Once a year, my friend Rick Floyd interviews by email me for his blog "When I Survey" (formerly "Retired Pastor Ruminates").
He has posted this year's installment. He calls it "The future of newspapers", but it's really about the future of news. Enjoy!
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Alden Global Capital drops a shoe: Is the Journal Register acquisition prelude to more consolidation?
On Thursday, Journal Register Company announced that it had been acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that specializes in “distressed opportunities,” such as companies emerging from bankruptcy — including newspaper groups. The acquisition may foreshadow additional moves by Alden, which is interested in two strategies to add value to its investments: (a) it wants its newspaper holdings to aggressively develop digital capabilities and revenues, and (b) it wants to see consolidation (mergers) among newspaper groups.
In its capacity as a distressed-opportunity specialist, as I detailed here in January, Alden acquired stakes not only in JRC, but also in MediaNews Group, Philadelphia Media Network, Tribune, Freedom Communications, and the Canadian newspaper groupPostmedia Network . Among publishers that avoided bankruptcy filings, it has stakes inA.H. Belo, Gannett, McClatchy, Media General and Journal Communications. (I detailed those investments in this post in March.) In addition to its newspaper holdings, Alden has other media investments, including in Emmis Communications and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Only the investments in public companies are detailed in SEC filings — they add up to about $210 million in media holdings. Together with the non-public investments in JRC, MediaNews, Freedom, Postmedia, and Philadelphia, Alden may have as much as $750 million of its total assets of $3 billion invested in newspaper and broadcast media properties.
At the time of that January post, Alden had just asserted itself at MediaNews Group by shaking up the executive suite and naming three new directors to the seven-member board. (Disclosure: I spent 13 years as a publisher at a MediaNews Group newspaper.) That move was important because it enabled Alden to use MediaNews as a platform from which to drive consolidation in the still-fractured U.S. newspaper industry. (The largest player, Gannett, owns only about 13 percent of the industry in terms of daily circulation.) Under SEC rules, by taking a position on the board, Alden was no longer allowed to speculate in MediaNews stock; hence, their assumption of board seats signalled an intent to use their MediaNews holdings strategically rather than speculatively. Until the JRC acquisition, Alden had not done the same at any of the other firms in which it had invested.
Click here to continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab
Click here to continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab
Thursday, March 10, 2011
The flip side of black hat SEO: If your news site publishes paid links, you risk suffering Google’s wrath
Last month, the New York Times outed retailer JCPenney for engaging in “black hat optimization” — the practice of buying or placing links designed primarily to improve a site’s standing in Google search results.
While JCPenney did a quick mea culpa and fired the SEO consultants responsible for the links (and had its search standings plummet for all the keywords involved), there is also a flip side to the story: a cautionary tale for news sites and bloggers — indeed, for anyone operating a reputable website that looks for advertising revenue.
A number of high-profile news sites, in fact, still carry links of the offending variety, potentially to the detriment of their own standing in Google search results. In a survey last week, we identified a variety of news sites publishing paid links that lack Google-required HTML formatting designed to avoid negative SEO results. The list includes GlobalPost (which has since removed the links), the Jerusalem Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Monthly (of Australia), the Gotham Gazette (which has since made them Google-compliant by adding nofollow tags — see below), the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail and its JOA partner the Charleston Gazette.
...Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab...
While JCPenney did a quick mea culpa and fired the SEO consultants responsible for the links (and had its search standings plummet for all the keywords involved), there is also a flip side to the story: a cautionary tale for news sites and bloggers — indeed, for anyone operating a reputable website that looks for advertising revenue.
A number of high-profile news sites, in fact, still carry links of the offending variety, potentially to the detriment of their own standing in Google search results. In a survey last week, we identified a variety of news sites publishing paid links that lack Google-required HTML formatting designed to avoid negative SEO results. The list includes GlobalPost (which has since removed the links), the Jerusalem Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Monthly (of Australia), the Gotham Gazette (which has since made them Google-compliant by adding nofollow tags — see below), the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail and its JOA partner the Charleston Gazette.
...Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab...
Monday, March 7, 2011
Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry
Who owns America’s newspapers?
In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status.
After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’s common stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.
