Tech

We'll get to Voice of San Diego when I'm home for more than a couple of days. For now, just a brief mention of a publication I look at whenever things seem hopeless. Newspapers & Technology is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and reading it reminds one that for all the theological and ideological comments on journalism, Hal Holbrook's rule still goes: Follow the money. In this case, follow the money spent on presses, prepress systems, mailroom equipment and the like.

This world has slowed down in the last couple of years, but has not come to a stop. Newspapers are still buying print production equipment (OK, if anyone would like to cue Mark Potts to say, "The fools!", go ahead). Newspaper press suppliers see their future in digital presses that can re-create the Neighbors section at far less cost. They see newspaper management as -- dare we say it -- stuck in the past by not trying to figure out what individual customers want. They are fitting out papers for 42-inch webs but are adding towers for color and investigating how to change 21-inch presses to 17- or 14-inch cutoffs, which would still allow sectionalization. They are saying the day of the straight-run press that could print 96-page newspapers all at once is over and that what is needed is more products, fewer pages, smaller circulations and higher quality.

Advertisers have said for years that they want smaller, more targeted circulations. Print equipment vendors are saying that the future is smaller, more targeted circulations. In other words, putting out papers with smaller, more targeted circulations with better quality content, and thus more attractive to advertisers, would be a strategy for success -- except in the minds of journalists, who would continue to trash the newspaper business over the falling circulations that everyone except journalists seems to want.

As the Sagebrush Rolls

Tony Davis' essay in American Journalism Review on the death of the Albuquerque Tribune encapsulates why the problems facing American newspapers aren't just problems about journalism.

Many people knew of the Tribune as a little paper that could; my ACES colleague Jim Montalbano worked there happily. The p.m. paper had been saved in a JOA and for years Scripps was happy enough to let it continue with a fully funded newsroom and reap the profits from the larger partner, the Albuquerque Journal, even as Tribune circulation fell toward its end point of 10,000 in a metro area of more than a million.

As Davis notes, the Tribune in its heyday was run like this:

"It was a simple management philosophy that carried power far beyond its words: Hire the best people you can and let them do their jobs.

"The brainchild of our editor Tim Gallagher, this mantra sounds like a cliché, but it made the Tribune a laboratory for innovation. One former Trib reporter, John Hill, said he was impressed 'by how much they let the inmates run the asylum.' Another, Pulitzer-winner Eileen Welsome, likened the atmosphere to anarchy.

"Sounds a bit much, but think about it. You're a crusader, wishing to bust heads and take prisoners, or you're intrigued by a quirky tale that nobody has told. What's the first thing you need? Not a fat salary or big staff, but an editor who will tell you to take a couple of weeks or months and don't come back without the story. Even in the best of times in the newspaper business, such editors were rare. But we had them.

"Today, attitudes like Gallagher's are seen as an anachronism in what's left of our business. Editors can't afford not to micromanage. They operate from fear: of continued circulation declines and ad losses to the Web, of offending readers or giving them more than they can handle."

Aux barricades! Over the next hill! Mount your steed, put your notebook in a case marked "This Machine Kills Fascists," and it's off to save America. We all grew up believing this. And as a result, the paper "won prestigious honors: the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, two George Polk Awards, the IRE Award, the National Headliners Award (three times), the Roy W. Howard Award for public service reporting (four times), the Edward J. Meeman Award for conservation writing and the Sigma Delta Chi public service award."

But there was a darker side as well:

"The cost of this experimentation was that we missed, briefed or buried the meat and potatoes: meetings, budget hearings and government pronouncements. Gallagher dismissed such material as 'agenda journalism.' We got away with it because we were in a joint operating agreement–the country's first–with the more traditional Albuquerque Journal, which had a staff of well over 100 and a circulation more than three times ours. We sneered at them, citing anecdotes like the day [reporter Dennis] Domrzalski was finishing a lengthy probe of the county assessor and walked into a meeting room where his competitor was sitting through a budget hearing. "I felt like I was in heaven," Domrzalski says.

