OJR front page archive for May 2009
Local media survival depends on Low Cost Sales Models
May 29, 2009
Amidst the doom and gloom of local news media, it's lost on many that there's a sector of local businesses that can provide a 20% lift in revenue. McKinsey did an analysis using a market of 1 million people to determine the revenue increase a newspaper could get if it attained a similar share of ad budgets in small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) as it had with larger local businesses. It represented a 20% revenue increment over where they are today. In an environment where "flat is the new up", that's significant. It does require a fundamentally different sales approach than what most local media have practiced which I outline below.In my experience as a revenue traction consultant and local publisher, I have seen 20% growth is attainable as we saw that with a number of clients in Q1 when most businesses saw a decline in revenue. McKinsey also found that already the penetration of SMBs spending online is greater than the penetration of SMBs spending in newspapers. Though we often think of smaller businesses being behind larger organizations, it turns out they have deeper penetration with online than any other form of measured media. It is worth noting that SMBs aren't simply interested in display ads, however. McKinsey's findings echo my experience that SMBs have interest in other online marketing tools like Search, Email and other non-display tactics.
In general, we have seen a gap between the high-end of the market where shoe-leather sales models are still appropriate and the low-end of the market where some local media have pursued self-serve models. Our experience has been that added sales focus in the mid-market will increase sales yield. This isn't lost on companies like ReachLocal, Citysearch and others who are grabbing swaths of the market that local media has every opportunity to capture with the proper focus. One of the ways to differentiate versus the national players is outlined in the follow-on piece on thought leadership I outline below.
Newspapers should become carnival barkers on their Google-linked pages
May 26, 2009
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has tauntingly suggested that newspapers could keep their stories out of the search engine's omnivorous maw by the simple expedient of inserting a line of anti-spidering robot text. But newspapers don't have to commit hara-kiri to keep others from making a free lunch (and breakfast, dinner and snacks) out of their expensively produced content.Yet so far they haven't been creative enough to exploit the potential of having their stories turning up as links on the heavily-trafficked Google News homepage. In her recent testimony [PDF] at a Senate committee hearing on "The Future of Journalism," Google Vice President for User Experience Marissa Mayer gave a virtual tutorial on how newspapers could do that.
Journalists must emerge from a culture of failure in order to survive
May 25, 2009
For a generation, journalists have been steeped in a culture of failure. Even during boom years, newspapers laid off employees, offered buy-outs, froze the hiring off new employees and cut the pay of the ones they kept. When the Internet brought unprecedented competition into the news business, and Chicken Little's sky really did fall, the industry amplified its toxic narrative: "No one can make money online." "Journalism is doomed!"But it isn't. All that's doomed is the reactionary management philosophy of monopolists who could not adapt to world where people, not papers, controlled the narratives of their lives. Good riddance, I say. Journalism is not doomed; people can make money publishing online. All that needs to change to make that happen is journalists' toxic attitudes toward themselves and the value of their work.
That was my message to the participants at the Knight Digital Media Center News Entrepreneur Boot Camp this week. We met at the USC Marshall School of Business for five days, working through a curriculum outlined by myself, KDMC's Vikki Porter and Tom O'Malia of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Marshall. We brought in a team of four faculty to finalize the camp's curriculum and instruct the campers: Mary Lou Fulton, Susan Mernit, Ken Doctor and Vin Crosbie. And we supplemented each day with expert speakers, including SEO expert Danny Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, entrepreneurs Shoba Purushothaman and Staci Kramer, and attorney Michael Overing.
Every day, the campers started by giving us their "elevator pitches" for their projects. Over the week, the pitches sharpened from rambling four-minute speeches to tight engagements of 20 seconds or less. At the same time, they learned how to flesh out their pitches into five-minute multimedia presentations, which they presented Thursday morning to a panel of business finance experts, including Lloyd Greif.
Top 10 search engine optimization tips for online news start-ups
May 19, 2009
This week, OJR is helping present the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at USC. We've brought 15 aspiring news entrepreneurs to the USC Marshall School of Business, where they are learning the basic of eliciting financial and community support while creating a small news business. They are building upon their existing journalism skills, learning how those skills have (or have not) prepared them to move from being reporters to publishers.You can follow our Tweets about the camp using the hashtag #uscnewsbiz on Twitter.
I'll write more about the camp, which ends tomorrow, with a wrap-up on Friday. But today, I wanted to dive into one important topic that we covered in a dinner conversation on Sunday evening.
Our invited speaker was Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, and a long-time expert in search engine optimization [SEO]. Danny's a news entrepreneur himself, having grown his 1996 Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines into two online news publications. (He also maintains a blog at http://daggle.com/, which I recommend for his sharp observations of the online news business.)
