The Numbers Game

As they do every six months, last week the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) reported newspaper circulation averages for the "FAS-FAX period" from April through September. The news didn't look good, with weekday numbers down 4.64 percent year-over-year, and Sunday down 4.64 percent. This represented an acceleration of the prior-year pace of decline, which was 2.6 percent weekdays and 3.5 percent Sundays.

As usual, the industry tried to put a good spin on the numbers, as summed up by Russell Adams in the Wall Street Journal:

But the reality is in some ways less bleak than the latest numbers indicate: Some newspapers have raised newsstand prices, curtailed discounted copies and halted delivery to the least profitable customers. Also, while print circulation has been declining for years as readers continue their mass migration to the Web, many publishers point out they are reaching more readers than before through print and online. The problem for publishers is the printed paper commands higher ad rates than the Web so even as more people read newspaper content, the papers pull in less money.

Some newspapers were able to point to gains in overall combined audience of online and print readers. In particular, Matt Baldwin, V.P. of Research at MediaNews Group, wrote an indignant memo claiming growth in the total audience of the Denver Post (owned by MediaNews) and Rocky Mountain News (managed by MediaNews as part of a joint operating agreement). This came after the Post as well as the Rocky had each reported their print circulation drops the other day without, apparently, getting the online audience spin from their V.P. of Research.

An obvious question about this combined audience approach might be, aren't we comparing apples and oranges? The print portion of the averages reported (in the first link in the previous paragraph) are seven-day readers. A one-day reader counts as only one-seventh of a reader in that average. But the are adding to that the seven-day "unique visitor" number, in which a one-time, one-day web site visitor counts as one full reader. Apples and apples would demand adding only the one-day unique visitor average, which is undoubtedly much lower. Moreover, as acknowledged by Baldwin, some print readers are also site visitors, and nothing has been done to eliminate the overlap.

A set of web audience metrics that looks more reliable comes from the National Newspaper Association (NAA), which reports:

Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 68.3 million unique visitors on average (41.4 percent of all Internet users) in the third quarter of 2008, a record number that reflects a 15.8 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

The NAA recognizes that both the election and the economy are contributing toward this rise, but their stats show pretty similar reach during July, August and September, which is not what you'd expect if the trend were due mainly to current events. In the NAA's findings, the average unique visitor made eight or nine visits, however, so this is not seven-day readership. In fact, if you examine their stats closely, the NAA is saying that 41 percent of web users spend about 45 minutes a month, or an average of only 90 seconds per day, at newspaper sites. If you look at it that way, it's not much of an audience. In fact, the top half-dozen or so domain names all individually outpull the entire newspaper industry in unique visitors.

Still, there seem to be some optimists out there. Neither the revenue slide nor the circulation decline seem to bother Richard Siklos at Fortune in recommending a bet on printed newspapers.

Andreessen speaks

Imagine newspapers have never been invented. Here's the synopsis of a business plan for your consideration:
(a) head for Canada,
(b) cut down trees,
(c) feed said trees into one end of gigantic machine,
(d) take pulp paper from other end of machine,
(e) truck said paper to place of publication,
(f) feed paper into one end of another gigantic machine, which prints words and pictures on it,
(g) load printed paper into more trucks,
(h) deliver newspapers to front porches (behind screen door!), driveways and plastic tubes on metal posts beside roads in every godforsaken nook and cranny near said place of publication.

Likelihood of angel funding? Not too high. Likelihood that enterprises actually engaged in this crazy business today figure out that continuing this routine much longer is folly? About the same, apparently.

Marc Andreessen, well-known entrepreneur of the digital world, suggests in a Portfolio interview, responding to the question, "If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?":

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business—shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

Now, realistically, he would not shut the printed Times down overnight. The important point here is that newspapers are not playing offense (although the Times comes pretty close), and they're not internet companies.

