Some hits, some misses: a look back at my 2009 predictions

A year ago, in December 2008, I went on a limb with a raft of predictions for 2009.

Here's my scorecard (send corrections if I've missed anything!):

No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.

• WRONG. By the end of 2008, only Tribune had declared. Since then, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Journal Register Company, and the Philadelphia newspapers made trips to the courthouse, most of them right after the first of the year.
  

Several cities, besides Denver, that today still have multiple daily newspapers will become single-newspaper towns.

• RIGHT: Hearst closed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Gannett closed the Tuscon Citizen, making those cities one-paper towns. In February, Clarity Media Group closed the Baltimore Examiner, a free daily, leaving the field to the Sun. And Freedom is closing the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, which cuts out a nearby competitor in the Phoenix metro area.

Whatever gets announced this week by the Detroit Newspaper Partnership in terms of frequency reduction will be emulated in several more cities (including both single and multiple newspaper markets) within the first half of the year.

• WRONG: Nothing similar to the Detroit arrangement has been tried elsewhere.

Even if both papers in Detroit somehow maintain a seven-day schedule, we'll see several other major cities and a dozen or more smaller markets cut back from six or seven days to one to four days per week.

• WRONG, mostly: We did see a few other outright closings including the Ann Arbor News, and some eliminations of one or two publishing days, but only the Register-Pajaronian of Watsonville, Calif. announced it will go from six days to three, back in January.

As part of that shift, some major dailies will switch their Sunday package fully to Saturday and drop Sunday publication entirely. They will see this step as saving production cost, increasing sales via longer shelf life in stores, improving results for advertisers, and driving more weekend website traffic. The "weekend edition" will be more feature-y, less news-y.

• WRONG: This really falls in the department of wishful thinking; it's a strategy I've been advocating for the last year or so to follow the audience to the Web, jettison the overhead of printing and delivery, but retain the most profitable portion of the print product.

There will be at least one, and probably several, mergers between some of the top newspaper chains in the country. Top candidate: Media News merges with Hearst. Dow Jones will finally shed Ottaway in a deal engineered by Boston Herald owner (and recently-appointed Ottaway chief), Pat Purcell.

• WRONG AGAIN, but this one is going back into the 2010 hopper. Lack of capital by most of the players, and the perception or hope that values may improve, put a big damper on mergers and acquisitions, but there should be renewed interest ahead.

Google will not buy the New York Times Company, or any other media property. Google is smart enough to stick with its business, which is organizing information, not generating content. On the other hand, Amazon may decide that they are in the content business... And then there's the long shot possibility that Michael Bloomberg loses his re-election bid next fall, which might generate a 2010 prediction, if NYT is still independent at that point.

• RIGHT about Google, and Not Applicable about Bloomberg (but Bloomberg did acquire Business Week). The Google-NYT pipe dream still gets mentioned on occasion, but it won't happen.

There will be a mini-dotcom bust, featuring closings or fire sales of numerous web enterprises launched on the model of "generate traffic now, monetize later."

• WRONG, at least on the mini-bust scenario. Certainly there were closings of various digital enterprises, but it didn't look like a tidal wave.

The fifty newspaper execs who gathered at API's November Summit for an Industry in Crisis will not bother to reconvene six months later (which would be April) as they agreed to do.

• RIGHT. There was a very low-key round two with fewer participants in January, without any announced outcomes, and that was it.

Newspaper advertising revenue will decline year-over-year 10 percent in the first quarter and 5 percent in the second. It will stabilize, or nearly so, in the second half, but will have a loss for the year. For the year, newspapers will slip below 12 percent of total advertising revenue (from 15 percent in 2007 and around 13.5 percent in 2008). But online advertising at newspaper sites will resume strong upward growth.

• WRONG, and way too optimistic.  Full-year results won't be known for months, but the first three quarters have seen losses in the 30 percent ballpark. Gannett and New York Times have suggested Q4 will come in "better" at "only" about 25 percent down.  My 12 percent reference was to newspaper share of the total ad market, a metric that has become harder to track this year due to changes in methodology at McCann, but the actual for 2009 ultimately will sugar out at about 10 percent.

