Piet Bakker monitors the world's free papers

This is Piet Bakker, skating on a canal in the Netherlands.

What with global warming, skating on "natural ice" is not possible very often in the Netherlands, but for a change, right now every puddle, pond and canal is frozen, and the Dutch have been "on skates en masse." One long distance-skating race was held for the first time in twelve years, and dozens of other races and tours (scroll down to map) drew such crowds that there were enormous traffic jams. The whole country was kind of a Woodstock on ice this weekend. (Full disclosure: I'm Dutch but for some reason never learned to skate.)

Anyway, that's why Bakker is not blogging for a couple of days, but normally, he can be found at Newspaper Innovation, where he keeps tabs on the world's free newspapers. Bakker is professor of Cross Media Content at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Hogeschool in Utrecht, the Netherland. (The blog is in English.)

As Bakker has reported, the free newspaper business has not been smooth skating lately. Free circulation in Europe has actually declined in 2008, as 11 titles and 37 editions closed down. The details of most free paper launches, closes and other transitions get chronicled almost obsessively in Bakker's blog, and lately closings have dominated his reports. The blog also features links to the newsletter "Free Daily Newspapers", a set of interactive maps, and a free dailies resource page.

All in all, it's well worth adding Newspaper Innovation to your blog subscription feed to keep track of the free newspaper field and to catch Bakker's insights.

An imperfect solution in Detroit

The announcements now being made in Detroit appear to confirm the earlier rumors:

Changes due to occur in first quarter 2009 include:

• Expanding digital information channels that provide news and information to a variety of audiences when, where and how they want it.

• Limiting newspaper home delivery to Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays while selling printed copies at newsstand seven days a week.

• Providing subscribers daily access to electronic editions, exact copies of each day's printed newspapers.

It's not the best solution, I think. While managers told an employee meeting there would be tens of millions of dollars in savings (stemming from about 200 job cuts, newsprint savings and distribution savings), it keeps in place two separate press runs on most days while failing to differentiate the two papers more clearly. And implementation will be a nightmare, I'm afraid.

The plan looks like a compromise between the status quo and a real rationalization of the market, which had been my suggestion last week. I put forward a Thursday-Friday-Sunday Free Press coupled with a Monday-Friday News distributed free. Advantages: fewer press runs, two distinct missions and markets, greater circulation during the week, and easier to implement.

Either scenario would, by design, push more readers to electronic editions. Given the findings of a just-released Gannett poll tracking consumer news preferences, that's a good strategy, although it will get fierce resistance from many, particularly older readers. The graph posted by Paul Gillin from this poll shows that a year from now, the Internet will surpass local newspapers as a daily news source. (And local newspapers have been behind local TV news for a long time.) Better for newspapers to go with that trend, by adopting online-first strategies, than to continue trying to fight it. That seems to be the plan in Detroit, whatever the imperfections of the print distribution scheme.

Thanksgiving week Odds and Ends

Since it's Thanksgiving week in the U. S., a slow week for news about newspapers, I've got some odds and ends, most of them from across the pond:

Who's on Twitter? Following up on my prior musings about Twitter, here's a list of U.K. journalists using the service, courtesy of Stephen Davies of PRBlogger.com. A compilation of U.S. journo-Twitterers might be a useful tool, as well. Or at least a list of links to lists. I've only come across the Twitter directory of the enlightened newsroom of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. (Which covers local Twitter developments, as well.)
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Who's next to make the leap? The estimable U.K. columnist and blogger Roy Greenslade suggests in his Guardian column today that The Independent should exit the world of print and go 100 percent digital. The paper losing its owners about £12 million a year, sells only about 200,000 papers a day, but has more than 8 million website unique visitors a month. Their predicament sounds similar to that of the Christian Science Monitor, which last month announced its plans to go all-digital. From the column:

I imagine the O'Reillys both wondering - and not for the first time - if this media commentator has lost his marbles. But I sincerely believe their ailing newsprint paper is in danger of attracting so few readers in the coming year that the balance of those sums is likely to change for the worse. So they need to plan now for an online future and to reap the rewards of being the first major paper in the world to boldly go where no man has gone before.

That Star Trek reference could not be more apt because they are in a position to explore the final newspaper frontier, the one highlighted to an extent by none other than Rupert Murdoch in his speeches in Australia last week. [Subject of a prior post of mine.] Though he was stressing that newspapers do have a future (though I tend to think he means his own newspapers rather than other people's) he also made it clear that news brands are the future.

