Why are you "holding" the print version of your weekly newspaper?

 I am writing from Texas. A nearby newspaper, owned by a friend, who's also a journalism/mass communications prof.

This last Tuesday was Texas primary election day. Tuesday is his press day, and mine as well. 

Our press normally likes our newspapers at 5 p.m. or so.

The only statewide race in real doubt was the Democratic Senate primary. I think we were pretty sure the Republican Senate primary was going to a runoff, AG, Comptroller and RRC were going to runoffs, Gov and Lite Gov were blowouts, and that Dems would likely have a runoff for AG as well. 

There was one closely contested county commissioner race in his county. A district judge and the county clerk were also contested, but not closely. 

And, you do have a website. 

Plus, we all know that in a county of any size, county elections officials will post the results quickly on the county's website. 

I would have printed at normal time. 

A McLatchKey clusterfuck in Charlotte coming up

 The Charlotte Observer, nominally owned by McClatchy but really by Alden Chatham Asset Management, is about to implode.

Per a Substack run by a presumably online-only competitor, The Charlotte Ledger — or maybe the Substack IS??? the online paper ...

The Observer is going to cut to just 3x a week in print.

And, wait, that's not all.

We all know there is no DeJoy, or rather, too much DeJoy, in the Mudville of the U.S. Postal Service.

McLatchKey in Charlotte is delivering those 3x papers a week via the USPS. No more carriers.

Sidebar: Where in the FUCK are they being printed if they have 2 p.m. deadlines? Atlanta? They've obviously gotten rid of their own press, which for a daily paper in one of the top 30-35 metro markets in the US is incredibly stupid right there.

Here's the Observer's announcement. The change starts in September.

That said, this Ledger does run off Substack, it appears. That means you're paying overhead to Hamish et al. And charging just $99/year for the half that is paid. SMH. The Way of Life sub-Substack (it's a newspaper, not a newsletter) is paid-only, with 22K subscribers. OTOH, that's $2.2 million, if those subscriber numbers are current and no churn.

They say, on the first link, that the Observer is down to less than 40 journos. OK, at $50K a year, and allowing Hamish his cut off that $2.2 million plus the partially paid biz Substack, you've got the same number yourself.

However, my back-of-envelope calculation doesn't allow for the employer share of FICA taxes, nor for unemployment insurance program payments to the state, nor any state business taxes on the Ledger, nor any property taxes if it has a physical newsroom. (Also, are these sales subject to North Carolina sales tax?) It also presumes that there's no health insurance and these employees have to Obamacare. It also leaves no room for higher pay for editorial management. 

So, while the Observer may be imploding, and may have shot itself in the foot on the printing press closure, whenever that happened, it's not like the Ledger is necessarily all that and a pack of smokes either. And, it's been around four-plus years.

Why aren't you charging for sports if you are presumably, going beyond "just the box scores"?

==

Update: Re the suggested collection, Teh Google said Chatham is going in the crapper in other ways, merging McClatchKey with the parent company of the National Enquirer. Well, maybe not. The story said that "accelerate360," Chatham's glossy mag group, would specifically exclude the Enquirer and some other mags, and also by name exclude David Pecker.

We'll see how long and well that lasts.

==

Sidebar: I appreciate the correction from Alden to Chatham, which error I shouldn't  have made. But, it reminds me ... moderation here is being flipped on.

Online only newspaper + monthly print mag = cheapness?

 I was down this road a little over a year ago with Maricopa, Arizona, and it not wanting to pay the ME anywhere decent, as I nosed around. (Set aside that the co-owner sent me a Walgreens clerk type standard two page application form as part of the initial round of the interview and potential hiring process [no, really!] and you lost me.)

I had forgotten that a certain newspaper in the Metromess had gone this same route, and I believe pre-COVID. But, a chance to move back into the Metromess itself, if other thingswere OK.

Well, this position was for an assistant editor. Which I found out means staff writer-plus, really. Then, we eventually got to potential pay. And an "-ish" at the end of what was discussed made me realize that the position was being "sold." Of course; part of the D Mag stable.

And, they did hire somebody else, which is fine, because I don't need to be paid in exposure-plus, along with a possibility of graduating to D Mag itself. (Say hi to Jim Schutze for me.) I think, per what the gist of things were, a generational talent was OK with exposure-plus pay.

Does the newbie get a cut of the advertorial stuff you're running, too? (Looking at the PDF version of the mag, there's more than one piece.) Dunno if that would be happening were Wick still alive.

