Wow…absolutely hysterical…
Via Suzeanne Yada on Twitter…her description is better than any I could come up with:
A 1940s short film on journalism. Watch as men in fedoras call editors with visors and completely shaft women!
The New York Times Sells Its First Front Page Display Ad (NYT).
As the British marched out of Yorktown after the surrender of the troops under Lord Cornwallis, the British band played “World Turned Upside Down.” This seems like one of those moments to me…display ads on the front page of The New York Times. Just a few scant years ago the mere suggestion would have had you escorted from their newsroom by security, never to return.
Oh how the mighty have fallen…
Following Ari Herzog’s example, here are my top 10 posts of 2008.
It’s a hard choice to make, but the votes are all in and I’ve got the envelope from our friends at Price Waterhouse containing the winners:
Its mildly surprising to me that my best posts from 2007 tended to center on small business marketing, online marketing and content management. Of course, I was working with small businesses then, so that I guess makes sense.
Did I miss any important post? Quite probably, but this is a fairly solid list. Tell me, which is the best of 2008?
Newspaper insiders for the most part weren’t all that surprised to see the Tribune Company file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday. The Trib has been in trouble for some time, and it hasn’t been helped by high profile fights of the past two years by owner Sam Zell, who purchased the company in April of 2007, which saw him take the company private. Since then his fights with the leadership of the Los Angeles Times have achieved near legendary status.
The problem is that bankruptcy isn’t a complete answer for the Tribune Company. Perhaps they’d do best to do as Sam Zell suggested just a short time ago when the mortgage crisis was at the top of the news:
“…this country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have been in houses in the first place.”
Perhaps indeed the newspaper industry also needs a cleansing, and all those who should never have owned newspapers should be cleaned out. For example, Sam Zell. Continue reading
Layoffs at Random House, Simon & Schuster
Random House, etc. layoff…Yahoo is attributing it to the economy, but I wonder how much is do to people not reading in paper as much.
The economy has crashed down on an industry once believed immune from the worst — book publishing — with consolidation at Random House Inc., and layoffs at Simon & Schusterand Thomas Nelson Publishers.
At Random House, the country’s largest general trade publisher, the man who helped give the world “The Da Vinci Code” is in talks for a new position, while the publisher of Danielle Steel and other brand-name authors is leaving altogether.
“Yes, Virginia, book publishing is NOT recession proof,” said Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers. “It’s sad day.”
David Churbuck has found that which we are losing in this digital age. It reminds me of the discussion I had with my 9 year old yesterday when she asked me if I’d read every book in my library.
I like the Kindle. Indeed I love it. But I can’t indulge my penchant for giving away books thanks to this selfish device. I can tell people to read “Moneyball” but I can’t back that up by emphasizing my desire to share that experience by giving them my copy. The Kindle, ultimately, is a selfish device that cannot be loaned. Last week, while driving my son home from college, I sang the praises of “Shadow Country,” this year’s National Book Award in fiction. But I can’t lend it to him and indeed, tragically, I don’t have a physical copy to park on my favorite shelf next to the previous three books in the Watson series.
Indeed I suspect in some ways we may end up as a “Lost Generation” having committed so much to digital formats that most likely will be arcane and unreadable 50 or a 100 years in the future. And in the here and now, the ‘community of the book’ is dying.
For now, I continue to buy my books in print. The problem is in this new economy, I have precious little time to read.
Read David’s full post…really
No time to write today, but I picked this none-to-delectible tidbit up from Alan D. Mutter at Newsosaur while surfing during lunch and had to share:
In one of the most startling of the potential initiatives, an amazing number of publishers of all sizes are giving serious consideration to eliminating print editions on certain days of the week, according to private conversations with operators who requested anonymity.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions, which typically carry the least amount of advertising, appear to be at the most risk.
With demand for newspaper advertising this year plummeting in every category (including online since March), industry ad revenues in 2008 are likely to be no better than $38 billion, or nearly 25% less than they were when sales hit an all-time peak of $49.4 billion in 2005.
An interesting notion, and one I hadn’t trully considered until just now. I suspect in the end, publishing only a few days a week will be unworkable for most publications due to union contracts, etc. Additionally, many of the hard costs endemic to print publishing and delivery will remain, ie, the presses, the trucks, etc.