To be an internet business, a digital business, the a newspaper would have to decide, irrevocably, that it will now be focused totally on publishing online content and creating online communities, 24/7. No U.S. newspaper organization, including the Times, has truly done this—they continue to be organized around that evening deadline for the print product, and everything else is secondary. And their reporters and salespeople continue to carry business cards with the prominent name and logo of the printed paper, not that of their web site.

Importantly, getting out of the daily distribution of "ink on dead trees" does not preclude sweeping some of that digital content into print from time to time. The Christian Science Monitor will stop its daily paper, but will maintain a weekly magazine. Politico publishes a weekly newspaper circulated on Capitol Hill. Wisconsin's Capital Times eliminated its daily edition, but still publishes twice-weekly niche tabloids. The Onion is driven by its web business, but has a print edition with a circulation of 690,000.

Andreessen’s solution is radical, and he probably knows it’s not going to happen, not right now. But the Times and all other daily newspapers could, and should, consider the radical-enough solution of going digital by dropping everything except a profitable, ad- and feature-laden Sunday package (and probably switching that to Saturday publication). Cutting out six mostly break-even distribution days a week would be a lot smarter than cutting out 40 percent of their news staffs. (And, as Mark Potts suggests, and I agree, "Newspapers haven't even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue, and that's partly because they're still focused on print.")

Now, in Living Color...

A while back I wrote several posts about e-paper (Esquire and E-paper, Kindle as a news delivery tool, the new Plastic Logic e-reader). All of these dealt with existing black-and-white screen technology.

Now, Freestyle Audio is first on the market with a device featuring a color e-paper screen manufactured by Qualcom. OK, it's pretty small, but so were the first commercial applications of black-and-white e-paper. Qualcomm's technology is reported to be able to change pixel colors rapidly enough to handle video. The right app for this is clearly an iPhone-sized screen, but if they can eventually scale this to page size, make it flexible, and build in WiFi, you'll be carrying around a piece of paper showing instant updates of your news feeds, including video. Sign me up.

Welcome to The Christian Science Blog

I just about fell off the couch when NPR's "Marketplace" mentioned this evening that the Christian Science Monitor plans to drop its print edition in April. It's not as if the New York Times or WaPo dropped that bombshell, but nevertheless, it's a turning point.

While it has a circulation of only about 50,000, the century-old Monitor, with a net loss of $18.9 million covered by subsidies from the Mother Church and an endowment fund, was able to maintain 9 foreign bureaus, 9 U.S. bureaus, and 100 news staffers. They can, perhaps, maintain all of that with a subsidy half as large by cutting out the print edition, with the exception of a printed weekly magazine. In their own words, the Monitor will be "the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day."

In my second post on this blog, on September 20, I wrote:

To have even a chance of survival, the mindset of the industry needs to become: We are in the business of publishing information content continuously on our web sites; every 24 hours (for now, and this may ultimately change to once or twice weekly) we gather some of that information into a printed product and distribute it, but our business is focused on and driven by our online operations. Right now, I don't see anyone in the industry articulating this direction unequivocally.

Scratch that last sentence. The Christian Science Monitor has seen the light. Congratulations. Who's next?

Miscellany

Sorry about the 5-day gap. Here are some random items not exactly about News after Newspapers, but certainly further indication that we may soon be in an After Newspapers world.

The "September FAS-FAX" numbers are out—that's the self-reported circulation figures of U.S. newspapers for the 6 months ending September 30, versus the same period a year ago. Guess what—they are down: 4.6% on weekdays and 4.8% on Sundays. The rationalization this time is that lots of papers are cutting out unprofitable—that is, not actually real—circulation. This includes gimmickry like Newspapers in Education, "third-party" promotions in which businesses pay for thousands of giveaway copies, "bonus days" in which papers are delivered on, say, Monday through Friday to people who only paid for Saturday-Sunday delivery, and on and on. Since all this nonsense has been going on for years, the current drop really represents years of real, core, paid circulation decline that's becoming visible all at once.