Newspaper circulation, aggregated, will be steady (up or down no more than 1 percent) in each of the 6-month ABC reporting periods ending March 31 and September 30. Losses in print circulation will be offset by gains in ABC-countable paid digital subscriptions, including facsimile editions and e-reader editions.

• WRONG, and also way too optimistic. The March period drop was 7.1 percent, the September drop was 10.6 percent, and digital subscription didn't have much impact.

At least 25 daily newspapers will close outright. This includes the Rocky Mountain Post, and it will include other papers in multi-newspaper markets. But most closings will be in smaller markets.

• WRONG, and too pessimistic.  About half a dozen papers closed for good during the year.
  

One hundred or more independent local startup sites focused on local news will be launched. A number of them will launch weekly newspapers, as well, repurposing the content they've already published online. Some of these enterprises are for-profit, some are non-profit. There will be some steps toward formation of a national association of local online news publishers, perhaps initiated by one of the journalism schools.

• Hard to tell, but probably RIGHT. Nobody is really keeping track of how many hyperlocals are active, or their comings and goings. An authoritative central database would be a Good Thing.

The Dow [Industrials] will be up 15 percent for the year. The stocks of newspaper firms will beat the market.

• RIGHT, or close enough, although the year isn't over yet. As of Friday, December 11, the Dow is more than 19 percent ahead of its Dec. 31, 2008 closing level. (This prediction is the one that got the most "you must be dreaming" reactions last year.  
• AND RIGHT ABOUT NEWSPAPERS BEATING THE MARKET (as measured by the Dow Industrials), which got even bigger laughs from the skeptics. There is no index of newspaper stocks, but on the whole, they've done well.  It helps to have started in the sub-basement at year-end 2008, of course, which was the basis of my prediction. Those beating the Dow were: New York Times (+25%), AH Belo (+126%), Gatehouse (+350%), Lee Enterprises (+763%), McClatchy (+296%), Journal Communications (+56%), EW Scripps (+208%), Media General (+388%), Gannett (+65%) and News Corp. (+57%).  Only Washington Post Co. (+6%) lagged the market. Not listed, of course, are those still in bankruptcy.
  

At least one publicly-owned newspaper chain will go private.

• NOPE.

A survey will show that the median age of people reading a printed newspaper at least 5 days per week is is now over 60.

• UNKNOWN: I'm not aware of a 2009 survey of this metric, but I'll wager that the median age figure is correct.

Reading news on a Kindle or other e-reader will grow by leaps and bounds. E-readers will be the hot gadget of the year. The New York Times, which currently has over 10,000 subscribers on Kindle, will push that number to 75,000. The Times will report that 75 percent of these subscribers were not previously readers of the print edition, and half of them are under 40. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post will not be far behind in e-reader subscriptions.

• UNKNOWN, as far as the subscription counts go: newspapers and Kindle have not announced e-reader subscription levels during the year. The Times now has at least 30,000, as does the Wall Street Journal (according a post by Staci Kramer last month; see my comment there as well.) There have been a number of new e-reader introductions, but none of them look much better than their predecessors as news readers.  My guess would be that by year end, the Times will have closer to 40,000 Kindle readers and the Journal 35,000.  During 2010, 75,000 should be attainable for the Times, especially counting all e-editions (which include the Times Reader and Newsstand.com additions along with the Kindle). The Times' total electronic circulation stood at 53,353 weekdays and 34,435 Sundays for the six months ending Sept. 30.
  

The advent of a color Kindle (or other brand color e-reader) will be rumored in November, 2009, but won't be introduced before the end of the year.

• RIGHT: plenty of rumors, but no color e-reader, except Fujitsu's Flepia, which is expensive, experimental, and only for sale in Japan.

Some newspaper companies will buy or launch news aggregation sites. Others will find ways to collaborate with aggregators.

• RIGHT:  Hearst launched its topic pages site LMK.com.  And various companies are working with EVRI, Daylife and others to bring aggregated feeds to their sites.
  

