AP’s ethnographic studies look for solutions to news and ad “fatigue”

A new study by the Associated Press has come to the conclusion that consumers are “tired, even annoyed, by the current experience of advertising,” and that, as a result, they don’t trust very much of it. But at the same time, AP found, consumers do want information relevant to their needs, as well as ways to socialize that information.

Although it tends to move cautiously and deliberately, AP has been subtly and quietly introducing tools aimed at improving relevance and socialization, and may have plans for an ad-supported aggregation business that applies what it has been learning.

I spoke about the study with Jim Kennedy, AP’s vice-president for strategic planning, about how the study’s findings will impact AP’s strategic thinking. “The future of information delivery needs to be quite different from current practices and quite different from the old packaged practices that we’ve had offline and online so far,” Kennedy said. “That’s the big deal for us now. You can’t figure all that out in a minute or even a year.”

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Has newspaper advertising reached rock bottom? Probably not.

During the last few months, as newspaper stock prices rebounded somewhat from their lowest points, and as newspaper execs suggested, in conjunction with second quarter results, that having made all the cuts they did, they would be in good shape “once advertising rebounds,” I found myself nevertheless thinking the same thoughts as the crystal ball-gazers consulted by the New York Times who said that the bottom, for newspaper advertising revenue, had not yet been reached.

The good news is that the third quarter of 2009 won’t be quite as bad as the second: the consensus is that revenue will drop just 25 percent, compared to about 30 percent in Q2. That means that even if the fourth quarter somehow manages to be dead even with last year’s Q4, revenue for the year will be down 20.4 percent. But dead even would be a big stretch, because the first three quarters of 2009 will average about $6.7 billion, while Q4 of last year was $10.1 billion. Typically, Q4 beats the average of the first three quarters of the year by about 22 percent in good years, less in bad years. Even with the benefit of the doubt at a 20 percent differential (Q4 vs. the average of Q1-3), that puts Q4 at $8.1 billion (down 20 percent from prior year) and the full year 2009 at $28.2 billion, down 25.5 percent from last year’s $37.8 billion. (My recent guess for the year stands at $27.5 billion.) For newspapers to get to around $28 billion for the year, however, advertisers would have to invest in newspapers in Q4 with the assumption that the recession is mainly over and that consumers will be loosening purse strings significantly during the holiday shopping period.
Continue reading this post at NiemanLab.

Can newspaper publishers survive this revenue freefall? Perhaps, if they embrace a digital future.

Without the fanfare that accompanied the recent release of its online readership data, the NAA quietly posted last week its latest compilation of quarterly revenue data for U.S. daily newspapers, in a data set it has maintained for 50 years. The latest figures, for the second quarter, show an alarming drop of 30.15 percent in print revenue and 15.90 percent in online revenue versus the same period in 2008. Despite signs elsewhere that the recession may have bottomed out, these figures are even worse than the first quarter results (declines of 29.70 percent in print and 13.40 percent online).

Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, analyzes these numbers by category and projects that for the full year 2009, combined print and online revenue will be “no more than $27 billion” — and worse if the economy doesn’t pick up — a drop of more nearly $11 billion from 2008’s $37.8 billion. My guess is slightly higher: print revenue of $25 billion; online revenue of $2.5 billion, total $27.5 billion — a drop of $10.3 billion.

How did this happen to an industry that in 2005 garnered record revenue of $49.4 billion ($47.4 billion of it in print)? By adjusting the historical numbers for inflation, as Mutter did, the industry is half the size it was in 1986, when it scored $52.3 billion in 2008 dollars. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture.

A better way to look at the historical revenue record is to place it in the context of total advertising expenditures across all U.S. media. I’ve done that, and here’s what it looks like:

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading actually happens online

Surprise.

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

This exercise was prompted by recent posts by John Duncan of Inksniffer, in which he argues that “internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience.” Duncan (who seems to have revived Inksniffer from a long dormancy with a series of math-heavy posts during March), provides calculations supporting his conclusion that in the UK, online sites have only 17 percent of the page impressions delivered by printed newspapers.

