From the doghouse to the GateHouse

Not sure why a small newspaper company would hire someone away from Gatehouse. Not sure how said person's mindset will translate from a big corporate chain to a small family-owned one. Not sure how much she expects other people at the the new site to translate or Borg-meld their mindsets to hers.

But, the hiring appears to be carved in stone somewhere in Texas.

Newspapers are dying, reasons 641, 722 and 816

Sleeping with the Internet enemy, which is becoming sleeping with Google as well as Facebook, is never a good sign. Not only are you letting them control how your  stories get disseminated, you're doing this while continuing to maintain all your legal liability yourself.

Here’s the bottom lines, and PR flak, on Google’s side:

The growing pact between large publishers of news and large platforms for social media is an alliance born out of desperation on the part of publishers and opportunity on the part of technology companies.  … 

 Google has been exploring the benefits and drawbacks of publishing for some time; being an entity protected by the First Amendment and freed from the obligations of utilities can be useful. Taking on expensive publishing risk is less convenient. However, just as the temperature of regulation in Europe heats up, with the government always trying to rein in the giant search company, Google has maneuvered its friendly tanks up the drive and into the garage of publishing houses. … 

 First of all, this is a clear signal of Google saying explicitly that while it might not employ many journalists (yet) it sees itself as being in the news business—not an accidental platform through which news moves, but an active ingredient in shaping how journalism is formulated and consumed. 

Sounds like a publisher in all but name.

And, here’s Facebook’s spiel:

Last month, Facebook disclosed it was negotiating with a number of news companies in the US to embed video and text within its own site from major publishers including The New York Times,National Geographic, and Buzzfeed. … 

 Two weeks ago at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Andy Mitchell, head of Facebook’s news partnerships, held the line that Facebook itself was staying out of publishing, even though the evidence is very much to the contrary. George Brock, a professor at City University in London, asked Mitchell whether Facebook felt any responsibility for the integrity of its news feed. Mitchell gave the perfunctory Silicon Valley answer that the company cared about improving the “user experience.” Brock suggests that this denial of responsibility is insulting to audiences.

Also sounds like a publisher in all but name.

And, “legacy” newspapers, in addition to not getting control over story dispersal, are leaving the ad dollars more and more in Facebook’s and Google’s hands. Oh, I’m sure any such arrangements will give the newspapers a percentage of the cut on Facebook ads, or Google ads that appear with stories either in Google’s news feed or online to G+. Will that offset likely further loss of onsite online ads? Probably not.

And, if you’ve got a paywall, like the NYT, how’s that going to affect your online circulation revenue? Not well, I’d think.

I don't know if the smell of desperation in the morning is like that of napalm, but it can't be too good.

Meanwhile, newspapers, especially in mobile versions, are looking at following the social media world down another rabbit hole. Just as ads are becoming ever more "targeted," and per the top of this story, newspapers are looking at doing the same with stories.

So, do blacks in more impoverished portions of the city of Baltimore get a different version of the Freddie Gray story than whites in west-side suburbs? Do poor people get different versions of Wells Fargo marketing subprime credit cards and opening accounts in their name without authorization than do rich people?

If so, then the news industry is taking a major step backward; might as well let Google and Facebook have the keys.

Finally, I don't doubt that fear of social media magnifying mistakes is paralyzing or at least constricting reporting.

Newspapers are dying, part 461

When newspapers as big as the Dallas Morning Snooze and the Austin American Stateless (give me more time, I'll create a better riff) are running half-page house ads to tout a "master couponing special" they're sponsoring, you know they're struggling.

First, Americans use less than 1 percent of the coupons we're bombarded with. That's probably because of other factors, like more and more coupons requiring the purchase of multiple products.

This long listicle also notes that mobile couponing is on the rise. How much of that is NOT from mobile-formatted e-editions, or even from mobile editions of a newspaper's website in general is anybody's guess, but let's just say "a lot." Listicle point No. 17 — and this is from 2009, the Neolithic Era of mobile devices — says that mobile plus computer coupons were already then past traditional print ones. A 2014 listicle says print coupon usage has declined by 15 percentage points since just 2010.

In other words, the Snooze and Stateless are probably, once again, pursuing something about ... 5 years too late? (Hey, at least the Stateless has a paywall!) Or paying a third-party consultant to teach people how to use Groupon and such as much as newspaper coupons — unless you've put a gag order on the presenter.

That said, if Felix Salmon is right about how legacy print's bromance with Facebook will start backfiring this year, maybe legacy print's going to start getting more desperate.

Note to Dallas: It's called a paywall, before you do desperate stuff like this.

Note to Austin: If you can't sell ads above 15 percent of newshole on a TUESDAY, not just a Monday, it's called cutting pages in print.

Two years before the masthead, part 2

That's what I meant to title my original piece, instead of "Two Years a Publisher," with a hat tip to Richard Henry Dana.

But, I'll start that now.

A publishers' meeting in a small newspaper group.

An advance assignment of "10 challenges you face."

Look, we're small town papers. We probably don't have a list of 10. In a small town paper, you face the challenges of:
1. Postal Service getting crappier by the day, especially if you're in a definitely rural area; in turn, old folks born here but now moved away eventually get frustrated and stop subscriptions.
2. Old folks dying, and thus auto-stopping subscriptions.
3. Small towns still recovering from the Great Recession more slowly than cities.
3A. Double this if you're in a town or county with a static, even declining, population.

