thoughtsignals

New owners of newspapers — folks like Sam Zell, who made his fortune in real estate — are now saying the outlook for the papers they bought is worse than they expected.

David Carr writes:

These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.

A lot of these deals were done in the last two years, when the economy was still good despite the troubles in the newspaper biz. With the economy headed downhill, the systemic problems with newspapers will get amplified.

However, what continues to be missing from this whole discussion about the business of newspapers is the lack of innovation in newspaper business models (not in newsrooms, which have been trying new things like crazy the last few years).

Chris O’Brien, who has worked for newspapers as a business reporter for years, gets it right:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

I don’t know that I agree that selling ads, per se, is a dying business model. It’s what Google is based on after all (however, unlike newspapers, Google has produced a number of innovations in advertising). But basically, that’s right. There is lots of experimentation going on in the nation’s shrinking newsrooms, not so much in the other departments.

The LA Times finally brings some sense to the nonsensical discussion about whether the end of newspaper book sections somehow heralds the end of books:

INDEED, more than at any time in the last 40 years, there is a bounty of news, features, criticism and gossip about books in newspapers, magazines and journals, blogs, radio and TV, podcasts and an ever-growing number of book clubs and festivals. It’s by all appearances a flourishing literary moment in a culture that traditionally values other forms of entertainment, and it raises the question: Why should two key elements of that mosaic, litbloggers and book reviewers, be trading shots at all?

Link.

Startup newspaper BostonNOW is printing excerpts from local bloggers in its print edition.

John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site.

Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Mr. Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.

Mr. Wilpers, who previously edited two other free commuter newspapers, Metro Boston and The Washington Examiner, said he wanted to address what he believed was the news industry’s biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers.

I expect there will be a certain amount of moaning that this is another sign of the end of newspapers (no, their declining circulation, readership and ad revenue would be the sign of that). However, I also expect that we’ll see a lot more of that. Other newspapers are already doing this in one form or another, and many papers are printing excerpts from their own bloggers in the print edition (a sure sign that momentum has shifted from print to the Web).

Newspapers have a long history of printing things that aren’t really news — comics, recipes, letters to the editor, horoscopes, etc. This isn’t that new. But it is a good idea.

Link.

G.D. Gearino, a columnist and longtime N&Oer is leaving that newspaper for self-employment. Newspapering is best left for younger folks, he says, and newspapering is getting tougher.

For a long time, newspaper owners had a sweet gig: Money rolled in and their papers had a voice-of-God authority. These days, the money is harder to come by, and that authority is under siege. I still believe newspapers are important, but the job of adapting to the new information age needs to be done by people wiser than I.

So he’s freelancing, apparently, working on another novel and writing a daily online column here.

N&O Editor Melanie Sill outlines the difference between what her paper is reporting on the Duke lacrosse case compared to at least some of what has appeared on blogs before the N&O reported it.

We heard all kinds of rumors and tips, but we don’t publish unattributed rumor and we almost never quote unidentified sources. Much of this gossip went right up on blog posts, but we used such leads and rumors as initial information that had to be fleshed out on the record or through independent verification.

She does a nice job calmly laying out the difference between what the N&O is doing in the name of traditional journalism compared to what some bloggers have done. And I think she manages to avoid re-opening the whole “blogging vs. journalism” hobgoblin.

Also, she notes that Roy Cooper has (apparently) refused interview requests from N.C. media but jumped at a chance to go on 60 Minutes.

Cooper is North Carolina’s attorney general and has a responsibility to speak to the local community, including reporters who work to inform people here. It’s ironic that after condemning Mike Nifong’s play-to-the-cameras actions, Cooper gave exclusive access to a national television program.

Link.

Online Journalism Review has a Q&A with Baristanet co-founder Debbie Galant, a former New York Times Columnist.

On the site’s approach to journalism: “We are much more … shooting from the hip and smart-alecky. We’re more like the front of the book in Newsweek or like those sly Entertainment Weekly-type magazines.”

On earning a living: “We’re now after two years really starting to make some decent money. It took at least that long to build up the readership so we could become a viable competitor in the local advertising market. It certainly helped that during that time Liz and I both have husbands who were bringing in the health insurance and the steady income.”

On the competition: “Our shining hours have been during fires and this microburst last summer that was just like a tornado and that’s when we utilized the medium really well. … And the local newspaper surprisingly enough, even though they were out reporting it and even though they have a website, they didn’t use that material and saved everything for their newspaper on Thursday–which was two-and-a-half days after everything happened. And so we just really felt like we completely kicked their butts.”