Let’s examine how this looks in the U.S. First, print impressions: The NAA’s research shows a “daily” (Monday through Saturday) print audience of 116.8 million, and a Sunday print audience of 134.1 million. (This is much higher than paid circulation, but there are 2.128 readers per daily copy, and 2.477 on Sunday.)

We don’t have clear data about the average number pages each member of that audience looks at, but let’s make an educated guess: 24. That translates to about 87.1 billion printed page views per month*. As a check on our assumption of 24 pages: based on annual newsprint consumption of 9 million metric tons, the industry prints about 190 billion pages (a mix of tabloid and broadsheet sizes). So we’re assuming the average reader looks at about half the pages published, which seems reasonable.

Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Photo by Dustin Diaz, used under Creative Commons License.

The elusive "business model"

It's all about the business model.

New York magazine has a don't miss-piece by Emily Nussbaum about the New York Times geeks—a team of 20-something experimental online coder/journalists who last year broke down a convoluted approval structure and are now collaboratively integrated into the paper's news operation, rolling out one innovation after another, dragging the rest of the news team along into the future, whether they like it or not. They've done great stuff and have great plans. Over drinks at the Algonquin, one of them gets around to the business model (italics added):

Over time, [Aron] Pilhofer adds, this is the role the Times can play: exciting online readers about the value of reportage, engaging them deeply in the Times’ specific brand of journalism—perhaps even so much that they might want to pay for it. If this comes true, it would mean this terrible year was not for nothing: that someday, this hard era would prove the turning point for the paper, the year when it didn’t go down, when it became something better. Pilhofer shrugs and puts his glass back down on the Algonquin table. “I just hope there’s a business model when we get there.”

In other words, "we don't really know if there is one, but that's not our job," and rightly so.

At the Times itself, media columnist David Carr, who is quoted in the New York story, has a column called "Let's Invent an iTunes for News," which has been much lambasted in the blogosphere (by Matthew Ingram, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen, among others). Carr hopes against hope that readers can be induced to pay for news once again, but he doesn't really know what the model would be, either:

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

He mentions expectations that we'll see, later this year, an iPod Touch with a 7-to-9 inch screen (we may, and we'll see upgraded Kindles and, before long the Plastic Logic reader, as well).

The device would allow scanning of pages with a flick of the finger. It sounds promising for newspapers and magazines. Now all we need is a business model to go with it.

And that business model would be? Carr doesn't tell us , the column ends there. But he's thinking that if you want to read the Times on that thing, you're going to have to pay. (Earlier in the column he expresses the hope that someone like Steve Jobs will somehow convince "the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up." A cashectomy.)

Wrong. Yes, we know that some publishers have some content that some people will pay for some of the time. (Carr mentions that he pays for the Wall Street Journal, Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports). But most people will never pay for any content at any time, whether or not micropayments become easier to handle. Besides that, when you put up any kind of paywall, you put a serious dent in your ability to sell advertising, because in contrast to the traditional printed newspaper (in which publishers owned the only available delivery pipeline), today's reader has free alternatives that are just a click away through whatever device they choose for browsing.

I've speculated, myself, that the news business could be enormously transformed by the advent of an "iPod for news" in the form of an e-reader that's particularly suitable for news reading, because the proliferation of such devices would broaden the consumption of digital news content away from computer screens, to anyplace where an iPod can be carried and used.

But while consumers might buy the gizmo, they won't pay for the content, so we still need a business model, no matter what. In mine, publishers dump print (except for a weekend edition), and deliver content digitally via all interfaces that come along, from desktop to Blackberry, from Kindle to iPodTouch. They layer in a robust social network for news (the Times geeks have only scratched the surface of that need with TimesPeople, but they must have more up their sleeves). They "monetize" by delivering all kinds of commercial content including much more video and new forms such as geotagged ads on mobile devices; and by moving beyond advertising into the sale of premium services (not premium content), by facilitating transactions, by leveraging their social network in ways not yet invented (but Facebook and others are trying).

