One view from inside the newspaper industry I've had quite a few e-mails from people about my theory that newspapers are entering a death spiral, but none as compelling as this one, which just arrived. The sender is anonymous, so I have no way of verifying who he says he is. Read it, though, and judge for yourself.

"Hi Paul......I'm a Delivery Foreman for the NYTimes, union, of course. I make 90k a year without overtime. My drivers make 60k+ a year. The Times signed a new contract with us (NMDU) this spring that's "guaranteed" through 2016. With diesel fuel approaching 3 bucks a gallon, newsprint costs, warehouse rent, insurance, pension, workers comp costs, etc. etc. etc. how long is this a viable model? Answer....not too effing long, that's for sure. I tell my drivers, "We're like the dinosaurs after the first meteor hit.........we stick our heads up above the weeds, and think, 'hey, it's getting cold out...'.......and they don't want to hear it. I'm really curious about what Sulzberger could have been thinking when he forced us to re-open our contracts and gave us the guarantee. Does he know something that the rest of us don't? Anyway, I retire soon. I'm more than ready for a buyout, but the younger guys ....well, good luck with that 'guarantee'. If one lawyer can write a contract, another one can break it................ "

By the way, you can now download my article, "How the coming newspaper industry collapse will reinvigorate journalism" as a PDF.

Labels: mainstream_media

  ¶ 3:04 PM 0 Comments

  New Influencers site is live The New Influencers promotional/informational website is up and running. Well, maybe not so much running as toddling, since there's a lot of work still to be done. I'll eventually have links to ever blogger/podcaster who was interviewed or mentioned in the book, along with what I'm calling "online footnotes." Those are commented links to important and interesting information from the book.

It's a work-in-progress, so I'd be pleased to hear your comments and suggestions.  ¶ 3:00 PM 0 Comments

  Time's Person of the Year choice is on the money The best line I've read about Time magazine's choice of all of us as the Person of the Year comes from Pop Sugar:

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

Fortunately, a very large number of people do, and that's why Time's recognition is apropos. New media has given millions of people a voice to share that energy and passion with others. Maybe not a lot of others, but even if only a few people listen to what they say, that's enough.

Critics are trashing Time's choice as a wimp cop-out, a pander to advertisers. I think it's a master stroke. What other story was this big this year? The quagmire in Iraq? The Democrats' victory in the election? The earthquake in Hawaii? Fifty years from now, no one will remember these things, but 50 years from now the world will be a very different place because of what happened on YouTube, MySpace and thousands of other online meeting places that barely existed a year ago.

It was 25 years ago that Time named the personal computer Machine of the Year. That was a pretty prophetic choice. This is no less visionary.

In a recent Tech Nation interview, author Steven Levy told host Moira Gunn that he was fortunate to be covering the Internet because it's the biggest story of our generation. I think he made a good point. The global revolution in information discovery and dissemination will change our future fundamentally. It will touch every institution in our society. And now each of us can play a part in it. What bigger story is there than that?  ¶ 7:55 AM 0 Comments

  Zounds! I've been podcasted! I did a podcast interview with Dave Fish, CEO of online marketing firm iMakeNews, about small markets and social media influence. You can find the transcript here. Or download the podcast and listen at your leisure!  ¶ 5:46 PM 0 Comments

  Marketers react to newspaper death-spiral proposal BtoB magazine published my monthly column under the provocative title “Newspaper death spiral has begun” this week and linked to a 3,500-word manifesto that I assembled to further argue my point. If you read this blog regularly, you’ve already read the salient points, but the essay on the BtoB site packages everything up neatly.

I’ve received a handful of e-mails from BtoB readers about the column and not a single one has disagreed with my position. Perhaps my argument isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. One writer asked whether I thought magazines were going to suffer the same fate as newspapers. My position on that is that magazines are a different issue entirely and it really depends on the type of magazine. High-end, lifestyle mags will be just fine (Cigar Aficionado, Golf, Travel & Leisure). News magazines have been in trouble for a long time and I think their situation will worsen. Trade magazines will be a mixed bag. I expect very few computer magazines to survive, for example, but CFO magazine or vertical journals in non-tech areas may see little change.

