All Things Cahill

Category: media

  • PEJ Report – The Changing Newspaper Newsroom

    The Project for Excellence in Journalism (funded by the PEW Charitable Trust) has an excellent report out on the Changing Newspaper Newsroom – with some very interesting statistics that seem to imply the newspapers still haven’t got the message about their value proposition.

    It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

    Graphic from PEJ Report

    Well, that sounds good, but in looking at the graphics we see that the biggest area of cuts is what many point to as one of the two biggest differentiators with online journalism, the Copy Editor (the other is local coverage, which we’ll get to in a minute.

    The thing in my mind is that you can’t hold the lack of editing up as the big problem with blogs, citizen journalism, or whatever you want to call it, then club your own copy editors like so many seals.  They’re either important or they’re not.

    As an experienced writer and blogger I can tell you that I am much better when I’ve got a competent copy editor to work with.  Not only do they catch the typos, they’re the folks that ask “What are you, writing in esperanto?  Say what you mean.” or “This section needs to be rewritten, it doesn’t say what you think it does.”  It’s the reason I so often post here and am corrected in the comments section by my astute readers.  The truth is, on a blog, you’re my copy editors.

    As far as local reporting, the papers report devoting much more space to it, but in actuality, they are using less bodies to do it.  While 62 papers reported devoting more space to local, only 8 said they used less space.  However, half of the papers reported they had less “resources” assigned to local reporting.  Again, it flies in the face of the protestations.

    The real answer is that they’re devoting *proportionally* more space to local news, and have contracted both the overall number of “resources” they have available (magic decoder ring: resources were formerly known as “people” or “journalists” prior to the ascent of the accountants) as well as decreased the number of pages they’re publishing overall.  There’s no mystery here, and the big news will be how this all works for them.  Personally, I think the newspapers missed their opportunity in 2000, and they probably won’t be getting another one.

    Robb Montgomery posted on the same issue:

    If reporters are laid off and the paper doesn’t report their actions – did it really happen?
    It is, perhaps, an unforgivable journalism sin that this story is not being told fully by some closely-watched U.S. newspapers. Reports from The New York Times and Editor And Publisher indicate that editors-in-chief of Tribune newspapers in Florida are neither announcing nor publishing the newsroom layoffs they are making at this very moment.

    From the E&P item: “Of concern to several staffers, however, has been the Sun-Sentinel’s lack of reporting on the cutbacks, with no stories appearing in the newspaper or on its Web site about the cuts. In most cases, newspapers have reported on their own cutbacks prior to the final reductions.”

    Right on Robb – newspaper, cover thyself…to paraphrase the old saw about physicians.  The wholesale carnage in the industry, while getting mention in blogs such as this, is generally going under or even un-reported.  As I noted before, we’re talking about people, even if we cloak the humanity in terms like “resources”.  And these actions while they may impact newspaper readers a little, are both “life and career altering events” for the people experiencing them.  I know, I’ve been there, and over a year later, even though I’m well employed, I am still dealing with the vast ramifications, both personally and financially of that layoff.

  • Tribune Company – Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis

    Big moves today over at Tribune Publishing – the owners of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. The moves apparently started last month when Publisher Scott C. Smith retired, and was replaced on an interim basis by Bob Gremillion, publishing group executive vice president.

    Ann Marie Lipinski, the newspaper’s senior vice president and editor is leaving and will be replaced by Gerould W. Kern who’s been their VP Editorial for the last 5 years.

    Later in the day, it was announce that LA Times Publisher David Hiller has resigned after 21 months. He’d had a tumultuous reign, and even though he cited differences with Sam Zell the owner, we’d do well to remember he had been brought in as a guy who could get along with Tribune corporate.

    This all comes after the Tribune announced steep cuts last week, including 80 newsroom slots. The Times had announced it was cutting 250 positions and 150 in the newsroom.

    Sources:

    Tribune Newsroom Layoffs

    Times Layoffs

    Smith Retirement

    Hiller Resignation

    Lipinski Resignation

    As Steve Yelvington alluded via Twitter – they’re apparently settling all the family business – Godfather-style.

  • Social Media – Participation Rates Much Lower Than We Thought…

    Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a great post up entitled ” Why Some Don’t Need to Join the Conversation“. The basic premise is that even though social media has been so very hot in the past year or two, actual participation by users remains at a relatively low percentage of overall visitors.