In the end, it's still about capturing a slice of the advertising pie, which, as I've detailed before, is going to remain at around 2 percent of GDP as it has for 80 years or more, simply because our competitive economic model can't do without it. With the partial exception of non-profits such as public radio and TV, every major new content delivery method in 400 years (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV) has been financed by commercial content. (The subscription and single-copy revenue of newspapers and magazines is not relevant here, it's simply an offset for printing, distribution and circulation overhead expenses.) The online news organizations that newspapers morph into (or those that supplant them if they fail) need to find their share of that 2 percent pie. That's why it's important not only for newsrooms to become online-first, but for the advertising sales department to follow suit. Right now.

I do hope that Aron Pilhofer and his fellow Times Geeks (if they don't get to stodgy hanging around the Algonquin), let their thoughts wander away from news toward revenue generation now and then. It sounds like they could come up with some nifty ideas on the commercial content side of the equation, as well. Meanwhile, when the nation's press barons assemble for Round Two of their API Summit for an Industry in Crisis, perhaps the smartest thing they could do is to create a national newspaper geek squad focused on innovation in commercial content. It's the only way out of the swamp, fellows.

PM UPDATE: I can across this post at MediaBistro, quoting Aron Pilhofer, which sheds a tad more light on the Times's intentions with regard to real social networking: "The goal is to 'make the NYT programmable.'" Pilhofer is also on the team looking for a Knight News Challenge grant to create DocumentCloud.

Can news sites get their slice of the advertising pie?

Recent findings by Pew and Gallup indicate that, generally speaking, U.S. consumers now prefer news delivered via the internet over news printed in newspapers. This redoubles the need for a viable business model in which online news content is supported by adequate advertising revenue.

Unfortunately, as pointed out by John Thornton at Insomniactive, only a fraction of the ad revenue formerly aimed at those print-oriented eyeballs has followed their attention over to the web. By Thornton's educated guestimations, online news via newspaper sites is garnering only about 4 percent as much revenue as newspapers still manage to sell into their printed products.

Can this problem be overcome? Can newspapers crank up the sales pressure and find more revenue for their electronic offerings?

One way of looking at this says no: Historically, printed newspapers were monopolistic enterprises, their positions protected by very high barriers to entry which gave their owners the market power to set prices high enough to cover the cost of a liberally staffed newsroom and still reap princely profits (such as those that built and furnished Hearst's San Simeon). This monopolistic privilege has only gradually eroded over the last 50 years as television, and then the web, claimed their slices of the pie, as illustrated by this graph showing the share of various media of total U. S. ad spending since 1948 (click for clearer enlarged view, see November 30 post for more info).



But clearly, no newspaper, or other news content provider, has much pricing power in the online world. Does that mean there's simply no chance that online advertising on newspaper sites can grow enough to make them viable?

One observer at Seeking Alpha, Alex Rampell, seems to think not, in a piece entitled "The End of Brand Advertising." Basically, Rampell's thesis is that brands are waking up and realizing they've historically been getting bilked, that " there is at best a tenuous link between consumption of their goods and consumption of the free content they are sponsoring." And that, having figured this out, they'll shut the spigot. This explains, according to Rampell, why CPMs on MySpace run 25 cents per 1,000 while Time Magazine, in good times, got $25 per 1,000.

The problem with this view is that while advertisers will, of course, always drive the best bargain they can, brand and image advertising has always been about achieving a degree of monopolistic market power. There may be a tenuous link between the advertised goods and the content sponsored by ads, but there has always been a clear relationship between the volume of advertising behind a product, and its consumption or popularity (as convincingly demonstrated in recent months by the Obama campaign's unprecedented promotional spending). Leading brands have almost always maintained their positions by brand and image advertising, not by informational advertising providing objective product specifications.

Historically, for at least 80 years, total U. S. advertising expenditures have been nearly constant at about 2 percent of GDP. Economic slowdowns push that ratio a little lower, expansions push it up, but with very few exceptions the range has been between 1.8 and 2.3 percent, despite all the changes over time in media technology and the consumer's preferred media mix. If there were, overall, no more than a "tenuous link" between advertising and sales, marketers would have discovered that, and adjusted their spending, a long time ago. But the fact is that the link is robust, not tenuous, and 2 percent is still the norm—it was 2.025% in 2007; 2008 will probably come in a tad lower.