As newsrooms, with or without corporate direction, begin to truly embrace an online-first culture, outbound links embedded in news copy, blog-style, as well as standalone outbound linking, will proliferate on newspaper sites. A reporter without an active blog will start to be seen as a dinosaur.

• MORE WISHFUL THINKING, although there's progress. Many reporters still don't blog, still don't tweet, and many papers are still on content management systems that inhibit embedded links.

The Reuters-Politico deal will inspire other networking arrangements whereby one content generator shares content with others, in return for right to place ads on the participating web sites on a revenue-sharing basis.

• YES, we're seeing more sharing of content, with various financial arrangements.
  

The Obama administration will launch a White House Wiki to help citizens follow the Changes, and in time will add staff blogs, public commenting, and other public interaction.

• NOT SO FAR, although just this past week a new Open Government initiative was announcement by the White House.  This grew out of some wiki-like public input earlier in the year.
  

The Washington Post will launch a news wiki with pages on current news topics that will be updated with new developments.

• YES - kicked off in January, it's called WhoRunsGov.com.

The New York Times will launch a sophisticated new Facebook application built around news content. The basic idea will be that the content of the news (and advertising) package you get by being a Times fan on Facebook will be influenced by the interests and social connections you have established on Facebook. There will be discussion of, if not experimentation with, applying a personal CPM based on social connections, which could result in a rewards system for participating individuals.

• NO. Although the Times has continued to come out with innovative online experiments,  this was not one of them.
  

Craigslist will partner with a newspaper consortium in a project to generate and deliver classified advertising. There will be no new revenue in the model, but the goal will be to get more people to go to newspaper web sites to find classified ads. There will be talk of expanding this collaboration to include Ebay.

• NO. This still seems like a good idea, but probably it should have happened in 2006 and the opportunity has passed.

Look for some big deals among the social networks. In particular, Twitter will begin to falter as it proves to be unable to identify a clearly attainable revenue stream. By year-end, it will either be acquired or will be seeking to merge or be acquired. The most likely buyer remains Facebook, but interest will come from others as well and Twitter will work hard to generate an auction that produces a high valuation for the company.

• NO DEAL, so far. But RIGHT about Twitter beginning to falter and still having no "clearly attainable" revenue stream in sight. Twitter's unique visitors and site visits, as measured by Compete.com, peaked last summer and have been declining, slowly, ever since.  Quantcast agrees.
  

Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

• YES, as described in this post and this post.  See also the blogs of Steve Buttry and Chuck Peters.  The Cedar Rapids Gazette and its affiliated TV station and web site are in the process of reinventing and reconstructing their entire workflow for news gathering and distribution.

A major motion picture or HBO series featuring a journalism theme (perhaps a blogger involved in saving the world from nefarious schemes) will generate renewed interest in journalism as a career.

• RIGHT.  Well, I'm not sure if it has generated renewed interest in journalism as a career, but the movie State of Play featured both print reporters and bloggers.  And Julie of Julie and Julia was a blogger, as well.

Stay tuned for my predictions for 2010! 

More media blogger predictions for 2009

Since I came out with my own predictions for 2009, a number of other media blogs have posted lists of media-related prognostications. Here's a roundup:

Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb offers a set of social media predictions that focus on tools "to help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day."

Dylan Stableford at Folio has no fewer than 117 predictions, rounded up from a slew of experts, mainly about the magazine racket. Some suggest 2009 will see a major contraction in the number of magazine titles published, but there's also Dylan Tweney of Wired, who notes that 335 magazines were launched during 2008, and he expects laid-off journalists and entrepreneurs to start even more of them in 2009, with this proviso: "Most of these magazines will never see print. They'll be online-only publications, aggregators of interesting stories, pictures and miscellany—the original definition of 'magazine'—along the lines of Harper's or its more modern analogue, The Huffington Post."

Diane Mermigas of the Benton Foundation: "Major advertisers such as automotives, financial services, retail and real estate will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. Local media could see half of their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009."

Shawn Farner's ("ballsy")social media predictions: "Twitter will be bought. By who? If I had to guess, I’d say Google."