    To prove my point, let’s start with data: In most markets, (even youth) there are no bars that span 100% for creators. In fact, 18-24 year olds in United States only are creators 39% of the time. 45-54 year olds in UK only create online content a paltry 6%, although they are critics 11% of the time.

    So what does this tell us? Not everyone is part of the online dialog exchange. Not everyone will ever be part of the online conversation.

    This point has really been driven home lately to me as I’ve become more directly involved in the Reel-Time Community again. In discourse with a few readers, I’ve mentioned “well, you’ve only been a member for the past two years,” only to be told that they were actually lurkers back well into the last decade. In two distinct cases, that means they waited at least 8 years before registering or posting on a site they use almost daily.

    So what’s it all mean? My feeling now is that you’ve got to assume that the active participants on your site are the tip of the iceberg. They’re responsible for helping to make the experience rich and vibrant, but you’ve got to realize that many of your dedicated users may actually never really contribute.

    New information? Not hardly…we’ve been discussing the lurker factor on online bulletin boards since pre-internet days.

  • Media Deathwatch: Tampa Tribune

    Jessica DaSilva posted last week right after the Tampa Tribune Editor in Chief Janet Coats announced a major round of layoffs, and their embarkation for a trip in an entirely new direction:

    Then she dropped the reality bomb:

    “People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

    (Bold added for effect)

    The questions from much of the newsroom apparently were the same old saws: “how will this affect profits” and “How will we compete with the other local paper” (quotes not verbatim, I wasn’t there, but are true to what Jessica posts).

    I’m glad to hear they got it. Stop chasing a model that obviously isn’t working anymore. Instead of trying to support print as the end all and be all, with it’s incredibly costly delivery mechanism, start thinking about yourselves as content development. Find *all the delivery streams* that can make you money and optimize them. Forget about the ones that don’t make you money.

    More from DaSilva’s post:

    Janet believes in the news industry. She believes in holding government, media and the public accountable. And she knows there is not another job that makes such a huge difference and weilds such power. News organizations offer society so much, and that is why she cannot take another job – because journalism is her calling, and she knows there is nothing else she could ever imagine herself doing.

    “It’s worth fighting for,” Janet said.

    Out of all her quoteable moments, those were the words that stuck with me. It was that powerful statement that conveyed the hope, faith and prayers of all journalists worldwide. That maybe this industry can’t be demolished because of its importance and that maybe our love and passion for it could be enough to keep it running.

    It’s going to be tough, and no, passion is not enough to keep things running in a broken model. If you combine passion with a willingness to change, to innovate and revolutionize (is that even a word?), you’ve got a much better chance.

    To keep on doing what they were doing would be insane. To quote the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo:

    They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way

    My best wishes to the Tampa Tribune staff, DaSilva and Coats that they can weather the storm.

  • Twitter, FriendFeed and Overexposure of the Personal Brand

    I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee.

    That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with.

    I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling), Plurk, etc. I’m sure many have convinced themselves that a lot of what they are doing is “creating social media brand awareness” for their products. The truth is that Twitter is more about branding for the personal brand, and as such I find in most cases, it creates a level of over exposure that’s downright harmful to your personal brand.

    Think about Jason Calacanis, who was for a while offering all kinds of contests, giveaways, etc. via Twitter, trying to increase the awareness of the Majalo Search Engine (disclosure: I signed up to contribute when it first started, but honestly never did produce any results for them). For a time, it seemed that the Twitter stream I was getting was all Jason, all the time. “I’m going to have lunch with xxx here. Burritos, yum” or something like that. The signal to noise ratio was so high that I really began to dislike what Calacanis was doing. I didn’t even know him and I was starting to develop a strong dislike.

    Jason mentioned on the This Week in Tech podcast this week that he has a lot of people who can’t stand his online persona, but actually become good friends when he meets them. And for the record, I really enjoy hearing Calacanis on podcasts, and I’m sure I’d like him if we were to sit down for a beer sometime. However the Twitterati Calacanis was, for a time, utterly annoying.

    Similarly Jeremiah Owyang – he’s been a perennial link in my posts, but when Forrester did their conference in March this year, I had to un-follow him for the time being, I just didn’t need to know whenever anyone decided to go to the bathroom at the conference, or what specific CEO he was talking to.