The industry claims that some of the decline represents readers switching to reading their content online, and that the overall audience is growing. But is it? ABC's list of the top 25 "tier 1" papers showing total audience growth (print plus online) is not that impressive—only 4 are in double digits, and below these 25 there must be a number in that "tier" with an overall decline. We can't tell, because the ABC has a membership firewall around the numbers.

Arthur Sulzberger admits that the New York Times might not be around forever. (And another report here.) Instead, says Pinch, "we must be where people want us to be for their information." I'm surprised this one didn't get more play, really—the publisher of the greatest newspaper in the world says, in effect, that he likes print but doesn't really care if it stays or goes. I have to say that of all American metros, the Times is really the most web-centric today, and stands a chance of making the post-print transition. Meanwhile, however, the Times reported a whopping 51 percent drop in earnings (but this beat Street estimates, somehow). At Gannett, the drop was only 32 percent.

Folks in New Jersey must still like the printed Times better than the bleeding Star Ledger, which is laying off 40 percent of its news staff. Forty percent! This is supposed to save the operation. Don't bet on it. Around the country, Paper Cuts has tallied over 12,000 newspaper layoffs and buyouts, and that's just the ones reported—lots of papers small and large leave jobs open or make small cuts without anyone writing about it.

If the audience is moving online, advertising is not following, at least not in the second quarter, when newspapers reported a 2.4 percent decline in online ad revenues. That's not much compared to the print slowdown, but it's not encouraging when newspapers have been pointing to the Web as representing their future. But in the third quarter, the newspaper web site audience grew 16 percent. One would think that ad revenues should resume their upward trend. I also read this week, and can't find the reference, that in September 41 percent of U.S. adults visited a newspaper web site, a new high. As newspapers disappear, however, we won't be talking about "newspaper web sites" anymore—just "news" sites.

Universalizing the copy desk

Turmoil in the generally placid waters of copyediting! Singleton lets drop that he might outsource their work to India! Weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth! The American Copy Editors Society (ACES) responds (on front page of site, not permalinkable):

Sending copy editing overseas is a sure way to kill a paper's credibility. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not in one dramatic gesture, but every time that desk 9,000 miles away overlooks some nuance that local readers will spot, the newspaper's credibility dies a little. Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff, Oak Park, Oak Hill? What's the diff?

....And let's not even start on the tragicomic workflow disaster an overseas desk would cause. Just think of the last time you had to deal with an overseas customer service call center.

I'm sorry, but I happen to think the world’s offended copy editors are wrong for suggesting, in effect, that those dumb folks in India don’t know English well enough, and won't know their particular backyard, resulting in a ton of stupid mistakes.

The unions’ argument against Singleton (in their formal response) is plainly weak; it boils down to: There might be “errors a local person would have caught.” What else is new? There are plenty of errors already.

But beside that, if you look at the stories in any major Indian newspaper online, you won’t find scads of grammar errors, spelling errors, or stilted language. And for the most part, at the various regionalized copy desks already within MediaNews Group today, they don’t make mistakes about street names and such that are a couple of counties away, because Google has been invented (along with the telephone), to doublecheck those things. Distant copy desks can learn the local particulars pretty quickly and would obviously build themselves a reference manual as well. The California MNG papers are already doing ad production in India, apparently with no surge in errors, and the outfit Singleton probably has in mind, Mindworks, has been at this for a while very very successfully for a number of other major publications.

A better idea than all of this, however, is wiki-based journalism, which I seem to be posting about frequently (click "wikipedia" tag below this post). As part of this, stories could go online before getting excruciatingly edited, and would then go through several cycles of re-editing and annotation, Wikipedia-style, as envisioned by Japan's Information Architects. Copy editing in this model is universalized, as it is at Wikipedia.

Of course, copy editors won’t like that either, because it means that to some extent, Jane Public becomes your copy editor. But what's wrong with that? If Jane Public is already spotting mistakes (or “missed local nuances”) all over the paper today, while there are still copy editors warming American seats, why not let her just fix those mistakes, so reporters and editors can focus on chasing down the rest of the story? In fact, if enough Jacks and Janes out there can be engaged in the process of not only copy editing but researching, reporting and improving stories and news wiki topics, news content could be enormously enriched.