Asking for a full list of 10 almost sounds like an invitation to publishers to start self-flagellating. Because, anything below this, with the exception of "making sure my office manager/bookkeeper is doing her job," is small potatoes.

Maybe I'll find out differently at the actual conference. Maybe I'll be more optimistic after I get back.

And, maybe I'll vote Republican in 2016.

Re-reading the assignment sheet, I can include editorial as well as publishing issues, and it's called "goals," not "challenges." Maybe I'll think New Agey bright thoughts.

Is the Austin American Statesman even more dying?

The latest sign in the decline of journalism? The Austin American Statesman offered $19.99 full-year online subscriptions yesterday as a real non-fools AprilFools presentation. Either some people "didn't get it," or Cox corporate has the Statesman under pressure for X number of new subscribers, because they're running it again today. And also did so on Friday, April 3.

Or maybe they're "counting" on people missing the apparent auto-renew of $8.99/month after that 1 year, per the link I clicked. Or else, since it's Cox of cable fame, they make you walk through hell to cancel the auto-renew.

That said, if I were a current subscriber and could switch to this, I would.

And then, I'd quit after a year until I got another special offer.

I mean, it's one thing for a biweekly magazine like High Country News to offer $12/year digital subscription (without — I think — auto-renew) but this is different.

If other people, see above, thought like me, the Statesman would be getting to digital only whether it's ready for it or not.

Are journalists about to meet their machine overlords?

According to the New York Times, it's possible.

Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science’s co-founder, estimates that 90 percent of news could be algorithmically generated by the mid-2020s, much of it without human intervention. If this projection is anywhere near accurate, we’re on a slippery slope.

And, if a bot can already write the lede graf in a pro sports story well enough to fool most humans, we're past the days of police blotter and quarterly financials. And, yes, there's an example of a bot doing just that on a sports story, about eight grafs about that pull quote. (And if that one example isn't enough, there's a quiz at the bottom of that link. I got five of eight correct, double crossing myself on one, but getting a gimme on another, per discussion in the story.)

Now, there will still be room for some time for sports columnists, but beat writers? You could be in trouble. Ditto for news writers.

Because of cost, and looking at this from a selfish personal angle, this is less likely to trickle down to the community level by 2020. Hyperlocal bots specialized to write about the police blotter and real estate deeds are one thing; general purpose bots writing about a contentious city council meeting are another.

Among other things, the bots have to be fed information. If a city secretary is slow in posting meeting minutes, at least the version she transcribes off audiotape, a human's going to knock that out. Ditto if a high school coach is slow on posting game stats.

But, community newspaper editors and writers shouldn't sleep too easily, especially in suburban or exurban vs. rural areas.

One editor who knows the lay of the land on the set of suburbs or exurbs, assuming a company has a group of such newspapers, can polish up the bots' writings easily enough, one would think.

And, one would think that one editor would be expected to do so by corporate hierarchy.

Two years a publisher

Just over two years ago, for the first time in my life, I became a newspaper publisher.

I've been an editor of multiple weekly and semiweekly papers, and at two of them, had either the actual title, or the essential duties, of a general manager, not just an editor.

But, I never had the thrills — and the responsibilities and chills — of overseeing operations. And finances. And finances.

It's not "Three Years before the Mast" or "Twelve Years a Slave." Nonetheless, on the whole, I wish I were in Philadelphia. (I think.)

That said, I have learned other things about the newspaper business, the structuring of newspaper companies and more.

One is that the smaller companies that primarily own "community" non-daily papers, while perhaps adapting more to the expansion of the online media, and "media," world, than their big daily cousins adapted to the traditional Internet, aren't perfect on that.

Facebook, especially, is a big competitor to small-town papers. Local government meetings and other "spot" news get "published right away. And, if the regular newspaper publishes online not just a fatal wreck or an attempted murder immediately, but too much information about a slightly contentious city council meeting, it's undercutting its print version, even with a paywall.

Otherwise, if the Net in general, and things being free, were a death knell for dailies, Facebook, or free blogging software plus Facebook, is a gut punch to community newspapers.

Oh, and e-editions are reaching the dead end stage. Community papers don't have the money or resources to emulate daily brethren and create reformatted e-editions for smartphones and tablets. (I personally think it's a money- and time-waster for big dailies to do that, but that's another issue.)

The biggie, though, is that community papers, like their larger brethren, have found a variety of ways to legally organize themselves. LPs, LLPs, LLCs, etc., aren't limited to the oil business. Nor is robbing Peter to pay Paul, if you own your own printing presses, or have centralized graphics shops, let alone pagebuilding, doubly let alone "content," whenever that hits the non-daily world.

Newspapers have always been a business, above all else. Doubly so at the community level, at least since we got past World War I and the image of newspapers got spiffed up and away from its yellow journalism past. Of course, there, too, newspapers were ultimately a business, just a bit more louche about it.

Meanwhile, as more daily papers shut their presses and get printed at other dailies, community newspapers that still have presses can charge other companies' community papers more. Or, per what I said two grafs above, have enforced rates on their own papers.

Of course, I have worked for a couple of larger chain newspapers, but not outside the newspaper business. Yet.