I asked Sullivan to come speak to our campers because of the importance of SEO to any boot-strapped online start-up. With few resources to draw readers to a new website, SEO provides start-ups a low-cost opportunity to get their site's links in front of an interested audience. The only cost is the time to learn these tips, and the effort required to implement them.
How the newspaper industry threw away its lead in online search engines
May 15, 2009
Last week, I reviewed how a 1995 court decision led the newspaper industry to withdraw from interactivity with its online audience at a crucial moment, crippling the industry's ability to compete with new online rivals.Today, I'd like to take another trip down the memory hole, and show how the newspaper industry could have had the favorable position it now seeks from search engines... if only the industry hadn't adopted policies which gave that advantage away.
Recently, newspapers executives have been approaching search engine companies, notably market leader Google, asking the search engines to change their ranking algorithms to move up results from newspaper websites, arguing that they are more authoritative than other sites, given newspapers' experience and large reporting staffs, and that they are often the original sources of much information republished online.
Foreign reporting, the entrepreneurial and multimedia way
May 14, 2009
What are the two new qualities that journalists of the future must embody? They must be entrepreneurial and they must be multimedia. These are precisely the qualities that animate the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.Almost five years ago now, my wife (Geneva Overholser) and I sat in Jon Sawyer's living room in Washington, D.C., and listened to him spin out what sounded like an improbable tale. He wanted to set up a nonprofit center on foreign reporting, and he wanted a philanthropist to bankroll it.
I will confess right here. I was supremely skeptical that this could work. And I was wrong as could be. Jon, the longtime Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, indeed did persuade Emily Pulitzer to establish the nonprofit center. And today, three-and-a-half years old, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is producing dozens of exclusive, multimedia reports on issues and regions of the world that otherwise wouldn't be covered.
Making media social: news as user experience
May 13, 2009
I live in Austin, Texas, and teach at Texas State University, a short drive down I-35 in San Marcos. One thing I look forward to every year with great anticipation is the annual South By Southwest conference that happens in mid-March. Many are aware of the gigantic music festival associated with this event, but a smaller group of tech and media aficionados know about the fantastic Interactive gathering that occurs just before the musicians come to town. It is, by far, the most important event my students and I attend each year. Emerging topics at SXSW quickly become the "next big thing" within a few years. While attending SXSWi this year, an emerging theme that I noticed was that of User Experience (UX). At least one panel had UX in it's title, and it was a common topic in many of the sessions and overheard in various hallway conversations. Where "content is king" was once the mantra of online publishing platforms, it now seems to have been replaced by "UX is king." I have shared this observation with many people, and am often met with an initial look of puzzlement followed by the question, "What do you mean by that?" It's a tough concept for people to grasp, particularly journalists, who traditionally have had control over every aspect of newspaper consumption, other than actually turning pages for readers.How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online
May 7, 2009
This week, the United States Senate held a hearing on "The Future of Journalism", prompted by the recent demise of two major U.S. newspapers. I won't rehash the many, many arguments and theories put forth by so many people on this issue, save to note one that I am afraid might be slipping down the memory hole.The particular decision I wish to remind folks of today was the industry's reaction to 1995 court case, one that prompted news managers across the country not only to dismiss opportunities to engage with their audiences online, but to directly order their employees not to do so.
As newspapers die, journalism schools turn online to find new life
May 6, 2009
Sometime in the weeks between the shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post Intelligencer newsrooms, it dawned on me that not having a Facebook account (or texting capabilities for that matter) might actually make me less credible as a journalism professor.I realized I needed some self-examination, and our journalism program needed some updating.
At the University of La Verne in Los Angeles County, the journalism program for which I've taught the past eight years is part of a healthy department of communications, where we have had a decent record of readying graduates for the "real world."
Amid newspaper closures and projected closures, surveys showing dwindling newspaper readership, and the lousy economy, we – with journalism professors across the nation –are trying to figure out what to teach our students about the Fourth Estate and the news business, and how to retool with the hope of staying ahead of or at least in step with the mercurial news media market.
How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community
May 1, 2009
I get the same question again and again as I explain our innovation efforts at Gazette Communications: How are you going to make money doing that?When I explained our plans to separate content from product, people could see that we were moving to an organization built for the future rather than the past. But they still asked: How do you monetize that? (Yes, even journalists have started using the M-word.)
I answer in my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, published this week on my blog: We need to move beyond advertising.
Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen, the foremost authority on disruptive innovation, says established businesses take two approaches when faced with disruptive technology: They ignore it or they try to cram their existing model into the new opportunity. The newspaper industry did both. When we realized we couldn't ignore the Internet any longer, we tried to cram our newspapers into our websites.