Public will pay for media content

A new survey says the public will pay for media content — if the need/reason is adequately explained.

"When participants were provided with a compelling justification for the paywall -- that The New York Times was likely to go bankrupt without it -- their support and willingness to pay increased," Cook and Attari concluded.

Again, take that Jay Rosen Jeff Jarvis Clay Shirky and other new media fluffers who tout "no paywalls" for selfish reasons:.

That said, the survey authors note that many people will believe the “information wants to be  free” quote out of context and misinterpreted means they should get newspaper stories for free:

Those publishers should also consider this cautionary note: a majority of The New York Times readers surveyed by Cook and Attari said they wouldn't pay for content and made good on their threat, often by switching to free providers. "The decline reported in our study is echoed in the decrease of over 3.3 million unique website visitors reported in The New York Times marketing materials between the spring of 2011 and 2012," Cook and Attari wrote.

Of course, with more and more papers adopting paywalls, that option is shrinking. The key will be AP (and Reuters and AFP) continuing to up their rates they charge news aggregators.

A newspaper where pets matter more than people?

Via a newspaper exchange, I get copies of my former newspaper, the Marble Falls Highlander, at my new location.

Well, I knew it offered to run pet obits, but we didn’t get any while I was there.

What I didn’t know until now was that, although obits for people are free for the first 500 words, the pet obit has a minimum charge of $10.

Never heard of such a thing before, with a newspaper valuing pets above people. That said, readers can probably insert jokes about this if they want, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you.

Digital newspaper circulars — good news or bad?

Short-term good, long-term bad? Or, the other way around? A growing consortium of newspapers is backing Wanderful Media, a company that creates digital versions of newspaper circular inserts. It is a way of looking to the future, to have a digital version of the grocery store and hardware store flyers online, yes. OTOH, in at least a certain percentage of digital readers, are they already going to Target.com or whatever anyway? And, as newspapers' complains over Valassis' deal with the USPS show, print circulars are still an important part of newspaper revenues, so ... if this leads retailers to abandon print circulars sooner rather than later, it could be a big issue.

I doubt this will come to non-daily papers any time soon, so no hurt there. And, bigger seven-days will still attract plenty of print-version circulars. Smaller dailies, though? At some point, retailers participating with Wanderful may make a take-it-or-leave-it digital-only offer to some of these papers, perhaps playing them against Valassis/Red Plum on mail-out versions of print circulars.

Especially if smartphone/tablet apps are next, this is another gift horse that may not pony up well for the longer term.

And, of course, there are other issues involved. One I can think of is, will these digital circulars get past ad-block extensions or not?

Editing pettiness is ...

An editor of a group of newspapers who takes a byline off an individual editor's story because he thinks he has too many bylined stories on the front page.

Just another way in which black is not even white, but tangerine or something, here in MF-ville.

#Poynter #PolitiFact and St. Pete Times: Overblown blowhards?

Between deliberately slapping ESPN in the face at times just to prove it's a good contract/consultant ombudsman, between financially affiliated St. Petersburg Times getting ready to call itself the Tampa ("Bay, if you will") Times while the Tampa Tribune still publishes, and other things, I'm beyond skeptical to cynical about both the paper and the media institute.


The latest? Its/their PolitiFact have awarded the claim that the GOP wants to kill Medicare the lie of the year, then said that the raft of objections to that award is all just from liberals being in an echo chamber.


Oh, technically, the GOP doesn't want to directly kill Medicare. But, privatization of it? Everybody with a brain knows that is exactly what will happen.


Basically, PolitiFact descends into he said/she said journalism:

We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

That's exactly the problem: Politifact made no judgment on the merits of the Ryan plan. Krugman's right: RIP PolitiFact. And, as far as I am concerned, everything else in the Poynter/St. Pete Times stable.

Update, Aug. 8: If there is any truth to this, Markos Moulitsas (Kos) may well be on the right track, that Jon Huntsman Sr., father of the GOP presidential candidate and former Utah gov, is Reid's source. It's an inter-Mormon connectedness source (and an inter-Mormon grudge — don't forget how Huntsman Jr. felt about Romney) who has place, time, connections, more.