And, no paywall on the monthly mags? And, wasting print pages with a month's worth of crime logs, even if this area of the Metromess is low-crime (not counting state-level or federal-level fraud cases, since that involves money.) I clicked more than half a dozen individual stories and no paywall there, either; D Mag doesn't, either, I think. Of course, magazines are a bit diff.

That said, I'm not sure we should call this a mag. Unlike Maricopa, both Park Cities People and Preston Hollow People (there, you're named) are in tabloid format, and I figure are as likely to be printed on newsprint as magazine slick.

As for content, other than already noted? They do a "person of the year" issue in January. ONE tabloid page, and that's it. Counting photos. Text is only half the page.

Wow.

Even if they had more money, and better website management, I'm not sure I'd want to be there.

==

Basically, they sort of remind me of a lot of Colorado papers in the heart of the Rockies and the start of the Western Slope: A real estate mag with a few pages of other newspaper stuff as fishwrap. Now, People has more non-real estate ads, tis true; the resemblance isn't total. But, sort of? At least in my book, yes.

'Digital' isn't the answer to rural journalism's problems

And, boy, community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

In fact, to state it again?

Community newspaper owners, publishers and general managers need to hear that.

So, hear it! 

From the Community Journalism Project:

To me, this is spot-on. 

Quick takeaways:

1. Community newspapers are ever-more stretched out. Asking them to do yet more with less is just no bueno.

2. Are you doing renewal postcards for subscribers and other "hygiene"? (Ten percent — I would have guessed more — have past due subscribers, 90 days or more past.) Without embedding this one, here's a related CJP video about retention strategies in particular. In basic, it notes about 65 percent of people renew automatically to the community paper, about 5 percent you lose, and so you need to focus on retaining 30 percent or so.

3. Have you thought about outsourcing some of this "hygiene" to folks like CJP?

4. The meat of the webinar is IF you have people who want something digital, how to offer something without cannibalizing the print newspaper. Related to that is, if you have digital customers, doing the digital version of "hygiene."

On point 4, what I relate to is, as "no DeJoy in Mudville" continues to raise USPS rates, using digital to target out-of-county readers who are move-aways but might have grandkids who live locally and want to see them in sports pictures, etc.

They also note that digital should NOT be seen as a way of "converting" subscribers there to print.

Now, that said, CJP did not offer prices for its services at the end of the piece. 

They do talk about managing rate increases on this, but it seems that they're only talking about subscription rates. The elephant in the room, of course, for many smaller community papers, is advertising rates.

OTOH, some of it seems out-of-date. They talk about somebody at the high school football game posting score updates from a smartphone to the company website. Really? You're competing with Facebook pages, Dave Campbell's website here in Texas, and other things.

And, if you're a publisher who isn't comfortable with at least the basics of a Blox-based website, and isn't comfortable asking a staff member to do that, you should maybe ask whether you shouldn't be paying CPJ to do this.

But, back on the good side, they say don't overpay for digital bells and whistles if you don't know how to use it. And, boy, this is true. 

Back more to No. 4. If you're part of a group of anything more than three-four local newspapers, much of this can be done at the corporate level. Any group of half a dozen or more papers, and definitely 10 or more, whether having a presence of moderate, modest or none digitally, and whatever they're behind on, on print "hygiene," should have a dedicated staffer at corporate level. If there's no single corporate office, run it out of the largest newspaper in ownership and bill out prorated charges.

The Texas Trib is neoliberaling on with Ev Smith's replacement

 That's the case with Evan Smith's CEO replacement, Sonal Shah, per the Gray Lady's profile. She worked in Dear Leader's White House and later on Mayo Pete Buttigieg's prez campaign. She also squeezed in a stint at Goddam Sachs. Probably gives her an in on finding people for those oh-so-vaunted Trib Talks.

So, we should probably expect the Trib to continue to pull punches on environmental, financial and other types of news, despite its claims that it doesn't, of course.

InMaricopa recruited me — and then ...

For the first time, I think, I was recruited for a job, and no, not by one of those recruiters.

It was by the former top editor, now transitioning out to a job at Politico, at a combination online “newspaper” and monthly print magazine, InMaricopa, in Pinal County, Arizona.

That said, for people with some of my bent in reading, or knowledge of the Southwest, you’ll understand the partial quote and the idea, when I say that a picture of Maricopa, Arizona, should be in a phrase dictionary next to Cactus Ed Abbey’s “Growth for growth’s sake …” (Update: The new water cuts that BuRec has talked about ARE COMING. And, a day after BuRec announced them, InMaricopa has zip on its website.)