First, here’s a set of slides detailing the top investors in each of the publicly-owned newspaper publishers. I’ve included among these News Corporation (both the class A and class B common stock), but for the rest of this analysis, News Corp. is excluded because its global multimedia holdings in film, television, magazines and book dwarf the entire rest of the American newspaper business. (Note: All holding and valuations throughout this post are as of December 31, 2010.)
Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status.
After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’s common stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.
First, here’s a set of slides detailing the top investors in each of the publicly-owned newspaper publishers. I’ve included among these News Corporation (both the class A and class B common stock), but for the rest of this analysis, News Corp. is excluded because its global multimedia holdings in film, television, magazines and book dwarf the entire rest of the American newspaper business. (Note: All holding and valuations throughout this post are as of December 31, 2010.)
Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Tackable aims to become the social network for user-generated news
“The traditional social network just doesn’t work when it comes to news,” says Luke Stangel, cofounder and chief marketing officer at Tackable, a Palo Alto-based startup tackling this problem by building a standalone social network that “organizes media on a map.”
Tackable’s current shape is an iPhone app-based social network focused on geotagged news photos and captions. The system will eventually include text, audio, and video, and of course an Android app is on the way. The Tackable vision is that when breaking news happens, you’ll be able to use the app to zero in on the location on the map, and see whether network members have posted photo, video and comments, without needing to have a previous relationship with those people.
“You don’t really care what a dentist in Baltimore thinks about Egypt,” Stangel said. “What you really want to do is talk to a protester who is there on the ground. So what we do is we break the social network and we replace it with something else. We put it on the map. So if you’re interested in Egypt, you simply pull the map over to Egypt and you can see all the media that’s coming out of the country, from people who are there on the ground.”
Click here to continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
The shakeup at MediaNews: Why it could be the leadup to a massive newspaper consolidation
Back in the early 1990s, Dean Singleton predicted that ultimately there would be just three newspaper companies left standing, and he intended his MediaNews Group to be one of them.
It was an audacious prediction, because at the time, after a decade of wheeling, dealing and sometimes ruthless management, MediaNews Group still consisted of just a dozen newspapers, and the company’s board meetings, as he was fond of saying, “could be held in the front seat of a pickup truck.” But Singleton often repeated his prediction of industry consolidation, and it was the driver behind MediaNews’s growth into the sixth largest newspaper company (in terms of circulation) over the past 15 years. Today MediaNews has 54 daily newspapers with a total of 2.4 million weekday circulation. (On its own site, MediaNews claims to be the “second largest media company,” but that’s a double stretch: Its properties are nearly all newspaper entities, and, by my count, Gannett, Tribune, News Corp., McClatchy and Advance have more daily paid print circulation — and are certainly all bigger media companies than MediaNews.)
Read the rest of this post here at Nieman Journalism Lab.
It was an audacious prediction, because at the time, after a decade of wheeling, dealing and sometimes ruthless management, MediaNews Group still consisted of just a dozen newspapers, and the company’s board meetings, as he was fond of saying, “could be held in the front seat of a pickup truck.” But Singleton often repeated his prediction of industry consolidation, and it was the driver behind MediaNews’s growth into the sixth largest newspaper company (in terms of circulation) over the past 15 years. Today MediaNews has 54 daily newspapers with a total of 2.4 million weekday circulation. (On its own site, MediaNews claims to be the “second largest media company,” but that’s a double stretch: Its properties are nearly all newspaper entities, and, by my count, Gannett, Tribune, News Corp., McClatchy and Advance have more daily paid print circulation — and are certainly all bigger media companies than MediaNews.)
Read the rest of this post here at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Friday, December 31, 2010
The year 2010 in review
Inspired by my friend Richard Floyd's ruminations about his 2010 blogifications, here's a rundown on how News after Newspapers was read this year.
To the extent Google Analytics tells a real story — there are many visits by folks clearly searching for something else who stick around for just two or three microseconds — visitors in 2010 came from 108 countries (missing: Central Asia, Central Africa, Bolivia, Greenland and a few Central American countries), and all 50 states. There were 11,532 visits in total, 14,584 pageviews, and 8,478 individual visitors. On average, you spent 57 seconds on site, which is not enough to read the average post, so obviously, a lot of you bailed out early. On the other hand, most of my posts here were just trailers for the full posts over at NiemanLab, where the average post got at least 1,000 hits.