When is modular design not? When you're in crazymaking land

I had put up some sort of post about this last week, then deleted it, in part realizing I had named my newspaper by name and city ... and not sure if the Google Alerts my boss has set up picks up blogs.

But, after an event earlier this week, I'm rewriting and adding some stuff?

First, the latest lament here? (See my "fifth worst career" series for more from the past.)

On at least one page a week in at least one of the three newspapers in our family-owned group, we have a non-modular page. It can be a minor violation, such as a story stripped across the top being uneven at the bottom, with two columns going deeper than the other four.

But, it's usually worse. A story on top of another doglegs a column around that.

So, two weeks ago, I said what the hell, and laid out a page for our production people that doglegged the bottom of one story (side by side with another, but a photo to prevent bumping heads) below the bottom of the other.

My boss' reaction? "That's high school. I'll never allow that."

Well, sir, at every previous paper I worked at, we wouldn't allow what you regularly do, and which I sometimes do because we don't have fucking time. That, too, would be called the same thing.

Anyway, a further trigger this week leads to this blog post.

First, we're told that staff is tight and we simply have to suck it up. Well, staff at the competing paper here in the Highland Lakes area of the Hill Country isn't quite so tight, though one person was let go there a while back.

That's the Marble Falls Highlander, and between a mix of stress and depression, I'm trying to move on.

Related to that, a fairly-to-very advertorial weekly entertainment section could be eliminated; that would let us all relax, and you could then not print the two weeklies in the three-paper group on the same day. (And, if the entertainment section's ad's rates are actually cheaper ... )

Finally, about being professional? Yes, I know you want me to "move on."

Bu, publicly advertising my job well over a month ago? That's not totally professional.

And, apparently doing so just to "send a message" or something, since as far as I know, nobody has actually been hired yet? Well, friends of mine say they've never heard such a thing.

Related to that, any company that is too cheap to take the unemployment ding (should a hypothetical such person qualify for benefits) probably has other problems anyway.

Oh, I've made errors here. The unforced ones? I've admitted several of them, as well as the general fact of them, to my boss.

The "unforced" ones, from the time rush here (and that part is far from being just about me), or now, the anxiety of a sword of Damocles over my head? Not to mention the yeller boss and the bellower owner. Different story.

Oh, and that weekly entertainment/lifestyles tab? Supposedly pitched to visitors. But ...

The cover story one issue last fall, before I got here, was about the paper group's new iPhone app. Really.

Other ideas, such as generic Easter stuff ... also not pitched to visitors. The whole tab is ... schizophrenic.

And certainly, visitors from the nearest metro area aren't going to read out here about day-tripping ideas for in the second-nearest major metro area.

The problem is, to paraphrase a friend, is that this place isn't Fredericksburg, but some people want to believe it is.

And, why would I say any of this out loud?

It would do zero good, or less than that.

Beyond the stress-induced reactions, I think I had shellshock that two daily newspaper veterans still believed old-time newsroom personnel "management" worked well, first of all. Second, and even more, I think I was stunned that it didn't totally look like the newspaper group had that type of experience level in its oversight.

A few years back, already, I saw that "community" newspapers would probably survive the continuing ad revenue (and general) implosion than many dailies. However, I see now that that's not totally true, either, first of all. And, second of all, if more community newspapers cut that tight to the bone to "survive" (or still semi-thrive in terms of old, outdated profit margin ideas) well, eventually, more and more would-be J-school grads may wise up.

And, others who know have nodded when I've used the word "crazymaking," too. I could use others.

===

Add in yelling and bellowing in the office ... and other things ... two "old editorial hands" from a seven-day daily who think this paper can be like that ...

#Apps - nothing more than an #Apple scam?

Technology Review doesn't go quite that far, but it does say that apps for newspapers, and mobile versions of websites in general for newspapers, when locked into an app-based system, simply don't make sense.

The gist of the story is that they don't make sense on either the technological or financial end, and I'm going to focus on that second one.

TR publisher Jason Pontin says that many newspapers and magazines were engaged in little more than dreaming, over the idea that mobile versions of websites on an app-based system were seen as a "do-over" for everything they got wrong with the traditional web.