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A new addition to my blogroll: Utrecht (Netherlands) journalism prof Piet Bakker blogs daily at Newspaper Innovation on the subject of free newspapers around the world. The news about free print is mixed: some are shutting down (The Virginian-Pilot's Link, Czechia's 24 Hodin, the Mitteland edition of News in Switzerland), but elsewhere there are new launches (ADN in Columbia). Readership of free papers is up in the U.K, but down in Spain. In the Netherlands, some free papers are crossing the line by selling their editorial space. A free paper might be an option for some U.S. papers looking restructure themselves into online-print hybrids, so keep an eye on Bakker's blog.

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North of the border: Insights from Jonathan Kay at the National Post, urging like most of us journo-pundits that radical change is needed, on "islands of profitability" that might survive the current challenges to print journalism. His life raft is aiming for:

(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity. Successful media in this mould will look more like the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times, more like The Financial Times than the Daily Telegraph....

(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale — i.e. the sort of well-educated, well-heeled reader who prefers to spend his scarce free time in the world of ideas. These people do have a sense of community — but it is a sense of community rooted in their political attitudes, foreign-policy interests, cultural beliefs, charitable causes and consumer interests, not their geography....-

(3) The hyperlocal. People love local news — which is why even really bad local newspapers manage to remain profitable. Simply put, people want to find out where the big potholes are, who got drunk and wrapped their car around a phone pole last night, what happened at yesterday's school-board meeting and — most of all — how the local hockey team is doing.

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I agree: Amy Gahran urges reporters to link to sources. This seems obvious if you're writing a blog, but not to newspaper reporters and publishers, which is just another indication that they are still overwhelmingly print-centered.

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Make a different wish: If you're looking for a Kindle under your holiday tree, forget it. Dan Frommer reports Amazon is sold out. Order now and you'll have one in late February, maybe. That means it might be a Kindle 2. (Previously on News After Newspapers) Amazon still won't say how many units they've sold (nor will book publishers, but one mentions a "triple digit" jump in e-book sales , but my educated guess is, More Than You Think. Among the best-sellers on Kindle, as ranked among e-books: The New York Times (number 28), The Wall Street Journal (number 36), and the Washington Post (number 158). [ADDENDUM: Just after posting this, I found via Paul Biba's TeleRead the Nieman Journalism Lab post with good evidence (a Times internal memo) that the New York Times now has 10,000 Kindle subscribers. That's about 1 percent of their entire circulation. Good news, along with the Times's rapid acquisition of a slew of Facebook friends, also mentioned in the memo.]

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Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Who Will NOT Pay for The News

Now that the press barons have returned home after circling the deck chairs in Reston, excuse me, "developing a shared vision for going forward," we'll be anxiously awaiting the results. Meanwhile, I recommend a look at the available video output from another comfortable confab, the Monaco Media Forum, held last week. There's half a weekend's worth of viewing there, so I haven't yet digested it, but expect to comment on it Monday.

Alan Mutter has a roundup today of third-quarter financial results from the publicly-traded newspaper firms. Most of those that have not plunged in the red on an operating-profit basis are seeing 40 to 90 percent declines. Elsewhere, an analysis of the New York Times Company's QIII results looks pretty scary, if you know what a quick ratio is. (Their currently liabilities are more than double their current assets, which is something that would put any normal company into bank covenant default and make it very difficult to refinance debt.)

So, the question of the moment is certainly: Who Will Pay For The News. Those with a vested interest in the topic may want to maker their calendars for O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, February 9-11, 2009 in New York. Although it's a book industry gathering, it looks like newsies might learn something as well. Jeff Jarvis will be there, as a keynote speaker, no less. (What would a conference be without him?)

Meanwhile, a substantial piece of thinking to chew on (yes, I know it's ancient, but I'm just catching up with it): "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,"a piece in Wired by Chris Anderson (see also his related Long Tail blog post). If you haven't previously encountered it, it's long but worth adding to your weekend reading, and it has new relevance during the current crises in newspapers and elsewhere. Samples:

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero....

This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all....

The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year....

Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

Barons of the press, repeat that: Reputation and attention are the new scarcities. Again: reputation and attention are the new scarcities. (Keep repeating. Monetization will follow.)