The economic model of magazines is very different from that of newspapers. Newspapers have huge fixed costs for production and delivery and that's why they're so vulnerable. Once they cover their fixed costs, the margins are great, but if they ever become unprofitable, the whole model starts to fall apart. They don't scale down very well. That's why I believe the collapse of newspapers will be so rapid. Remember that in many markets, newspapers operate as essentially legal monopolies. If they can’t make money operating from that position of strength, their situation is very dire indeed.

Another writer asked about the prospects for community newspapers. In fact, I believe those publications have a bright future. My expanded essay refers to resurgence in community publishing enabled by cheaper production costs. Small-town and community newspapers are well positioned to take advantage of the trend toward more localized publishing. They are the least likely to be marginalized by online competition.

In short, I think the rapid collapse scenario will be limited to metropolitan dailies. National papers will probably be okay and community papers could actually get stronger. But I’d hate to be the Detroit Free Press right now.

Labels: journalism, mainstream_media

  ¶ 5:38 PM 5 Comments

  Craigslist: Business success without a profit motive
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster spoke to Wall Street analysts this week, stunning them with his lack of interest in maximizing profits or revenue. Two years ago, a study estimated that Craigslist is costing Bay Area newspapers $50 million annually in lost revenue. Today, the site is far more influential. And it doesn't care about profits. How do you compete with that?  ¶ 9:04 PM 2 Comments

  Late-night news feeling the squeeze Washingtonpost.com reports on the precipitous decline in viewership of late-night newscasts in its region: more than 10% on average compared to last year. Such dropoffs are unheard of in the relatively stable media world. The culprit is apparently declines in the quality of prime-time network programming, which typically swings viewers into the late news. As networks have cut budgets in response to falling viewership, a domino effect has taken hold and now the local affiliates are hurting.

Is this the beginning of the end of television news? The average age of an evening news viewer is now 60. Late-night has been the one salvation of the broadcast business, but even that may fall by the wayside. News has always been a low-margin business for TV stations. In the future, will they even bother to offer news any more?

Labels: mainstream_media

  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 Comments

  False Hopes Media Post reports today that "newspapers' decline will slow and maybe even stop in 2007," based upon advertising buying intentions. These kinds of reports may give false hope to the newspaper industry, which has no future. The fact that advertisers say they won't cut back on newspaper advertising has no bearing on their actual behavior. Try to convince a car dealer that the $10,000 he spends on advertising every week is money well-invested when he's got countless alternatives that are free. Intentions have nothing to do with reality in a market like this and the reality is that advertisers are deserting newspapers in droves and will continue to do so. Make a note to check back on these predictions in a year to see how woefully wrong they were.

Labels: mainstream_media

  ¶ 10:04 PM 0 Comments

  The new journalism The near-total collapse of the American newspaper industry as we know it is inevitable. Anything newspapers could have done to stop it should have been done years ago (Slate recently wrote that newspapers saw this coming 30 years ago). All the social, demographic and economic trends are lined up against the industry. Over the next decade, there will be agonizing rounds of layoffs, consolidation and bankruptcies. It will be painful to watch, but it will be a necessary process for the industry to reinvent itself.

What emerges from the rubble of the newspaper industry will be a fresh, vibrant and very different kind of journalism. It will make a lot of traditionalists uncomfortable. It will force us to re-examine our assumptions about everything from readership to libel law. But it will ultimately be an evolution of the profession into something that is richer, more inclusive and much more dynamic than anything we have ever known.

Print newspapers are modeled on assumptions that were defined by physical constraints but which are outmoded and irrelevant online. Basically, information is scarce and publishing is archival. In most metropolitan areas, the newspaper has been the principal or only source of news for many years. This required editors and publishers to take a very serious view of everything they set into type. Layout, headline selection, story lengths, story placement and design were critical considerations in a space-constrained world. The importance of a story was reflected by its location in the paper or on a page, the weight of the headline and the number of column inches dedicated to it.

Once a story was in print, it was permanent. This necessitated an almost obsessive attention to detail and fact-checking. All facts had to be assembled before the story was written. Often, multiple editors were assigned to review and challenge information in the article. If information wasn’t verified, it wasn’t published.