I managed to put up 20 posts this year versus 75 in 2009 and 66 in 2008 (and I started in September of 2008), so it's been a slow year. Nevertheless, overall traffic this year was down just about 5 percent from the year before.
What you liked, based on pageviews:
1. iPad strategies for publishers — I must admit, I still don't have one — an iPad that is. But I've played with one, and I think so far the strategies outlined in that post are looking valid. (See also that post's precursor, with the same thoughts somewhat less polished.)
2. Groupon's revenue pace — I predicted a $350 million annual pace back in April. That seemed pretty preposterous at the time (they only came out of beta about a year before), but the actual result, astoundingly, seems to be closer to $1 billion.
3. Are newspapers doomed? — This is a 2008 post that continues to get traction. The answer, if you don't want to peek, is yes.
4. Out on a limb again: Predictions for 2010 — You can check on how those prognostications turned out here. I had more hits than misses, overall.
5. A roundup of media predictions for 2010 — This is a beat that NiemanLab has taken over in spades, with an all-star series of 2011 predictions posted during December, including my own.
Happy New Year to all!
To the extent Google Analytics tells a real story — there are many visits by folks clearly searching for something else who stick around for just two or three microseconds — visitors in 2010 came from 108 countries (missing: Central Asia, Central Africa, Bolivia, Greenland and a few Central American countries), and all 50 states. There were 11,532 visits in total, 14,584 pageviews, and 8,478 individual visitors. On average, you spent 57 seconds on site, which is not enough to read the average post, so obviously, a lot of you bailed out early. On the other hand, most of my posts here were just trailers for the full posts over at NiemanLab, where the average post got at least 1,000 hits.
I managed to put up 20 posts this year versus 75 in 2009 and 66 in 2008 (and I started in September of 2008), so it's been a slow year. Nevertheless, overall traffic this year was down just about 5 percent from the year before.
What you liked, based on pageviews:
1. iPad strategies for publishers — I must admit, I still don't have one — an iPad that is. But I've played with one, and I think so far the strategies outlined in that post are looking valid. (See also that post's precursor, with the same thoughts somewhat less polished.)
2. Groupon's revenue pace — I predicted a $350 million annual pace back in April. That seemed pretty preposterous at the time (they only came out of beta about a year before), but the actual result, astoundingly, seems to be closer to $1 billion.
3. Are newspapers doomed? — This is a 2008 post that continues to get traction. The answer, if you don't want to peek, is yes.
4. Out on a limb again: Predictions for 2010 — You can check on how those prognostications turned out here. I had more hits than misses, overall.
5. A roundup of media predictions for 2010 — This is a beat that NiemanLab has taken over in spades, with an all-star series of 2011 predictions posted during December, including my own.
Happy New Year to all!
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Predictions 2011: More digital convergence, AP Clearinghouse, more trailblazing from John Paton's JRC
Continuing an annual tradition here at NaN, here are my prognostications for 2011 (posted also at Nieman Journalism Lab). See also my earlier post with predictions for 2020.
Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming. My geezer head spins just thinking about all this, but look: All these things will not stay in separate silos. Why do you think AOL invested $50 million or more launching Patch in 500 markets, without a business model that makes sense to anyone? What’s coming down the pike is new intersections between all of these digital developments, and somehow, news is always in the picture because it’s at the top of people’s lists of content needs, right after email and search. There are business opportunities in tying all of these things together, so there are opportunities for news enterprises to be part of the action. Some attempts to find synergies will work, and some won’t.
But imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don’t). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we’ll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.
The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I’m going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed. (Disclosure: I’m working on a project with the University of Missouri to explore potential business models enabled by news clearinghouses.)
Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming. My geezer head spins just thinking about all this, but look: All these things will not stay in separate silos. Why do you think AOL invested $50 million or more launching Patch in 500 markets, without a business model that makes sense to anyone? What’s coming down the pike is new intersections between all of these digital developments, and somehow, news is always in the picture because it’s at the top of people’s lists of content needs, right after email and search. There are business opportunities in tying all of these things together, so there are opportunities for news enterprises to be part of the action. Some attempts to find synergies will work, and some won’t.
But imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don’t). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we’ll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.
The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I’m going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed. (Disclosure: I’m working on a project with the University of Missouri to explore potential business models enabled by news clearinghouses.)
How I made out with my 2010 predictions
Time to look back on my predictions for 2010, posted December 17, 2009. Here are the full texts of the predictions, with outcomes, as near as ascertainable at this point. (Posted also at Nieman Journalism Lab)
Newspaper ad revenue
PREDICTION: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.8 percent in Q3 of 2009 and widely forecast in Q4 to exceed that rate. But newspaper revenue has not followed suit, dropping 28 percent in Q3. McClatchy and the New York Times Company (which both came in at about that level in Q3) hinted last week that Q4 would be better, in the negative low-to-mid 20 percent range. This is not unexpected — in the last few recessions with actual GDP contraction (1990-91 and 2001), newspaper revenue remained in negative territory for at least two quarters after the GDP returned to growth. But the newspaper dip has been bigger each time, and the current slide started (without precedent) a year and a half before the recession did, with a cumulative revenue loss of nearly 50 percent. Newspaper revenue has never grown by much more than 10 percent (year over year) in any one quarter, so no real recovery is likely. This is a permanently downsized industry. My call for revenue by quarter (including online revenue) during 2010 is: -11%, -10%, -6%, -2%.REALITY: CLOSE, ONE CIGAR. Actuals for Q1, 2, and 3: -9.70%, -5.55%, – 5.39%. And Q4, while not a winner, will probably be “better” than Q3 (that is, another quarter of “moderating declines” in news chain boardroom-speak). So, a win on the trendline, and pretty close on the numbers.
Newspaper online revenue
PREDICTION: Newspaper online revenue will be the only bright spot, breaking even in Q1 and ramping up to 15% growth by Q4.
REALITY: CLOSE, ONE CIGAR. Actuals for Q1, 2, and 3: +4.90%, +13.90%, and +10.7%. Since Q1 beat my prediction and was the first positive result in eight quarters, I’d say that’s a win, and pretty close on the ramp-up, so far. Q4 might hit that 15%.
What will journalism look like 10 years from now?
Over at NiemanLab, there has a been a litany of predictions for journalism for 2011; my own should be in the works over there.
But at Quora, where I'm a member, somebody asked, "What will journalism look like 10 years from now?" This is a good question, because year-to-year changes don't always reflect the long-term trends. Here's the answer I posted:
There are those who say that only trained professionals can practice journalism, but as a practical matter, journalism will continue to be practiced by a range of people with professionals at one end and amateurs at the other, publishing via a range of channels with large commercial and non-profit news organizations at one end and individual bloggers at the other.
Some of these will have paid access, some will be free; some will be on paper, some on websites, some on apps, some on other channels, and many on some combination of these distribution methods. Journalism will be fully platform-independent. But although platforms and cost are not directly relevant to how journalism will be practiced, they do affect how journalists may earn a living. So lets look at ways the work of journalists across the spectrum may change over the next ten years:
More freelancers: Individual journalists will have enhanced ability to earn a living by selling directly to news consumers, which will better enable them to operate outside of traditional news organizations and sell their content in multiple ways including syndication, curated channels, individually branded channels.
But at Quora, where I'm a member, somebody asked, "What will journalism look like 10 years from now?" This is a good question, because year-to-year changes don't always reflect the long-term trends. Here's the answer I posted:
There are those who say that only trained professionals can practice journalism, but as a practical matter, journalism will continue to be practiced by a range of people with professionals at one end and amateurs at the other, publishing via a range of channels with large commercial and non-profit news organizations at one end and individual bloggers at the other.
Some of these will have paid access, some will be free; some will be on paper, some on websites, some on apps, some on other channels, and many on some combination of these distribution methods. Journalism will be fully platform-independent. But although platforms and cost are not directly relevant to how journalism will be practiced, they do affect how journalists may earn a living. So lets look at ways the work of journalists across the spectrum may change over the next ten years:
More freelancers: Individual journalists will have enhanced ability to earn a living by selling directly to news consumers, which will better enable them to operate outside of traditional news organizations and sell their content in multiple ways including syndication, curated channels, individually branded channels.
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