    On the other side, I see a lot of the Twitterati catering to prurient interests to build their following. Yes, sex sells, for the most part, you’re selling yourself here. Do you really want the interest that brings? If you’re even thinking about that, you might want to talk to Ariel Waldman, community manager at Pownce, who’s now got her own stalker, with all the fun that brings. Oh joy!

    The problem we have is that so many of us are making the mistake off blending our personal and our professional lives. In business, I prefer not to be known for my ability to consume Mojitos…although personally I really like them. Yet, I blend my Twitter posts with a weird mix of both professional and personal information (yeah, do as I say, not as I do).

    I think too many of the Twitterati are making the fundamental mistake of overexposing their personal brand via social networking, to their personal and professional detriment. Your thoughts?

  • Reel-Time.com Acquired By NameMedia

    In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com – the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer.

    It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here)  and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no financial stake in the final buy out. The big winner is honestly the community which now will actually move forward, vs. being in a holding pattern.

    Last September, when I posted my final Fishwire Report for the Boston Region (a report of what’s going on for saltwater fly fishermen) I swore it would be the last. Yesterday, I wrote two of them…handling both Boston and Cape Cod. The good news is that I was for the first time able to write them during normal working hours, instead of getting up at 4 in the morning.

    Reel-Time.com was a niche online community before anyone had any idea that such a thing could exist. In a lot of ways we invented, identified or were afflicted by, just about anything you now hear about termed as “Social Networking” or “Social Media.”

    So as things change, in many ways they stay the same for me.  I’m now back where I began, at Reel-Time.com and after 13 years, I couldn’t be happier.  Now if I can just get some fishing time in.

  • Yet Another Newspaper Outsourcing Post

    Sean Pollay pointed out that the Boston Herald will be outsourcing printing and laying off up to 160 employees.  This from E&P:

    The Boston Herald will layoff between 130 and 160 workers under a plan to outsource its printing operations to other locations within the state, the paper reported Tuesday.

    The publisher attributes the action to the fact that some of their newspapers have presses that are more than 50 years old, which one would expect are a maintenance nightmare.  This one directly affects the unions:

    “Some grim-faced union leaders declined comment as they emerged from a meeting with Purcell in his office late this morning,” the Herald added. “Purcell described the meeting as ‘somber,’ even as he praised union leaders for all they’ve done over the years to keep the Herald in operation.”

    Some 10 unions would be affected by the printing move, which is expected to start in late September or early October, the paper reported. Workers include pressmen, mailers, engravers and paper handlers.

    In the long run, we’re going to see more papers doing this.  Arthur Sulzberger Jr. suggested last year that he could see The New York Times not printing it’s own papers within 10 years.  Think of print as just one delivery means for a newspapers product, and at that, an extremely costly one, and you’ll have a good idea of where this may lead.

     

  • More on Newspaper Outsourcing

    CNBC posted on the newspaper outsourcing issue yesterday, and noted that not only is copy editing going overseas for a trial, one of the OC Register’s parent companies papers is now sending pages to New Delhi for layout.

    Mindworks Global Media will copy edit some of the papers stories for a one-month trial starting next week. And a community newspaper owned by the O.C. Register’s parent company–it didn’t name which one–will outsource page layout to Mindworks, which is based outside New Delhi.

    This isn’t enabling any layoffs–not yet. The company insists it’s just a test, and it won’t affect reporting or decision making and that O.C.-based editors will continue to oversee the month. Orange County Register Communications has been suffering through a rough patch. As its circulation tumbled, dropping the company from being California’s third largest paper to its fifth largest, the company has done three rounds of layoffs in the past year.

    That’s big news – since paginators are typically members of The Newspaper Guild (I am fairly certain that Freedom Communications has a contract with them). And even bigger news is that this story has only been picked up in a handful of spots around the web. Either the stories in stealth mode, or perhaps there just isn’t anyone who cares anymore.

  • Newspaper Deathwatch: OC Register Tests Outsourcing Editing to India

    When Reuters did this 6 years ago, we all laughed at them. “Want curry with that?” Now respected American daily The Orange County Register has begun a test using a New Delhi firm for editing tasks. From BusinessWeek:

    Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

    Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.”