Structure was critical. Because stories were cut from the bottom, newspapers invented the “inverted pyramid” style of writing, in which more important information was placed higher in the story. Good information was omitted because there wasn’t enough space.

Of course, all that is irrelevant online, and the new journalism will be based on an entirely different set of assumptions. Any report may be quickly and easily updated and corrected. Search engine results and referral links are the principal drivers of readership. Layout is almost irrelevant to a web site. Blogs have no hierarchy at all. Stories can be as long for a short as they need to be, or can even be composed of many links to other content. Stories may appear in many places at once and even in many forms, depending on how they are tagged. Readers are able to comment upon and contribute to articles. Graphics, audio and video illustrations are easily linked to text. If something is wrong, you can always go back and correct it.

In short, the online world challenges nearly every assumption of conventional newspapering. It will dictate a very different approach to journalism.

For one thing, the craft of journalism will evolve to include far more aggregation and organization that has in the past. Editors will assemble their reports from a vast library of resources located across the Internet. Some information will come from paid staff writers, others from freelancers and still more from reports and opinions published by independent third parties and even competitors. Editors will still have a critical role, but their value will increasingly be in assembling and organizing information for readers who don’t have the time to sort through the vast Web.

The craft of reporting will become faster and more iterative. Rumor, speculation and incomplete information will be published far more readily, on the assumption that errors can be corrected. Stories will, in essence, be built in real time and in full public view. Reporters will file copy directly to the Web, often without a review by an editor. Readers will be a central part of the process, correcting and comment upon articles as they are taking shape. Reporting will become, in effect, a community process.

This new model will be very disruptive and very controversial. The idea that a news organization would publish information it did not know to be true flies in the face of all of our expectations. The concept of actively involving readers - who have no formal relationship with the news organization - in the reporting process will be too much for some editors to accept. There will be hand-wringing over fears of libel suits and other litigation. It is going to be an unholy brawl.

But this is where journalism will go, and it is happening now, every day, on blogs and community media sites across the world. There authors knowingly publish information that is unverified and unreliable. They do so with the expectation that their readers will set them straight and that the truth will be arrived at through a process of publishing and correction. More than half a million blog posts are logged every day, yere there has not been a single successful libel suit resulting from any of them. Libel law, after all, is based on the expectation of archival permanence. Nothing is permanent Online.

New models are already being tested at community-journalism sites like Backfence, iBrattleboro.com, Northwest Voice and Korea’s OhMyNews.com. The Washington Post recently reported on a Gannett experiment to reinvent news journalism in Fort Myers, Fla. More will follow. Many more.

Journalism will become much more local. As the cost of publishing falls to near zero and citizens become more comfortable with the tools of publishing, thousands of mini “newspapers” will form around different geographies and topics. Aggregation sites will emerge to sift through and organize the reports and conversations going on in these small communities. Many of these sites will involve human editors who understand the needs of their audience and monitor online activity on their behalf.

This will be nothing less than a complete rebirth of journalism around the concept that information is plentiful and cheap. Instead of 1,500 print newspapers, there will be perhaps five to ten national “super-papers” and many thousands of regional and special interest community news sites. The process of getting there will be wrenching and controversial, but the new model will create a more dynamic and diverse information landscape than we have ever known. It will be incredibly exciting. I hope to be around for the ride.

Labels: journalism, mainstream_media, social_media

  ¶ 8:19 AM 2 Comments

  The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School has released its sixth annual "Surveying the Digital Future" report and the findings validate the momentum of social media communities. Among the highlights:

• More than a fifth of online community members take some kind of offline action related to the community.
• Two-thirds of people who are active in social causes online say they were unfamiliar with those causes before learning about them online.
• People reported meeting an average of 1.6 people in person whom they originally met online.
• "Almost all users report that the Internet has no effect on the time spent with close friends or family face-to-face."

That last point is important because online communities are frequently criticized for making people less socially interactive. In fact, 43% respondents to the survey said the Internet has increased the number of people they stay in contact with.

I expect this last number to grow as social media proliferates. The first decade of the Web was mostly a read-only affair. With one in eight Americans now maintaining a website, you can expect interaction to drive the next phase of growth. The belief that the Internet makes people more isolated is a myth.

Labels: research social_media

  ¶ 8:51 AM 3 Comments