Why is that not surprising? Just as a traditional website isn't an electronic version of a hardcopy newspaper, especially due to the mix of Google and news aggregators, a mobile version isn't that, either. And, it's more akin by far to a website than to a hardcopy newspaper.

So, apps don't sell. Pontin has the details:

A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers' app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead. 

That sounds pretty simple.

He says TR has junked them all for an HTML5 system that is less "constrained." Per that, this probably means that between this and expanding Android tablets, Apple's gravy train in the app world will probably start to dry up, too.

It also means, to get back to an old hobby horse of mine, newspapers and magazines need to look at paywalls. And real ones.

Don't listen to Jay Rosen or Clay Shirky. They're getting paid to tell you otherwise.

I work in the fifth-worst career, part 3 - advertising revenue

Last week, I blogged about the fact that a certain careers website said that journalism was the first worst job/career field right now, noting that, from the inside, that was no surprise.

Well, I'm probably going to do a few follow-up posts, looking at more specific issues.


Today, I throw out more specific ideas about advertising and circulation/paywall issues.

First, although paywalls aren't the answer, they're part of the answer. Period.

Newspapers are reporting more of their ad dollars are coming from the web, but that's because hardcopy ad dollars continue to sink, even as the country partway comes out of the recession. Newspapers need to get honest with themselves and permanently write off half of their hardcopy losses since 2007. And, that may be conservative.


Until newspapers do this, and accept this, they're not going to be able to better address the future, not just at individual newspaper levels, but at corporate levels.


As for the current disparity between traditional web ad rates and mobile-specific ad rates, reportedly as high as 5-1? Within in a decade, that difference will be no greater than 2-1, driven primarily by greater use of mobile devices, greater competition for eyeballs, etc.

Remember how much higher traditional web ad rates were a decade ago? The same things drove them down as will drive down mobile rates. More mobile-specific content, portals, and sites increases openings for ads and competition for eyeballs gets more scattered. Ergo, rates go down.


So, looking ahead to the future, newspapers need to be honest about that, too.


The Net, in its various delivery forms, has just the opposite problem as old newspaper media. You got plenty of room for editorial content, of course, but, because of ephemeral attention in many cases, there's limited "space" for ads. Plus, add in ad-block software, etc., and web rates plummeted.

I have no doubt that for both Android and iOS for Apple, somebody will invent the equivalent of ad-block programs, too. It's going to happen. Somehow. Jailbreaking of specific apps as well as mobile operationg systems will be involved, in all likelihood. But, it will happen.


The even bigger thing is that corporate chains have probably not even fully digested that 25 percent profit margins, along with hardcopy ad riches, are gone for good. I think many of them think that the much lower overhead for the Net will alleviate that. But, if Net dollars are dropping, or flat, still, and mobile dollars, while rising, are still smaller potatoes yet, that's not a "replacement." Plus, per part two of this series, as readers often demand fancier content, the overhead differential probably isn't quite so great as these owners imagine or hope.


So, back to those profit margins. Owners, and investors, need to digest that the day of 20 percent margins, even, for even the biggest dailies, are gone. Even with two more years of economic recovery, they need to get comfortable with 15 percent as "good." And, therefore, to stop laying off ever more editorial staff, cutting content, etc., while rewarding the CEOs who do that.


Think of this as the dot-com boom in reverse. The worst of the dot-com financial bust for papers is over. BUT ... not all of it is over. AND ... not all the lessons have been learned.


On circulation? A dollar is as high as even big metros outside the two coasts (and I really mean coastal California, on one hand, and the Boston-DC axis on the other) can go for several years. Ditto for the $3 mark on Sundays. That's your ceiling.


I'm glad to see a major metro like the Dallas Morning News has therefore finally gotten into the paywall spirit. I don't currently live in Dallas, so I wouldn't pay, and I don't know how much it costs. But, it was needed. That's even as, here in central Texas, the Austin American-Statesman, still free online, bleeds even more.


Of course, the AP, and now, Reuters with a largely expanded American presence, and somewhat AFP, have to be in the mix. Not all three can jointly deal with rates for news aggregators without explicit Congressional antitrust waivers, of course. But, individual papers can only do so much.


