Despite being the midst of the summer doldrums, the last week in the news industry has been relatively eventful. WikiLeaks provided us with plenty of fodder for discussion about the place of anonymity in new journalism, Gannet shut down publication of one of its papers in the U.K., and the season four premiere of Mad Men saw the news media play a central role in the unfolding drama. I took a little journey into my Pinyadda feeds today to find some of the best content about each event, with a little contextual commentary about how they play into the future of news.
Author Archive
While most publications seem willing to do just about anything to bridge the gap between their legacy print businesses and emerging internet models, it strikes me that there’s a contingent of publishers – mostly small to mid-size local and regional newspapers – who seem destined to ride their proverbial print horses into the sunset and disappear for good. For many, it’s a fate that may transpire despite best efforts to avoid it; the result of aging newsrooms, lack of resources, and inability to move quickly enough. But for a subset of these publications, it may be a conscious choice that reflects and unwillingness to upend a business model that’s served them well for a long time – in some cases, a century or more.
This week, Google issued a response to the FTC’s Discussion Draft on the future or journalism in no uncertain terms. Its language paints perhaps the most realistic view of the print publishing industry to date:
“The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.”
This statement, which I believe to be wholly correct, is the truth that most of the news industry has been running from as their revenue graphs dive swiftly toward the x-axis. But it does shed some light on why some smaller publishers might be willing to stick by their businesses to the bitter end. As Google’s statement hints, what we are witnessing is not an incremental shift in the publishing industry but the emergence of an entirely new model for content creation and distribution. It’s not, as many publishers seem to think, a matter of turning the knobs and twisting the dials until the money starts pouring in the door again. It’s about fundamentally re-thinking the way readers and publishers interact in the digital world. In order for existing institutions to survive, they will have to undergo a metamorphosis on a massive scale. All aspects of the business – from newsroom makeup to management strategies to distribution channels to ad sales – need to be disrupted, re-organized, and cleaned out. Excess infrastructure needs to be dismantled and discarded. Ingrained policies and procedures need to be uprooted, new skills need to be acquired.
MediaBistro wrote this morning about an announcement from KQED, an National Public Radio member station in Northern California, detailing their launch of their a companion web property at KQED.org. According to the release, the launch is part of a larger initiative to transform KQED into a full-fledged media platform:
“Eight new staff members, including six journalists, have recently joined KQED to expand KQED’s local news coverage. The results will be immediate as KQED Public Radio, one of the Bay Area’s most popular stations and among the most-listened-to public stations in the country, expands its local newscasts from six to sixteen beginning July 19. The newscasts will span the entire day from 6am to 12:30am. In addition, KQED News plans to add additional radio news reports and Interactive features in late August.”
There’s been no shortage of philosophical musing about the prospect of the NPR model emerging as a way forward for local journalism outfits, but the KQED expansion is one of the first real-world examples to watch. NPR itself has done well to manage the online transition, providing listeners and readers alike with high-quality content that works well on the web. At a first glance, the KQED takes significant cues from the NPR homepage, offering visitors the ability to listen live, find individual programming for on-demand listening, and read original content that’s often related to the other audio and video content on the site:
The newly launched KQED.org
The NPR.org hompage.
While KQED is in a unique position of strength among its NPR affiliate brethren, its ability to create value for web visitors seems to point to an emergent truth: radio and television outlets seem to have had an easier time bridging the digital transition than their peers in print journalism. And this shouldn’t be entirely surprising. After all, the web is an inherently multi-dimensional medium. Written content can coexist alongside audio and video content on the web, and when it’s done right the results are engaging and impressive. Newspapers have begun to embrace this reality and many are beginning to find innovative new ways to get multimedia content that compliments their print stories.
The KQED and NPR are focused on the same task, but with one key exception: the written content is there to support and enhance their multimedia content, not the other way around. KQED is good at producing audio and video content. They’ve learned how to create the element of ’story’ using these tools, and the experience translates well on the web. Creating written content to fill the gaps and augment these stories has seemed to come relatively easy to them. So what can newspapers learn from KQED, NPR, and the public radio ecosystem in general? In my opinion, there are a few key takeaways:
Another installment in the paid content drama began to unfold today with the first release of a metered model deployed using Press+, the consumer face of Journalism Online. Though the first installation of Press+ is news in and of itself, there’s another aspect of the model that’s unique. Lancaster Online, the publication to roll out the system, chose to meter only a specific section of its content: the obituaries. Starting this morning, those who wish to view more than seven obituaries a month will have to pay. Or die trying.
I’ve written about paywalls before, and I think they’re a terrible for everyone. And it’s not because I’m an information hippie who thinks that all content should be free. It’s because they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding about how to capture the value of great content, and because the user experience sucks. Really bad.
Gannet just rolled out paywalls at three of their regional papers. I found out because I follow paidContent.org on Pinyadda, which, ironically, is a free publication. After I got through the painful period of disgust/anger/befuddlement/hilarity that ensues when I hear about new paywalls being erected, I went to visit the Tallahassee Democrat, one of the sites sporting the shiny new system. It didn’t go very well.