"The Trib cost itself with other lapses, like the time a consultant persuaded the paper ... to junk the sports section. That move lost us 6,000 subscribers, many of whom never returned ..."

Nothing worked. But could anything have worked? The Tribune was a p.m. paper in an a.m. world.

The Tribune offered Albuquerque some stories of superior journalism, there's no doubt. It apparently didn't offer dependable day to day coverage. It didn't offer delivery when people wanted it. For a while it didn't even offer them sports. (One suspects it didn't offer them pet pictures.) Albuquerque increasingly said thanks but no thanks. The Journal may not have reached the journalistic peaks, but it was dependable, covered the bases, and was there in the morning.

We are always told that journalism is full of stories where superior journalistic quality trumped inferior rivals. These stories tend to be: the New York Times vs. the New York Herald Tribune in World War II; the Boston Globe vs. the Boston Post in the 1950s; Newsday in the 1950s and 1960s; in the 1970s, the Philadelphia Inquirer vs. the Bulletin and the Washington Post vs. the Washington Star.

We tend not to remember as well the failure of the Chicago Daily News, or the Chattanooga Times losing to the Chattanooga News-Free Press, or the Arkansas Gazette losing to the Arkansas Democrat, and a number of other occasions on which the product regarded as the greater journalistically did not prevail. Now we have Albuquerque as well. There are always reasons -- JOA imbalances or strikes or whatever -- but "special circumstances" apply in many cases where the winner was the higher-quality paper as well, such as the 1960s strike that ruined the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I'm reminded that Roy McDonald said the key to his success in Chattanooga was to run everyone's name in the paper once a year. Journalists hooted. His paper won.

Editors like Tim Gallagher were rare then, and are rare now, because in the end it didn't matter to the owners if the Albuquerque Tribune made money or grew readership. Doing so would have been nice, but as long as the Journal was rolling in the bucks, everyone's wallet was filled. Having the Tribune around let the JOA charge a premium for morning-evening advertising over just what would have been charged for the Journal, until things got to the point that literally almost no one read the Tribune. That being the case, let the boys and girls at the Tribune have their fun. Had quality journalism been the sole answer, readers would have flocked to the Tribune. Instead, the Journal got its community to reward it through circulation dominance, and Tribune reporters sneered at its reporters for being drones. There really is a lesson here, no matter how much journalists don't want to hear it. A business model needs to support good journalism, but good journalism is not a business model.

The Art of Link Letters

In which, like nearly everyone else, I point to others and say "Good idea!" or "Bad idea!" or "Good idea but I can do you one better!"

WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?: This chart from the Newspaper Association of America on Web readership is hard for me to interpret -- press putthroughs and copies per household I can do -- but what it appears to show to me is:
1. Two levels of readership, the 58-mil audience and the 62-mil audience. More is more and more is good, but why are there these two discrete levels? Why does the number of page views not fluctuate in a line basically reflecting the audience? There may be easy answers and this is an aggregate, but I know magazines can say exactly what cover sold what issue. Is this political, sports, what? In any event, an uptick in the last three months of 2007 (which might reflect politics and might reflect football) allows crowing about a figure that the year does not show.
2. Second, what I really want to know is, in essence, which are single copy, which are home delivery -- of this unique visits per month, how many are people who come every day and spend time with the paper, as opposed to those coming from other sites once in the month for a particular link? Sure, you can sell an ad with anything, but the latter is not going to produce too much revenue.

The main reason I want to know is that we had a presentation last week on search engine optimization and it indicated the same problem that every piece of Web statistics has: The numbers are squishy, they're not really very good, and no one really knows what they mean other than in the most vague sort of manner. Their main uses seem to be 1) "it's in the millions!" and 2) "it's more than it used to be!" This is not to say that newspaper circulation numbers have ever been exact or particularly truthful.