[a.m. addendum:] The point is, the advertising pie, relative to GDP, won't shrink significantly, or permanently, because marketers seeking market share continue to have very strong incentives to advertise, but the media to which ad dollars are allocated do shift over time, as the graph shows.

The problem for web sites, including news sites, is that the web is not yet a great place for brand and image ads, relative to the attractive environments of ads on big-screen TVs, billboards and slick magazine pages. Like newsprint, the computer screen is still fairly low res, as amply demonstrated in any YouTube video, so the web has been more suited (as newspapers always have been) for informational advertising rather than brand and image promotion. It is part of the genius of Google that their model has never featured any brand or image advertising at all.

So the challenge, to newspaper web sites and news site startups, is to move beyond Thornton's 4 percent level by ramping up online versions of the informational advertising that sustained printed newspapers, as well as finding ways to host brand and image ads that were never native to newsprint. And to do this in the context of the new wisdom that is writing off the utility of traditional website banner and button advertising and trumpeting video ads as well as the new world of social network advertising.

Nuts and bolts: maximizing online ad sales on newspaper sites

There being no newspaper bankruptcy, fire sale, layoff, frequency reduction or shutdown news (yet) today, I've been pondering what newspapers should do in the coming year to maximize their sales of online advertising. Anything they accomplish in that direction will help position them better for the day they follow the Detroit papers and begin, one way or another, to curtail print delivery. Or when print readership just melts away of its own accord. So here goes:

1. Lead with the DotCom brand. Publishers: take out your wallet and check your business card. And have a look at the cards your salespeople hand out. What's more prominent: the name of your newspaper, or the name of your web site (if it's even listed on there)? If the biggest element on the card is not your online brand, confiscate all the cards and replace them. Do the same thing with all other printed or online sales materials, rate cards, media kits, whatever. In other words, make sure your graphic message is: we are first and foremost an online news and marketing organization.

2. Don't separate online and print sales staffs. Many papers have flip-flopped on this question for years, but a staff with expertise in both areas will be most successful in maximizing revenue. Sure, in a larger paper or group you need some online specialists. But don't test clients' limited time by sending in two separate reps—teach reps to craft and sell the appropriate mix of print and online for each client.

3. Research how your customers use the Web. You expect them to use your site. When's the last time you looked at theirs? What's their web marketing strategy? How can you plug into it and enhance it? Look at big advertisers, look at small advertisers, and look at non-advertisers in the "Long Tail." You'd be surprised how many businesses, even the smallest, have invested in sophisticated web sites. But how's their traffic, compared to competitors? Research them by investing in a premium version of a traffic comparison service like Alexa or Compete. Do they show up in appropriate searches? Do they have plenty of inbound links? (Find out with a simple "link:[URL]" Google search.) Chances are that a retailer's site is like a billboard in the jungle: nobody can find it, nobody sees it, and nobody can point to it (and nobody hears it when it falls down). There's opportunity in pointing this problem out and showing what you can do to fix it.

4. Train salespeople, designers and customers alike. Training print reps (if it happened at all) used to be a piece of cake compared with what it takes to trainweb salesmanship. Your all-media reps need to be expertly conversant in web terminology, technology, traffic statistics, ad formats, clickthrough rates, pricing structures and more. Train and retrain, since the picture shifts just about daily. Remember that some of the old imperatives like the value of multiple brand exposures are still key in the online ad game. Consider bringing in a speaker like Mel Taylor to talk to a gathering of advertisers, as well as to energize your reps about online sales. Include your designers in as much of the training as you can, so they understand both the marketing and the design sides of the equation. Communicate frequently with customers via an e-newsletter.

5. Invest in the technology. It can be tough to pry loose a few bucks for capital expenditures these days, but you need to keep up with the latest tools for designing and publishing web ads of all kinds. If your sales reps aren't taking a laptop along on every sales call, buy them one for Christmas. Make sure it's equipped with both WiFi and a way to demonstrate options where they can't go online. In most cases, this won't cost more than a week's worth of ad commissions. (Capability to do order entry from the field would be nice, too.)