Of course, AP's long-term chairman of the board, Dean Singleton, was as stupid about this issue with AP as he ultimately was with the finances of MediaNews, running it into bankruptcy.


And, why didn't a court impose a five-year hiatus on him buying newspapers after getting out of Chapter 11? That could be a blog post by itself.

I work at the fifth-worst career, part 2 - advertorial

Last week, I blogged about the fact that a certain careers website said that journalism was the first worst job/career field right now, noting that, from the inside, that was no surprise.


Well, I'm probably going to do a few follow-up posts, looking at more specific issues.


Today, I tackle where the editorial and advertising rubber overlap on the same road, the good old "advertorial" content, as well as a couple of other business issues.


Per a recent post on Bloomberg about BuzzFeed, new media may be headed in an even more advertorial direction. This should be of no surprise. A recent story at Editor and Publisher said that many newspapers don't "get" either the traditional web or various new media as being different enough in format from hardcopy to call out for different presentation styles.


Now, a big paper like the New York Times has staff to create graphics slideshows and more. A community daily, a six-day or five-day, doesn't, really. A nondaily certainly doesn't. But, if readers who are reading the nearest metro seven-day of any size see those, won't they start expecting them from smaller papers, too?


So, per BuzzFeed, if smaller dailies want that type of stuff, it probably will be an easy opening for online advertorial content. For nondailies, it will probably be an issue of web news getting no more than an Onion-esque first-graf look. Or else.


And, it's not just smaller dailies. I've already seen online advertorial content at the Austin American-Statesman. In fact, it may be easier to disguise the advertorial nature of online content until after someone has clicked the link.


For nondailies, more advertorial content is probably going to come via the newspaper oriented web content companies that host, and provide support for, most nondailies that aren't part of big corporate chains. Expect more advertorial video first. Slideshows second. Text "news" third.


Meanwhile, advertorial's always existed in hardcopy newspapers, and usually more so at community ones, and above all in smaller communities that still had the fortune, or the misfortune (due to it straining both papers even thinner) of competing newspapers.


Even when not part of explicit "buy a story, get an ad" special sections, I've seen it. At my current newspaper, we got a fax last week from the area's top renter and property manager. An official from said company asked if we were aware that current highway construction projects plus the pending work on a new power plant were likely to make renting a better option than ever for homeowners who can't sell their homes right now? Said official then said his company would like to advertise in the same issue of our semiweekly that we ran a story about this.


It's fucking disgusting, to be honest. The story line actually isn't a bad one, though the highway projects don't have that many new people in town, and we'll see on the power plant. But, that we the newspaper will be that blatant (and not the first time) ...


So, journalists? Let's be honest and stop calling PR "the dark side." You're going to get expected to do more and more of it.


Part 3 ... advertising and circulation revenues ... is ahead.

I work at the fifth-worst career

In case you've not heard about it, newspaper journalism was listed by some career site earlier this week as the fifth-worst career in the U.S.

Throw out my best newspaper job, at a group of suburban Dallas weeklies before they went belly-up (which of course ties to why newspapers are getting ever worse) and I easily believe it.

Last two papers?

A national chain that believes Facebooking everything is the "answer" for driving both website and mobile app advertising sales, even though the website is still free and, IMO, the disparity between mobile-based ads and traditional online ads will not be a long-term deal.

And currently, a paper with "old-school" newspaper vets, Type A male yellers, the senior of whom, I think, believes this Texas Hill Country town can be a new Fredericksburg, when it won't. Sorry. Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

And, it works on the "margins" as far as staffing size, even for today's newspaper world, to boot.

That's even as the national chains continue to engage in forced furloughs, job cuts, or both, at the reporter/editor level at local newspapers, while simultaneously paying out bigger bonuses to top brass precisely for making those cuts.

And that's the dirty secret of why top brass of most national chains have no interest in a nonprofit newspaper incorporation bill, should one ever get real consideration by Congress. They'd rather skim now, and "apres moi, le deluge," than engage in responsible management. Local operations, meanwhile, continue to dream of "new angles" while stretching themselves ever thinner between hardcopy, traditional web, and mobile content delivery, while barely having the staff to do justice to hardcopy coverage.