Several commentators at eMarketer weigh in on online ad spending and e-commerce trends.

MarketEvolution has some predictions for the UK newspaper market.

Windchimes has an interesting one worth quoting in its entirety:

Traditional media will rediscover itself: There is a lot of talk on how traditional media will lose its sheen in the coming years. I believe it will continue to do so if it keeps following social media principles without reinventing itself. Take the case of citizen journalism. A couple of TV channels have started running segments where the citizens report in news to the people at large. As a subscriber I am not paying TV channels money to hear news from the common man. I am expecting a thorough analysis done by the reporters and journalists on the events before it being presented to me. I want an unbiased, complete perspective which an untrained citizen cannot provide. For citizen based reports, I always have social media platforms to go to.I predict that in 2009 channels adopting practices like these will die. Traditional media is still very important in our lives and it has to discover and operate from its own strengths rather than borrow principles of social media.

Carnival of Journalism members, hosted this month by DigiDave (that David Cohn of spot.us), were invited to counteract the general gloom with positive predictions. The rest of these are from that group:

Charlie Becket's list at Polis, includes "a consolidation in people’s habits, a gathering around iPhone, Facebook and Google rather than new adventures into virgin territory of the new media jungle."

Jack Lail at Random Mumblings appears to agree, writing that "[e]xcess will get wrung out. Media businesses based on bad ideas and media enterprises that have little viability of profits going forward will morph or fold, or both. Those could include everything from startups to the oldest business in Colorado in the Rocky Mountain News. Yes, some good technologies, good ideas and good news organizations will go down, too. Some good people will lose their jobs. But a business is more than a good idea or good product. That's a positive prediction? For those that remain, yes."

Doug Fisher at Common Sense Journalism looks on the bright side with predictions that include: "Out of all that laid-off brainpower will come some really smart sites/products/stories/multimedia, etc. A lot of smart people have been shown the exit door from newsrooms and media operations. And despite how it sometimes can come across when listening to the echo chamber of the digiterati, not all are luddites or curmudgeons or whiners and piners."

Andy Dickinson expands on two basic predictions: "This will be the year of the journalist" (in the sense that individuals can build their own personal brands, and "Europe will step on Google."

Paul Bradshaw at OJB tells us what 2009 won't be: not the year of the mobile web, not the year of the semantic web. And he agrees with Andy that Google is vulnerable.

Brian Murley at Innovation in College Media is philosophical: "We will be okay. Democracy will survive. Journalism will survive. The news industry will slowly figure out its future - 2009 will be a turning point. I think the next generation of journalists will be among those figuring out the economics of publishing in an era of 'free' on the Internet."

Adrian Monck offers a call to action, rather than conversation.

Out on my limb: Predictions for 2009

Update, December 2009: I've posted my scorecard on these predictions.

While we're waiting for the shoes to drop in Detroit, and before everybody drops out of circulation for the holidays, here are my predictions for the U. S. newspaper industry for 2009, listed in no particular order of likelihood:

No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.

Several cities, besides Denver, that today still have multiple daily newspapers will become single-newspaper towns.

Whatever gets announced this week by the Detroit Newspaper Partnership in terms of frequency reduction will be emulated in several more cities (including both single and multiple newspaper markets) within the first half of the year.

Even if both papers in Detroit somehow maintain a seven-day schedule, we'll see several other major cities and a dozen or more smaller markets cut back from six or seven days to one to four days per week.

As part of that shift, some major dailies will switch their Sunday package fully to Saturday and drop Sunday publication entirely. They will see this step as saving production cost, increasing sales via longer shelf life in stores, improving results for advertisers, and driving more weekend website traffic. The "weekend edition" will be more feature-y, less news-y.

There will be at least one, and probably several, mergers between some of the top newspaper chains in the country. Top candidate: Media News merges with Hearst. Dow Jones will finally shed Ottaway in a deal engineered by Boston Herald owner (and recently-appointed Ottaway chief), Pat Purcell.