So, I was ambivalent from the start. But, agreed to talk further. After a phone call with transitioning editor, he had me talk briefly on the phone with the publisher / co-owner, who then set up a Zoom.

Meanwhile, he emailed me an application. (More on that in a sec.)

Before the Zoom with him and the ad manager, I emailed back about “salary range.” Him: “We don’t really have a range.”

Well, before the Zoom, I googled “Apartments for rent in Maricopa.” Got Apartments.com, I think as first hit. NO Apartments. Just houses. That means, even compared to North Texas, utilities will be MUCH HIGHER for electricity (not even counting water problems as noted by BuRec). I also hit one of those cost of living comparison websites. Between this? I was asking $20K more than currently, and had no problem saying that on Zoom AND saying that was on the low side.

Two days after that, I looked at the application and finished it TO MY SATISFACTION, but forgot, or passively-aggressively, didn’t send it.

I’ve not filled out a standard “application,” at least not before actually being hired, in more than a decade. So, another turnoff right there. Yes, this was just like applying at Walgreens or something.

Seriously. Way to turn off potential applicants.

Second, I don’t put dates of college attendance on my resume, for obvious reasons, so they weren’t getting them either. Ditto on salaries. I just scratched through them.

Well, Monday, when I was in county commissioners court, publisher calls. When I get to office, I first finally email him, with note if you can’t read anything, ask, but NO note explaining my scratch-outs.

Then, off  my voicemail, call him back.

He picks up, has a kind of garbled response rather than a “hello” then either drops his connection or else cuts me off.

Didn’t call back since.

There were other hesitations about this job too.

First? No paywall on the website.

Second? Boasting about Facebook "likes." Facebook don't feed the bulldog.

Third? I don't have a problem with it in an occasional newspaper special section, but when you openly admit a fair chunk of stories in your mag are the old "buy an ad, get a story," yes, we do have some concerns. As for the mag itself? It's more than 40 percent ads on one sample issue, but 25 percent of that was biz director ads that I've not seen before in monthly community mags. It's either smart aggressive advertising, or deep discounts on TFN ads. My guess? The latter. Also, it's delivered by mail, but I don't know if that's free or paid subscription. Can't tell from the editorial masthead.

Said masthead DOES mention the word "prosperity," which the publisher emphasized as part of its mission when he asked if I'd visited the website. I'd guess that prosperity doesn't trickle down a lot.

Fourth, the Pinal County newspaper, headquartered in Casa Grande, may (or may not) suck, though it does have a dedicated Maricopa reporter, and apparently a separate edition or paper for Maricopa, but running it down in public?

As for the mag itself? OK, no more than that.

Aggie administrators kill print version of The Battalion

Innnteresting, and per the Trib, apparently was done with ZERO forewarning to journo students, or input by them.

President M. Katherine Banks (always distrust people who go by first initial, middle name, until they prove otherwise!) made the call herself, according to A&M's dean of students. Banks claimed that, per a 2021 recommendation to bring back a journalism department there (dead since 2003), it was inline with focusing on digital journalism in general.

Problem? That journalism department ain't back yet, and who knows if it will be. A working group first discussed that as a possibility, nothing more, the day before Banks killed the print paper. Besides, Battalion staff note that most ad money for them still comes from print. Oops.

Good journalism students there are of course, and rightly, journalistically skeptical, even suspicious, about the official line on this.

Dear formerly daily papers: About those comics

The former daily closest to me did a head-scratcher in last Tuesday's edition of the now-triweekly.

It ran two days worth of comics.

I checked back on previous issues.

No, it hadn't.

Be consistent.

Yes, you were caught in a hole of sorts, being on an odd number of pages because of a special graphics page about the 75th anniversary of World War II officially ending with the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay

No matter.

At some point, corporate is going to renegotiate those comics deals anyway. Especially if they look at dropping back to semiweekly.

And otherwise, readers have been kind of futzing through skipped comics unless they bother to read the off days on your e-editions. (I still say, outside of seven-day dailies like the Arkansas Democrat looking for statewide coverage, most papers are looking for too much salvation from e-editions.) Start running a double set on rare days, and they're going to want them every day.

"Pink slime" journalism: both conservatives and liberals do it

Excellent piece by Columbia Journalism Review, following up on a report it did about the Tow Center and other folks. The biggest takeaways from CJR:

1. This problem has grown a lot since the original Tow piece.

2. Per a link to Open Secrets, although this started as a conservative to wingnut-conservative project, liberals are doing it, too. One biggie is the group behind the Shadow vote-tabulation app of infamy from the Iowa Democratic caucus. Another is Pantsuit Nation, obvious Hillbot folks. So, we're talking neoliberals. A third group also gets George Soros PAC money. (Cue wingnut conspiracy theories.)