Sure, lots of college students still study journalism. They may believe the myths of liberal media. They may be clueless about the business-side issues. They may be in love with online journalism while remaining clueless to the fact that about nobody's figured out how to monetize it yet.

And, while they're still taking journalism classes to be a new exploitable crop, and others, formerly in the traditional biz, now work at various demand mills, the fifth-worst ain't going to get much better. It's that simple.

Kids in J-schools should be required to take a class in newspaper business management first. Second, they ought to be disabused of much of their belief in the "liberal media," if they hold it for good, unlike Faux News types.

As for the current disparity between traditional web ad rates and mobile-specific ad rates, reportedly as high as 5-1? Within in a decade, that difference will be no greater than 2-1, driven primarily by greater use of mobile devices, greater competition for eyeballs, etc.

Remember how much higher traditional web ad rates were a decade ago? The same things drove them down as will drive down mobile rates.

The Net, in its various delivery forms, has just the opposite problem as old newspaper media. You got plenty of room for editorial content, of course, but, because of ephemeral attention in many cases, there's limited "space" for ads. Plus, add in ad-block software, etc., and web rates plummeted.

I have no doubt that for both Android and iOS for Apple, somebody will invent the equivalent of ad-block programs, too. It's going to happen.

Oh, and as for the current locale, that's not just my opinion.

A cover story about your "app"?

Yeps, that's the newspaper I work at now. Last fall, the cover story for their weekend entertainment section was about their new smartphone app.

Now, I've seen papers bigger than this tout their new apps. But, they did so as straight news, and in 300 words, not 1,200.

But, the entertainment section here is supposed to be so artistic.

Geez.

Just shoot me.

Between this "entertaining" cover story, a quarter-page house "app" ad every week and more, let me say that this, no more than Facebooking everything by everyone in an office, is any "solution" for struggles.

Online journalism follies continue

Problem 1: This Reuters story in the Chicago Trib about Embridge pipelines. Entirely a US/Canada story. Entirely reported and edited from Bangalore, India. Meanwhile, friend Leo Lincourt notes "I like how it had the unlinked URL and the placeholder for where the factbox was supposed to go." Hmm, maybe the Trib is outsourcing website content management.


Problem 2: The L.A. Times has a paywall. It appears similar to the NYT's. I know of know "LAClean." But, in Firefox, going to "private browsing" defeats it.


This isn't some small chain, some small newspaper.


This is the L.A. Times, with a paywall even more "fake" than the New York Times.


And, the MSM wonders why it continues to struggle financially. Web-savvy readers dodge fake paywalls, to get news stories that are relatively "thin" because papers still don't "get it" on paywalls and financial hemorrhaging.

From frying pan to fire

Having left the daily newspaper which, personally and at the corporate level, came to the belief last summer that massive Facebooking and Twittering by everybody,  including copy editors who never are out and about  on news stories, was the "answer" to today's journalism revenue streams even as the company refuses to paywall websites, I may have gone from the frying pan to the fire.

(Oh, and now that I've left, I'll identify that previous newspaper as the Odessa American, part of Freedom Communications. And, despite being in the middle of the Permian Basin oilfield boom, the parent company, now owned primarily by its pre-Chapter 11 creditors, is continuing to tighten the editorial screws; I was replaced by a three-day-a-week person.)

Anyway, I'm now at a semiweekly, part of a group of newspapers owned by two "veterans," which is worse yet.

1. The owner allegedly published the exec editor to make him a minority owner, and it never happened. A recipe for bitterness right there, eh?
2. They're both "yellers."
3. They compete with another paper in the same area, which actually has more staff, and expect staff here to do more.
4. And, I've worked at many "community" newspapers that had "advertorial" special sections. I've never before worked at one that assigned stories about a particular advertiser before the sold ad was in the bag. I've worked at one now, though.

Well, if life has "learning experiences," there's plenty here.

And, at least Odessa was well organized as a newspaper. This place isn't. And, I may well be posting more about that soon.