The big point to keep in mind is that no one would have ever mentioned such a notion out loud in the hallowed walls of a newspaper even a year ago. How far we have fallen…
PC Magazine announced last week that their January issue would be the last issue they actually print, from then on, they’re a web-only publication.
From The New York Times:
It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.
“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.
While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.
There are only two surprises here, first that it took them so long to realize that online was the only viable medium for them, and that they continued to call themselves “news” got so little play to begin with.
I’ll leave the inevitable “if it’s online only, can you still have ‘magazine’ in the title” snark alone for the day. The real news here is that some news is best delivered over the web, and Tech News is one of those things. The long print cycle lead times ensured that by the time the magazine would turn up on your doorstep, the news content would be old and moldy, having been macerated to death by various blogs, news sites and forums. The key factors for moving Tech News online:
In the end, doing tech in print now means deep analysis and rigourous testing (both of which PC Magazine has always excelled at). Yet, those can be offered online, and with a richer presentation. Back when I started editing Reel-Time.com I remember new writers would always ask “How many words do I have?” when we talked about their weekly columns. I always had to laugh, the notion of specific column length being so “print-centric.” On the web, we are free to throw as many pixels as we need at an issue.
I believe we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. Those that can make the jump will start to make that jump quickly. Notably, I expect to see trade journals become a relatively rare beast. Ivory towered experts lecturing professionals about their profession is a thing of the past. Instead, users will gravitate to profession-based niche social media. The journals will slowly cease to exist, and the magazines that remain will be serving the less technical of the professions.
For all the talk, er, converstation, going on about Social Media, we really haven’t got there yet. I think the next year will the telling time, when we see more application of the prime tenets towards the professional space. Where as we may have proposed a network for surfers last year, which we might monetize someday, this year, we’ll be proposing a network of plumbers, which we’ll be monetizing starting day one.
Once again, we’ve had a “Genie is out of the bottle” moment, and things have again changed for print. There’s a digital diaspora going on, and we’ve seen a steady wave of carpetbagging print journalists, so it only makes sense that the institutions themselves attempt to make the move. It’s the publishing equivailent of breaking down the presses and moving them where the money is.
So, if you’re in print, think about this: how can you better leverage social media online now to allow you to make a transition later?
And one bit of information to remember: in the 1970s print still used Linotype machines for typesetting. There were tons of highly skilled linotype operators out there setting type for everyone. When the first Atex systems came along, they started to put those guys (my grandfather was a life-time linotype operator by the way) out of a job. About a decade later, the job no longer existed anywhere.
Are you a potential digital carpetbagger, or will you go the way of the linotype operator?
Perhaps the problem is that the UI stays with you like a bad burrito...
Yesterday morning I sat at the counter at Puffins Restraurant in Millbury having a wonderful plate of Eggs Latin, and as I struggled to read The Worcester Telegram while eating, I realized the problem with newspapers in print: the User Interface is pathetic.
Here are just a few of the UI problems:
I’m pretty much done with newspapers and newspaper technology, at least for a while. I grow tired of chronicling the demise of an industry and instead choose to look forward. ‘Tis a sad day when a boy whose dreams were of newsrooms, deadlines and worldly old copy editors walks away in disgust.
As my grandfather watched the death of his trade (he was a linotype operatator), I watch the entire industry crumble. But fear not, in time it will be reinvented…
Editor and Publisher is reporting that the Orange County Register is laying off 110 by Friday. We should remember that their parent company a few months ago launched a pilot program to outsource some editing to India, in addition to also sending some pages for pagination overseas as well. A flat world indeed!
OCR Publisher Terry Horne:
“This isn’t necessarily just to improve profitability, we have to become a different kind of company,” Horne said. “We will be more focused on Interactive and make more of an effort in the print business.”
Apparently online revenue (excluding employment) is up 69.3% over last year, which would seem to be good news. The problem is they’ve lost 15% circulation in year on year stats from Sept. 30th. On top of that, this is the 4th round of layoffs this year alone, which from personal experience I can tell you creates a bunker mentality, and absolutely kills any esprit de corps the organization had left.
It really seems like their flailing around here. After all, whenever we hear “Doing more with less”, which is just what they are saying when they cut people to “make more of an effort in print”, we’ve got to snicker. Easy words to say, much harder to do, especially if you’re the guy who’s just been asked to do more with less people.