experience that won't be well-approximated by the screens. And some may get news on paper -- those at the bottom rung who can't afford digital or at the very top who CAN afford good paper -- but the mass will probably be digital. So, yes you'd win the bet if you said there will be print around in 10 years. But if it's 14 or more, you might lose if you say it will have primacy above digital.