3. What CJR doesn't mention is that, primarily for capital reasons, leftists aren't. (That said, CJR's general failure to distinguish liberal and leftist is itself an issue.)

4. The original "pink slime" wasn't necessarily partisan as much as it was cheap hypercapitalism.

5. Wanna know who's doing this in Texas? Page 11 of this link. Metric Media and Local News Network are conservative as are Record.

Missing from the CJR account is the problem with this much capitalism sloshing in the system. Missing are accounts of how doing these fake news sites rather than spending this money on ad buys further undercuts community newspapers which both duopoly parties give lip service to helping.

How much is that online paper or mag spying on you?

If it's like Outside Magazine, a whole helluva lot.

Read just how much Outside tracks your ass with cookies, analytics, Facebook, etc., if you don't wear lots of online condoms on your browser to protect yourself. And that page notes that, for browsers like Firefox, "do not track" signals are ignored.

I found that link as part of a story on my main blog about an Outside story on the National Park Service and budget cuts. I had looked for ads about concessionaires in and near national parks, and then other non-concessionaire businesses in neighboring towns, when I saw that link.

To summarize?

Seven different analytics links.

Eight tracking tools.

Facebook Connect beyond that for "functionality."

Plus the "we don't currently respond" to do not track signals.

Plus the old tut-tutting of "certain features on our platforms may not work" if you block our cookies.

Know what?

I.Dont.Care. I hope it doesn't, in the sense of making it harder for you to track me.

Beyond that, if your website won't work that well without that much spying, you've got problems anyway.

Beyond that, targeted advertising doesn't work as well as marketing people claim.

"We're digital first!" No you're not

This is the most irritating bullshit slogan from today's newspaper world after the ever-ongoing "We're learning to do more with less."

The New York Times may be "digital first." But you, small newspaper chain owners of some five-day and six-day dailies, are not.

You're not digital first if you don't have a separate subscription plan for online only readers, rather than a single forced buy combo of print and Net.

You're not digital first if you cut the AP wire to save money, but then invoke that "more with less" BS by refusing to cut pages even with the Trump paper tariffs.

You're not digital first if most of your online advertising is nothing other than your print section classifieds.

You're not digital first if you haven't done the paperwork to figure out if you're close to digital first on revenue vs overhead.

You're not digital first if you're part of a chain and you don't train your ad salespeople on selling digital ads.

You're not digital first if your graphics person(s) at a daily paper have no real experience or training in building quality digital ads.

You're not digital first just because you post a podcast and video on your website, if you're not getting anybody to sponsor that.

You're not digital first if you see being online as a way to fill print gaps.

Saying "we're digital first" as a self-hypnotic mantra doesn't make it so.

To be successfully digital first takes thought and strategy.

Beyond the advertising and circulation side I mentioned, that includes issues of whether you want to post every story online first, at least in full story format. Even with word-count delimited paywalls, if I can read a header and 50 words of text, that might be enough for me to not need to read more.

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.

Social media, or social overkill?

My newspaper company (privately owned, one just-acquired small daily, and a couple of dozen or so nondailies) recently held a day-and-a-half seminar on social media and related website issues.

Other than the question of why it was more than one day in length, with lodging costs for staff from papers not close to the headquarters, as well as just the time length, I did learn some things about some of the "newer" social media, like Pinterest and Instagram. However, it was probably a fair amount of "bleah," and, it was bloated. Beyond larger issues, I know other reasons the timespan was bloated and don't need to comment more.

Here's, tentatively, the rest of my observations.

First, it’s “interesting” at least, but ironic at most, that a seminar about social media in particular and best Internet practices in general, is loaded with dead trees handouts.

Second, it’s also “interesting” that, as part of the seminar is about how all of us are getting busier, a lot of the presentation was about all of us doing “more” for our papers on social media. Related to that was the irony that other people are “ingesting” more and more social media how? By either becoming more addicted, or compulsive, about use, or else by “goofing off” on the job more even as “content provider” employees are expected to spend more time not goofing off and feeding that beast.

Third, as papers continue to age in readers, it’s “interesting” to have a presenter talk about some social media having users who are so young that “they’re not yet readers” of our newspapers or papers in general.