Valley Advocate does wiki, sort of

I picked up a copy of the Valley Advocate (that's the Pioneer, or Connecticut River, Valley in Massachusetts) the other day (something I do maybe three times a year), and noticed the front page headline: "Who's a WIKI: Help the Valley Advocate begin gathering data for the first Valley political wiki." Holy cow, I thought, they're starting a local wiki! They even express the hope that this will eventually be "a large and growing database of information about local people and issues in the news." Issues! Large and growing! A localpedia that's more than a directory of pizza joints and brew pubs!

No such luck, however. There's a two-page spread inside, with short bios of a bunch of politicians, and an introduction to the effect that they'd like readers to "fill in the gaps." So I go online and click on a pol I happen to know, Rep. John Olver. Can I edit what they've got? No. Can I add any information of my own? No. Can I do the wiki part of wikipedia? No. Well, actually, I can add a comment.

Sorry, Valley Advocate, that's not a local wiki. You want a local wiki? Use the open source software you can get from MediaWiki, or something similar, have every reporter, stringer and editor start contributing content, and open the gates to the public to add and edit. But, you were right about "local people and issues in the news"—the right way to build a localpedia is to base it around people and current issues, not restaurants and historic landmarks. (See multiple previous posts on this.)

I'll just have to keep looking for someone to kick this off right. Or do it myself.
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Extra: Must-read of the day is "The Elite Newspaper of the Future" by Philip Meyer in AJR. He makes some excellent points about why the end-game is here and now for newspapers, and suggests they might survive in some way by focusing on the "leadership audience," a narrow subset of the broad audience they've always aimed for. Here's Meyer:

If they should peel back to some core function, newspapers would still have to worry about the Internet and its unbeatable capacity for narrowcasting. The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web....But it won't be a worthwhile possibility unless the news-paper endgame concentrates on retaining newspapers' core of trust and responsibility. The mass audience is drifting away, and resources should be focused on the leadership audience. If existing newspapers don't do it, new competitors will enter their markets and do it for them.

Indeed, they will.

Newspaper as Wiki, by Information Architects

Oliver Reichenstein heads up an outfit in Japan, with an outpost in Switzerland, called Information Architects (iA). Matt Gerber is iA's information designer. They've done a lot of innovative branding work, and a lot of innovative thinking about the future of news, and especially about "newspapers as wikis. " Their entire "about us" reads:

Brands are interfaces. Successful brands perform and evolve in a controlled, interactive process with their audience. Performance empowers the brand.

iA plans, builds, and manages interactive brands by continuously measuring and optimizing the performance of their user interfaces.

iA’s offices in Tokyo and Zürich serve clients from Japan, Germany and Switzerland.

Follow their thinking about news and newspapers in this sequence:

From March 2007, "The Future of News: How to Survive the New Media Shift," an endorsement of the wikipedia approach to news publishing (which I've endorsed, urged and elaborated on previously):

The making of a news article must become a public process. This will greatly increase the quality and the trust in published text. The integration of social media into the writing process is a greatest opportunity for writers and readers since the invention of the press; the more intelligent the readership of a newspaper the more intelligent the product will become.

Wikipedia proves that it works. The only question is: Which newspaper will allow their readers to participate in the writing an editorial process first. Participating means: You let them influence the article from the beginning to the end—and beyond. Future newspapers will allow their readers to influence the article before and after it is published. The only way to do this is by turning the newspaper web sites into transparent public editorial tools.

Also in March 2007, iA posted "10 Newspaper Myths Deconstructed," including:

Myth 10: Newspapers need to become social networks
Fact 10: Newspapers need to become Wikis

Newspaper readers are not friends. Good readers are supposed to be critical about each other and not pat each other’s backs. There is a much more obvious technological model for newspapers.