This is fascinating stuff, well worth a read if you’re interested in the future of local journalism and in the idea of hyperlocal journalism especially.

Link.

Underneath all the very real concern about the future of daily newspapers and other “mainstream” media are questions about what will happen to the expensive, time-consuming journalism such organizations have traditionally done. Washington Post media writer Howie Kurtz raises the issue:

Newspapers and networks face the same dilemma: too many people doing other things with their time, from Web-surfing to podcast listening, or simply losing interest in news altogether. Some of these customers are consuming the companies’ wares online, which is great for exposure but doesn’t produce the revenue needed to support long-form reporting. If this erosion continues, it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians.

Link.

There’s also an online discussion where Kurtz and some of his readers get into it a little more.

Online Journalism Review has a great Q&A with John Battelle (the guy behind Federated Media and Searchblog) about online journalism, blogging, and (most interesting to me) the business model for online journalism.

There’s no doubt that traditional media can and will continue, but it has a hard hump to get over. Traditional media is in the business of sort of corralling talent. [As a newspaper reporter], you don’t talk to readers. Your job is to talk to your sources. Institutionally, these organizations have grown up managing reporters, not talent. When I was editing at Wired, my job was to produce writers and manage 50-150 talented, half-crazy freelance writers, and I think it really got me ready to do what I’m doing now. People with influential blogs are talent and they don’t want to be told what to write about.

There’s an interesting dynamic going on in new media right now.

The big old media companies (newspapers, TV stations, etc.) are losing their audiences and their share of advertising money; they’re trying to figure out how to integrate new media (Internet, mobile, etc.) into a new business model to make up for the business they’re losing. If they’re not successful at this, then we’ll have a lot of big companies that will eventually go out of business — with all the attendent economic and social chaos that causes.

At the same time, we have scads of small new online media companies, like Federated Media and Gawker Media, trying to figure out an online-only (or online-mostly) business model. (For example, consider the issues PodTech is facing trying to balance production and bandwidth costs with advertising revenue.) The small new media companies don’t have much to lose, in a way — it’s not an industry with hundreds of thousands, or millions, of employees, investors counting on their success for their retirement investment, etc. But they have a lot to gain, obviously. (The individuals working in those small media companies are risking a lot, but it’s mostly their individual risk.)

Will the big media and little media meet in the middle? Maybe.

Will all the little new media startups get bought out by Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. and essentially become small pieces of giant media/tech companies? Maybe. (And if that happens, do we risk losing the valuable diversity that lots of small companies bring to the ‘Net?)

Will the big media companies eventually wake up and figure it out and win the battle for the fast-growing online advertising pie? Maybe.

Will the little companies outmaneuver the big companies and make lots of individual bloggers and techies, if not rich, at least as well off as they would have been if they’d worked for a big traditional company? Maybe.

Will several of the above choices happen simultaneously? Are there other possibilities?

I don’t know the answer, but I think that making a living in the media right now is, existentially speaking, both scary and exciting because of the transition we’re seeing. And I think John Battelle and Robert Scoble, among others, are both likely to be among the first people to figure all this stuff out.

Business Leader magazine, based in Raleigh, plans to go national. I used to freelance for that magazine from time to time.

Link.

Geneva Overholser says it’s time for people to stop fretting about the future of journalism and start doing something about it.

What could be worse than having journalism on iPods?  How about NOT having it there? Take a cruise through some of the Web sites that, say, give ethnic news a well-deserved wider hearing. Or that enable people to search crime news by type, time and location. Or that pay the sort of loving attention to what’s going on in a particular neighborhood that only an old-fashioned weekly once knew how to do. How wondrously they put us to shame, all of us with our endless reasons why we can’t possibly fit something in our newspaper or newscast.

There is a great deal of fretting these days in newsrooms about the future of journalism. Overholser is right, of course, that we need to do better. But I think her call for action on the part of other stakeholders — corporate shareholders, for example — is a little naive.

One of the new things that we need to invent for journalism is a new business model. Some day online advertising may provide enough revenues to support robust investigative journalism (or, maybe not, for reasons I won’t go into here). But in any case, the money’s not there yet. And that’s got to be a part of this new future — not just more and better journalism, but a business model that doesn’t rely on the near monopoly power that sustained so many news organizations for so many decades.

Link.