Google will not buy the New York Times Company, or any other media property, . Google is smart enough to stick with its business, which is organizing information, not generating content. On the other hand, Amazon may decide that they are in the content business... And then there's the long shot possibility that Michael Bloomberg loses his re-election bid next fall, which might generate a 2010 prediction, if NYT is still independent at that point.

There will be a mini-dotcom bust, featuring closings or fire sales of numerous web enterprises launched on the model of "generate traffic now, monetize later."

The fifty newspaper execs who gathered at API's November Summit for an Industry in Crisis will not bother to reconvene six months later (which would be April) as they agreed to do.

Newspaper advertising revenue will decline year-over-year 10 percent in the first quarter and 5 percent in the second. It will stabilize, or nearly so, in the second half, but will have a loss for the year. For the year, newspapers will slip below 12 percent of total advertising revenue (from 15 percent in 2007 and around 13.5 percent in 2008). But online advertising at newspaper sites will resume strong upward growth.

Newspaper circulation, aggregated, will be steady (up or down no more than 1 percent) in each of the 6-month ABC reporting periods ending March 31 and September 30. Losses in print circulation will be offset by gains in ABC-countable paid digital subscriptions, including facsimile editions and e-reader editions.

At least 25 daily newspapers will close outright. This includes the Rocky Mountain Post, and it will include other papers in multi-newspaper markets. But most closings will be in smaller markets.

One hundred or more independent local startup sites focused on local news will be launched. A number of them will launch weekly newspapers, as well, repurposing the content they've already published online. Some of these enterprises are for-profit, some are non-profit. There will be some steps toward formation of a national association of local online news publishers, perhaps initiated by one of the journalism schools.

The Dow will be up 15 percent for the year. The stocks of newspaper firms will beat the market.

At least one publicly-owned newspaper chain will go private.

A survey will show that the median age of people reading a printed newspaper at least 5 days per week is is now over 60.

Reading news on a Kindle or other e-reader will grow by leaps and bounds. E-readers will be the hot gadget of the year. The New York Times, which currently has over 10,000 subscribers on Kindle, will push that number to 75,000. The Times will report that 75 percent of these subscribers were not previously readers of the print edition, and half of them are under 40. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post will not be far behind in e-reader subscriptions.

The advent of a color Kindle (or other brand color e-reader) will be rumored in November, 2009, but won't be introduced before the end of the year.

Some newspaper companies will buy or launch news aggregation sites. Others will find ways to collaborate with aggregators.

As newsrooms, with or without corporate direction, begin to truly embrace an online-first culture, outbound links embedded in news copy, blog-style, as well as standalone outbound linking, will proliferate on newspaper sites. A reporter without an active blog will start to be seen as a dinosaur.

The Reuters-Politico deal will inspire other networking arrangements whereby one content generator shares content with others, in return for right to place ads on the participating web sites on a revenue-sharing basis.

The Obama administration will launch a White House Wiki to help citizens follow the Changes, and in time will add staff blogs, public commenting, and other public interaction.

The Washington Post will launch a news wiki with pages on current news topics that will be updated with new developments.

The New York Times will launch a sophisticated new Facebook application built around news content. The basic idea will be that the content of the news (and advertising) package you get by being a Times fan on Facebook will be influenced by the interests and social connections you have established on Facebook. There will be discussion of, if not experimentation with, applying a personal CPM based on social connections, which could result in a rewards system for participating individuals.

Craigslist will partner with a newspaper consortium in a project to generate and deliver classified advertising. There will be no new revenue in the model, but the goal will be to get more people to go to newspaper web sites to find classified ads. There will be talk of expanding this collaboration to include Ebay.

Look for some big deals among the social networks. In particular, Twitter will begin to falter as it proves to be unable to identify a clearly attainable revenue stream. By year-end, it will either be acquired or will be seeking to merge or be acquired. The most likely buyer remains Facebook, but interest will come from others as well and Twitter will work hard to generate an auction that produces a high valuation for the company.

Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A major motion picture or HBO series featuring a journalism theme (perhaps a blogger involved in saving the world from nefarious schemes) will generate renewed interest in journalism as a career.