6. Make sure your sales incentive plan rewards online selling first. I probably hold a record for the number of newspaper sales commission plans I've assembled over 30 years, because I constantly tweaked plans to adjust for changing conditions. If your plan is older than the calendar on your wall, this would be a good time to throw it out and start over as of January 1, 2009. Your reps have a bucket full of things they can sell, and without the right incentive structure they will earn as much money as they want by selling everything but online, if they're so inclined. Be sure that the only way they can make some real money is by hitting targets in multiple categories—for example online, daily print, and niche products. Miss your goal in any category, and you won't earn the higher commission rates on over-goal sales. And be sure goal setting is a rigorous, monthly process the reps participate in.

7. Make it easy for advertisers to do business with you online. A longstanding web mantra, not well observed by newspapers, is that virtually anything customers can do with you in person or by phone should be possible, and easy, online. Think about how you make airline reservations, for example, or explore the Google AdWords site for inspiration—it gets Google billions in revenue with very little human interaction on their part. Or consider your own frustration when you're researching a purchase online and can't find the information you want, or complete a transaction. Remember that there are 168 hours in a week, and your reps are selling for 40, if you're lucky. At any time, day or night, your advertisers should be able to find your marketing materials (not PDFs of rate cards, please—take some time to transform that printed stuff into an effective web format), find answers to questions, place advertising, see and approve proofs, get digital tearsheets, access accounts, and pay bills. (This includes classified advertisers—they're flocking to Craigslist not only because it's free, but because it's easy, compared with the cumbersome classified placement process at many papers.) Be sure also that advertisers can easily find all the contact info they need to communicate with your sales, production and accounting personnel directly. And of course, all of this applies also to customers looking to do business with your circulation and news departments.

Related post: Nuts and bolts: What an "online-first newsroom" means

(Shameless disclosure/commercial message: I'm available to newspaper publishers for consulting on any of the above. )

Year-end crunch time at newspaper firms

During the next month or two, the crisis at America's newspapers will come to a head. There will be boardroom decisions that go well beyond the incessant paring of staff we have seen all year. Here are the reasons why it's crunch time now:

• Those of us still subscribing to "ink-on-dead-trees" versions of newspapers noticed that after a 4-day weekend with apparently ad-laden papers, what got tossed on our porches yesterday and today was mighty thin. Retailers expect a very slow holiday sales season, and they're going to be stingy with their ad dollars from here on out.
  
• The fourth quarter is normally the best for newspapers because of holiday-related advertising, but with slow retail sales in the offing, there's every indication that the revenue slide will continue. Total revenue (including online) was down (click on "Quarterly"), year-over-year, about 13 percent in the first quarter, 15 percent in the second quarter, and 18 percent in the third. Notice a trend? (For a longer trendline, the losses during the prior four quarters in 2007 were -4.8%, -8.6%, -7.4% and -10.3%,) If the fourth-quarter bleeding holds at "just" 18 percent, total revenue for the year will come in at a hair over $38 billion, down 16.1 percent versus 2007 (which was down 7.9 percent from 2006).
• Faced with these numbers, "stakeholders," also known as bankers and stockholders, will want to see evidence of serious restructuring. After December 31, most newspaper companies will have to report end-of-fiscal-year results, face Wall Street analysts, and hold stockholder meetings. Some, both publicly and privately owned, are laden with bank debt and will face loan covenant defaults. Banks are not in a position to be especially lenient about this, and will demand evidence of serious restructuring before issuing default waivers at the customary fees. Even firms that still possess fairly solid balance sheets will be looking to conserve cash and otherwise prop up ratios to placate stockholders.
• The first calendar quarter of the year is typically the slowest for newspaper revenue, so the pressure will be on to announce and implement drastic measures as early as possible.
• There will be no bailout in this sector, they're on their own. And the industry quietly failed in its single attempt (the API Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis) to come together to develop an industry-wide strategy, agreeing instead to reconvene in six months—when it will clearly be too late.