This post is the continuation of a half-formed thought I posted on my personal blog a few days ago. It’s about starting to understand the ways in which the digital world has changed, and is changing, the way we think about news itself. Before starting, I did a quick search for the words ‘journalism’ and ‘commodity’ on Google. Here are a couple of excepts from what I found that I think help frame the discussion:
Chase pinned a great article a few hours ago from the Media Decoder blog over on the New York Times that ruminated on a leak from Google indicating their supposed plans to roll out a “one-click payment system for content called ‘Newspass’” (if you’re unfamiliar with Decoder, you’re missing out on some great content about the future of the news industry. You can follow it here, and I highly recommend that you do).
The system, as real or fictional as it may prove to be, isn’t alone in concept or execution. A number of other entities, including Journalism Online, a venture that recently received additional backing from Rupert Murdoch, are jumping into the news payments game. While it may seen inevitable that subscription models will make their way to the web, the prospect of these products attaining long-term viability is tenuous but not completely out of the question.
While it’s easy to knock the subscription model as a legitimate revenue source – after all, it’s never been the way newspapers stayed afloat – there’s some reason to think that it may fit the online model better than the print model. Chris Anderson, in his controversial but insightful book Free: the Past and Future of a Radical Price, makes the contention that bytes (digital content) are fundamentally different than atoms (printed content). Since bytes are produced once and copied, distributed, and replicated at a price that’s always approaching zero, our traditional business models inherently fail.
There’s no cost per unit for producing a story on the internet, as there’s no additional paper, ink, delivery costs, or distribution fees associated with each additional copy. So what we’re essentially receiving when we read a news story is not a product but a service. We may not pay for the news itself, but are we willing to pay for the service of news? If so, the subscription model makes perfect sense. We already pay for the service of television, the service of internet, the service of the health club and, increasingly, the service of mobile data. But we’re not quite ready to pay for the service of news. Why is that?
This is where both a unified payment system and some bright young entrepreneurs come into play. The payment system is an obvious but significant hurdle to paid content. It’s awfully hard to get someone to take out their credit card and type 15 digits into a web form, for reasons that relate to both financial security and user experience (have you ever forgone an online purchase because your wallet was in the other room? You’re not alone…). In order for web content to survive a subscription basis, someone needs to make this as easy as possible, and many, including Google, will try. There’s an obvious model to follow in Apple’s iTunes store, but that company has always possessed the rare superpower of being able to pry thousands of dollars from innocent, unsuspecting victims who then turn around and shower the thieves with praise. To steal a phrase from New York governor David Paterson, on planet Apple, there is no gravity and light bends right around Cupertino…
But assuming someone solves the credit card challenge, and assuming our hypothesis about news as a service is correct, there’s one fundamental problem that remains to be solved. No one has yet to make the news experience pleasurable in all the ways the internet makes possible. We’re stuck in a half-integrated world, where newspapers exist as strange islands drowning in an online sea. To make a long story short – the service isn’t that good. We’ve come to expect more of our online content, and I think we deserve it. Want to publish a print version online and make me visit your poorly designed destination site? Fine with me. Want me to pay for that service? Think again.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, a different scenario. A scenario where content is delivered to you by a hand-picked group of curators who can provide filtration, context, and added value. A scenario where you’re rewarded for providing opinions and adding perspective to content that’s judged on merit alone, regardless of the size of the publication that produced it. A scenario where publishers, advertisers, and readers all work together to create value for each other in a way that’s unobtrusive and beneficial for all. That’s the future of Pinyadda, and we’re building it, together, right now. Come join us.
Read more about Newspass here and here. Who do you think will win the news payment war? Will it be Google, Rupert, or some other upstart? Let us know in the comments.
HTML5 is really cool. It’s going to make a whole lot of things a whole lot easier for developers, and it should lead to higher quality user experiences on the internet, no matter what device we use for access. While I’m excited about all the geeky details of the specification, which is still very much a work in progress, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at HTML5 from a news industry standpoint. For both big publishers or independent bloggers, some of the new features are likely to have a direct impact on the ways they present content going forward.
Things are moving fast at Pinyadda HQ and we wanted to make sure to keep everyone in the loop about what we’ve been up to. Yaddapalooza was a huge success, with hundreds of people coming out to celebrate our progress and cheer for the future, and we’re super pumped to turn on the gas and really take Pinyadda to the next level. Here’s a quick rundown of the cool stuff we’ve shipped in the last few weeks:
The Newsstand
Our users needed a better way to find new people, sites, and topics to follow that allowed them to do three main things: find a known quantity (e.g. a person or site whose name they were sure of), find unknown quantities with a known criteria (e.g. sites that have content about cars), and browse content by category in a way that was intuitive and fun. We’re pretty happy with the way it came out and we’re eager to hear your feedback about how to make it even better.
New Badges
Last week Cheryl and I did a quick case study about Pinyadda’s application of the lean startup mentality as part of the lean startup Boston meetup group. There’s a link to the video of the full presentation at the bottom of this post, but I thought I’d run through a couple of the key points I tried to stress in talking about our experience that I think is worth saying again. But let me also be clear that these are my opinions and not necessarily part of the formal (or informal, for that matter) lean approach.
– Being lean is about doing things that make sense and about being efficient, not necessarily about following every step of the ‘methodology’ to a T.