For example, the canard -- "visits averaging 44 minutes a month," often used to say "this means your typical user visits for 1.5 minutes per day." Well, yeah, except we all know it doesn't really mean that. But what does it mean? Some people are spending two hours a day and most people are spending 30 seconds? What is the mean, not the average? Since the Internet is largely a five-day medium, should we figure it based on Monday-Friday use only? What are the figures for daily users? Most important for the advertisers whom newspapers deal with, how many of these users are local? (What is often repeated is that about half are not, but how is that determined? Seems to me an IP address can be anywhere.)

It's not that any of this is wrong. It's just the uncritical adulation thrown at it, which brings to mind Sam Jaffe saying to Michael Rennie in "The Day the Earth Stood Still": "Such power exists?"

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?: A couple of posters here (thanks!) and a number of posters elsewhere keep making the point: The subscription fee just pays for the cost of home delivery and the news is otherwise free (ad-subsidized), so, if the method of delivery changes, why should I pay for the news? To which many journalists have unwisely answered, well, surely people would pay for the wonderfulness we produce.

The Watertown Daily Times operates in an isolated market -- almost an hour north of Syracuse and hours away from anywhere else. Watertown, like most of outstate New York, has had hard times, but the Times as still managed to keep (in 2007 Year Book) a daily circulation near 29,000, down from 37,000 10 years ago -- not as hard a decline as a lot of papers, but still in the 2o-to-25-percentish range.

The Daily Times, being a family owned newspaper and thus having neither stock analysts nor corporate overseers, decided to put the Web content behind a wall. Last week it threw up its hands and dropped the wall. Victory for the Web!

In a way. The Times subscription Web site had 1,000 paid subscribers. Which means 29,000 households took the print paper and 1,000 took the Web site, meaning -- 7,000 of the circulation loss was people who simply had no use for paying for the Watertown Daily Times in any form.

Now, this doesn't show people stopped reading local news. It shows people stopped paying for local news. There are TV stations in Watertown, and then there is NewZjunky. NewZjunky has very little information about itself, but it appears to be a sort of anti-Times... a Drudge for Watertown, with links to public records, TV sites, and obits from every funeral home, along with school closings, etc. In other words, the sort of local-local stuff that is supposed to save the newspaper.

NewZjunky covers traffic crashes. I suspect NewZjunky covers city council meetings. Other than that NewZjunky links to everything EXCEPT the Times: The Syracuse papers, the TV stations, the Fort Drum PAO. Outside the area, NewZjunky links to everything by every other Web site it can find.

What NewZjunky has lots of is local ads. Lots of them. How it does this is beyond me at the moment, since its "Advertizing" link takes one to how to post photos.

My suspicion -- although I welcome more information from NewZjunky him or herself -- is that NewZjunky generates enough money to employ NewZjunky and an ad salesperson.

I wonder how many people the Watertown Daily Times employs to cover the news.

What does this all mean? I don't really know. Here are some thoughts:

1. Almost no one is willing to pay for news on the Web if they can get it free. Almost no one is willing to pay for parking if they can get it free. If you ask them, they will say they want it free. They don't care what your problems are.
2. If you don't post news on the Web, someone else will. If you do, someone else will anyhow. TV stations, local entrepreneurs, L.A. Observed. All you're doing is doing it with a higher cost structure. Unless you get your cost structure down to their level, you can't compete on the Web in the long run. If you get it down to their cost structure...
3. The definition of what free news can be economically supported by itself on the Web is pretty thin. Car crashes, obits, and quick hits. TV should have taught us this, and it's got a legal oligopoly.
4, NewZjunky's audience seems to be mostly satisfied with the "just the facts, ma'm" -- at least for now. There is an audience that wants more.
5. As NewZjunky admits, it was started for people who had moved from Watertown and wanted to keep up with local news back home -- free.
6. Even with NewZjunky, even with local television, even with everything else, 29,000 people/families in Watertown are still paying to have the Watertown Daily Times delivered to their home.

Why? What do they want? How can the newspaper business provide them with a product that meets their needs and supports an actual reporting staff that doesn't simply say, well, here's a news release from Fort Drum, let's run it verbatim? Cause if all they want is "free obits online..." Just online, just free, is not a viable long-term business model for newspapers because without a barrier to competition, you can't afford to do what they do.

More to come...