So what will happen? I wouldn't expect much in the way of positive thinking in upcoming weeks. The talk in newspaper boardrooms will be tactical, not strategic (about "newspapers," not "post-newspapers"), and the actions under consideration will mostly be steps down a dead-end avenue. They include:

• Further layoffs and buyouts, where there's still "fat" left to cut
  
• Closing or selling underperforming papers
• Closing distant bureaus; paring coverage of Washington, D.C. and foreign venues
• Pulling out of A.P. in favor of the new CNN service (or no wire news at all), and creating shared statehouse bureaus
• Combining printing, packaging and distribution operations with neighboring papers, even with competitors
• Merging newspapers in neighboring markets, even when those markets have separate, distinct identities, interests and concerns
• Cutting frequency—not radically and strategically as suggested here and elsewhere—but one or two days at a time, prolonging the agony.
• Outsourcing whatever is outsourceable at a savings, regardless of quality
• Cutting virtually all investment in capital resources and new business development (or R&D as it's called elsewhere)
  

Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, is in the midst of a series, "Thinking the Unthinkable," with two installments so far, discussing these kinds of options.

There have been plenty of suggestions made by journobloggers (yours truly among them) and other industry observers on how to restructure in positive ways that will allow newspapers to become post-newspaper information utilities. Some are even being implemented here and there.

Tomorrow, I'll have a roundup of solutions, free for the taking.

The ever-dwinding newspaper share of ad dollars

Tim Windsor's post the other day, in which he updated his chart of constant-dollar U.S. newspaper advertising revenue, got me thinking. I commented in his post that perhaps a better way to look at the numbers would be to view them as a fraction of the Gross Domestic Product. But then I realized that total advertising expenditures across all media, as a fraction of GDP, might vary a bit over time, which would skew that approach (although it turns out that total advertising spending is pretty constant at about 2 percent of GDP, ranging mostly between 1.8 percent and 2.3 percent, with few outliers).

So I downloaded 49 years worth of cross-media advertising revenue from the data available at the Television Bureau of Advertising. All of their numbers come from Universal McCann, so they have the advantage (hopefully) of being consistent over time. The newspaper revenue data is identical to that published by the Newspaper Association of America. I loaded it all into a spreadsheet and calculated the "share of total" for each of the media over time. Here's what it looks like:



(Sorry about the fuzziness of that graph; any tips for publishing a sharper image from an Excel file would be much appreciated. The graph labels, reading across, are Newspapers, Magazines & Farm Publications, TV & Cable, Radio, Yellow Pages, Direct Mail, Business Papers, Billboards & Out of Home, Internet, and Miscellaneous.)

For the sake of simplicity I combined Magazines with Farm Publications, as well as TV with Cable. Around 1989 Universal McCann started including "out of home" (ads on buses, etc.), which causes the blip and jump in the Billboards line. And Yellow Pages is included in Miscellaneous prior to 1980, which accounts for the sudden sag in the Miscellaneous line.

[paragraph added 12/01:] In a nutshell: newspapers had unchallenged dominance with about 37% of all advertising (national and local) in 1949. Television grew rapidly during the 1950s, to about 14% in 1960, and continuing to grow thereafter. Starting in the late 1970s, direct mail started a long uptrend from about 20% to more than 25% in 2007. Newspapers were overtaken by TV & Cable in 1992, and by direct mail in 2001. In 2008, they could slide below radio.

My chart stops at year-end 2007, because 2008 projections for all media are hard to come by at the moment. But as discussed already by Tim and by Alan Mutter, the full-year newspaper results for 2008 look rather dismal. Assuming it finishes in the $35 billion ballpark and total ad spending for the year is down just slightly (it was buoyed nicely by the elections and the Olympics), the newspaper share will probably be 13%, or less. So that dark blue newspaper share line will resemble, even more than it already does, the "Phases of a Crisis" graph presented at the recent API Summit for newspaper execs.

Notice that in contrast to Tim's graph, there are no camel's hump peaks in 1988 and 2000, as there are in his constant-dollars view. Newspapers have been on an unrelenting down-trend for a half-century, with very few upticks, and they're now sliding off the cliff. They maintained market share for more than a year or two only from about 1964 to 1974 (at the expense of magazines and direct mail).

For fans of stacked graphs, here's another way to look at the trends:



Once again, I'll ask: Where is the Manhattan Project to reinvent the newspaper business, before it's too late?