    So what’s it mean? In the short term, nothing. In the long term its just one more bit of evidence that the print publishing model for newspapers isn’t going to work forever. In fact just minutes ago The Washington Post posted this:

    …We wonder and worry, too. Anxiety has intensified this year with an accelerating decline in newspaper advertising, and it has hit home for us in a particularly painful way this spring, first with the early retirements of scores of colleagues and then, this week, with Len Downie‘s announcement that he’ll step down Sept. 8 after 17 years as executive editor.

    Meanwhile, Bloomberg last week noted that The New York Times has seen it’s biggest Ad Revenue drop of the year during May.

    Ad sales at the News Media Group, including the New York Times and Boston Globe, fell to $130 million, the company said in a statement today. Total sales declined 6.6 percent to $227.5 million as increased circulation revenue couldn’t offset drops in national, retail and classified ads.

    The deterioration in May advertising mirrors drops at other U.S. newspaper publishers. Gannett Co., the owner of USA Today, reported yesterday that newspaper ad sales fell 14 percent in May. Those declines follow the industry’s worst quarter on record in the three months through March, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

    “Expectations were that 2008 would be similar to 2007, but clearly things have gotten worse,” John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland, said in an interview. “Classified is in a tailspin, and there’s no hope for newspaper advertising until they win back some of that revenue.”

    Meanwhile, in the This Week In Media Podcast this week, Alec Lindsey suggested that 2010 was the year that the model would break for the broadcast television market, stating that it would probably be the first year in which a revenue decline would be seen in the Upfronts. So, Mr. Television, your time is coming…

    The real message here is that the traditional media model is utterly broken, and while it may be too late for print, television might still have time. My money is on the new online media providers and the networks slowly cutting their affiliates and the cable outlets out of the loop.

  • The Shine is off Social Networking

    Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark.  I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.

    But it goes far beyond that.  Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting piece showing that social networking may have flattened out, or even may be decreasing. He notes:

    Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

    And these just might be the tip of the iceberg, for there are way too many me-too networks out there failing to find the traction, and hence the volume, needed to grow their revenues. The lack of monetization will only accelerate this process.

    I’ve also been detecting a subtle change in the “conversations” on Twitter lately, with some brave few actually taking a stand against the social networking Kool-Aid.  In one telling argument, it came down to a final comment from the prime Kool-Aid drinker that “You just never got Social Networking,” reminding my of my favorite line from a movie I dearly love, The Duellists, in which the lead character, D’Hubert, (a Napoleonic era officer who has served from Spain to Russia and back) is condemned with the single statement “You never loved the Emperor.”  Indeed, one might as easily be condemned for “Not being Politically Correct,” or whatever the actual flavor of the moment is.

    Also, I find the current “Proactive Customer Support” wherein companies monitor social networking apps to create a two tier service network, in which the middle to upper income have a vastly different support experience than the lower middle to poor do.  Think about “Comcast Cares” on Twitter, a Comcast rep, who actively searches out support issues to help fix them.  I’ll bet he’s finding most of the problems are centered in Bel Aire, not in Compton.

    Social Networking wasn’t invented by the current crop of Powerpoint wielding wannabes, and it’s been around a lot longer than most would suggest.  Honestly, I see it actually predating the internet, going back to the days of computer bulletin board services (Do you remember them?).  Most of the basic fundementals of Social Networking were really polished in online forums, on IRC, and in the first Instant Messaging Apps.  It’s not utterly new, in most cases, this is just a better presentation.

    Some general Social Networking notes:

    • “Join the Conversation” – I’m growing tired of hearing this.  If you already aren’t talking to your customers, then maybe there’s a reason.
    • Just because Facebook says we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will loan you money…
    • Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

    What is new, is that there is now a widespread understanding of Social Networking and it’s overall importance in both web design in particular and marketing in general.  I realize many readers may be rather upset at my saying the Emperor has no clothes, but indeed, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it’s a waste of time to talk about the clothes, rather than the more substantive issues about the Emperor, like taxes, etc.  When the medium is the subject of the message, there is a problem with that medium.

    I’ve said it before, I say it again here.  Social Networking and Social Media are not ends unto themselves.  They are aspects of good web design, and should be employed as such.  To use Social Media for Social Media’s sake is a waste of time.  There is a limit to the number of Social Networks I want to be a part of, and I personally would prefer to have more in common with my fellow users than simple ownership of a computer.  Niche communities are the way to go…as Om so brilliantly notes.