I believe that newspapers need to make the development of a story transparent, they need to cross link and cross reference articles, they need to allow users to write articles and collectively correct each other’s mistakes and they need to become at least as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Got it? Yes, newspapers should use Wiki technology. There is a lot to improve on the front end, but the content generation and optimization model is an almost perfect fit.

Then in April 2007, hinting that they had a customer interested in the wiki notion, they posted "Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki, " to answer questions beginning with "What does a newspaper as a wiki look like?" (The customer was not the Post.) Have a look at the graphics illustrating their thoughts.

Shortly thereafter appeared "Newspaper Wiki: Schematics," a Q&A on how iA sees the "newspaper as wiki" working. It includes a graphic illustrating a "wiki-based editing process,"

Finally, in June 2008, iA unveiled Newsnetz, which "joins the forces of major Swiss newspapers and a series of local Swiss papers to become the country’s leading news domain in terms of reach, traffic, editorial size, and production." With Newsnetz, they've put into practice their development of the "newspaper as a wiki." Again, look at the post for extensive graphics showing the sites before and after, and how the design was done. The sites themselves are now live, they're Tages Anzeiger, Berner Zeitung, and BazOnline. (Keep in mind that at this point, I believe the wikification is behind the scenes in the content management system, and apparently has not yet reached the stage where readers can join the process. But perhaps a reader of German can explore those sites better than me and explain how the reader might interface with them, wiki-like.)

There's a lot more to digest at iA, including many comments from visitors and responses from iA to the comments. Well worth spending some time with.

Election 2008 at Twitter

A while back I wrote about Twitter and mentioned my feeling that its potential journalistic value was not so much in a flow of individual messages from a single reporter as in the way that a "constant flow of messages from a posse of reporters, bloggers and even rank-and-file attendees at an event [can create] a sense of the ambient flow and mood of the gathering." This could be sports events, conventions, conferences, even riots. This can happen with live public access, or off the record record to keep everyone in touch in a group such as a newsroom, a team of salespeople or the like.

It's not really journalism (OK, it's not journalism at all), but some sense of ambient awareness can be derived from looking at Twitter's selective feeds on current topics, such as Joe the Plumber, ACORN, or Colin Powell. But you can get a really intense sense of Twitter's potential s at their Election 2008 center, unveiled at the end of September, where the tweets just keep on flowing in what's essentially a national conversation about politics. (Make sure you keep that Pause button unpaused to keep them coming; it seems to be triggered by mere cursor movement.)

For political junkies, this is pretty cool, but again, imagine this kind of flow from a convention or sports event audience. Or during a World Series Game. Or on how the stock market's doing. It appears to be the only such streaming topic on Twitter right now, but I'm guessing we'll see a lot more of this. See also ohguido's thoughts on all this at Masters of Media. The lingo is a tad stilted (it's a Dutch group blog by master's students at the University of Amsterdam), but I think he's on the right wavelength with regard to Twitter.

Incidentally, the other day Dave Lee at daveleejblog posted "How should we be using Twitter." He mentions only individual Twitter streams such as that of Jemima Kiss, who is a very savvy British blogger, now at the Guardian (sorry, she's apparently on vacation, so check back in a while); and "organisation" feeds such as the BBC's, which seems to be just an automated feed of stories as they go live. No mention of group twittering to create ambient awareness. (And yes, that term I'm using is from Clive Thompson's New York Times Magazine piece.

Another vote for a Wiki

Chris O'Brien of NextNewsroom has "start a wiki" at the top of his list of suggestions for reinventing newsrooms. Except he says, "Along with news, information is an important service a newspaper provides to its community." No, news is information, and it belongs in that wiki too, as previously suggested here (and here again) and being developed by Matt Thompson. Overall, though, Chris has good suggestions, and at least he's thinking about wikification. The Duke Wiki he mentions is pretty good, but on its breaking news page, we find "There is no breaking news on campus at the moment." Like hell there isn't.