Fourth, the ways of getting around the worst of the social media world, or the worst of the commercialized online world, were not discussed. AdBlock Plus wasn’t discussed. A search-history free, and Google-free in general, search engine like Ixquick or DuckDuck Go, wasn’t discussed. Ghostery to block tracking cookies wasn’t discussed.

Fifth, the presenter noted that Instagram, Vine and Snapchat don’t support links. So, that makes them worse. However, doesn’t that challenge the blogging-era prime’s claim that “it’s all about the links”? Is this true or not? Should it be true or not?

Sixth, it seems that a small to medium-small media company with small-sized individual outlets should recognize that economies of scale would involve headquarters expanding its IT/web staff, for less commonly used social media, like Pinterest, setting up newspaper accounts and adding to them from stories on each paper’s website.

Seventh, none of the discussion covered the narcissism angle of some social media, especially ones that “trend” younger in user demographics. I mean, we all have some degree of selfishness, but selfishness is not the same as narcissism.

Eighth, is blogging social media or not?

Above and beyond all of this, is there a "narcissism bubble" in the world of social media that will burst someday? After all, a medium is a mode of interaction. Traditional media's interaction was weighted fairly in one direction, as in "Here's what we've decided you'll see/read/hear." Things like selfies/geeky videos seem to have the same mentality, even if coming from individuals, not companies.

This narcissism bubble has nothing to do with newspapers  in particular or media in general, of course. However, it does relate to their current and future decisions as to what to do with the world of social media.

Austin American-Statesman - mistakes in digital, possibly beyond

Due to some unintentional misassumptions on my part, which started after, well, a recent "conversation" in Austin, I've learned that the Statesman has a few IT/web errors that I know of with its community papers.

Those that I don't know of, who knows?

Why this happened? I have some reasonable speculation.

But first, what the actual errors are.

On the websites of six of its seven community papers — the Bastrop Advertiser, Pflugerville Pflag, Lake Travis View, Round Rock Leader, Westlake Picayune, Smithville Times — their Facebook, Twitter and G+ links are all for the Austin American-Statesman social media sites.

After raising this issue with a person with whom I had, well, "conversed," he later showed me that the Bastrop Advertiser has a Twitter feed. And, a friend on a Facebook conversation showed me a Twitter feed, too. I'll assume that all the other papers above have their own social media pages. But their websites don't link to them.

These papers all had their own websites until just over a year ago, when they were rolled under the Statesman's umbrella as subsites.

Here's my guess as to what Statesman web staff probably did. They took the Statesman "main" site pages as a template 1 year ago when doing the rollover/wrap-in, and never replaced the Statesman links. The fact that this switch took place for all on the same date reinforces that in my mind. That's doubly so since this is less than six months after a major change at the Statesman, that may be connected.

First, if I'm the first person to both notice this and point it out in a full year, how much are people going to the community papers' social media feeds via the community papers' websites? Notta lotta? At least not among people new to Bastrop since the May 8, 2013, switchover. And, you can't blame this totally on the "demise of the homepage." There's social media links on each story page, and again, they all go to the Statesman, further reinforcing my theory.

So, Statesman? If you're going to emphasize social media, perhaps you need to further comb through the community papers and make sure there aren't other bugs. The rabbit hole of apparently, unintentionally, misguided thinking in finding out these are only erroneous links, rather than that your community papers don't have their own social media feeds, has left me frustrated. That's a lesser frustration to never having my social media skills, or theories, discussed in detail during that "conversation."

Beyond that, if either the Statesman, or its Cox Communications parent, is so dumb as to say it will, and I quote, "never" have paywalls for the web versions of its community newspapers? If you want to piss money away, that doesn't help the financial bottom line.

As to why this happened, beyond the speculation of a copied, and incompletely edited, template?

As part of its money-saving, Cox canned the entire Statesman copy desk late in 2012. All of its sections are paginated at other Cox papers. As far as I know, despite Austin being the Silicon Valley of Texas, they may do some Web and IT stuff for the Statesman elsewhere. I mean, I've been in Texas long enough; I know Cox was trying to unload the Statesman, along with all its other Texas holdings, for a few years. (And, from what I've seen, without eyeballing the Statesman on too regular of a basis, I'm not a total fan of over-consolidation. Besides, if you have to still have a "bridge desk," how much money are you really saving?) That said, with the over-consolidation, Cox will never be able to sell any of its large dailies individually now. Nobody wants to buy one daily paper and start off by hunting up copy desk staff.

And, beyond that, it looks like the Statesman isn't sure what to do with its outlying editions. All of them except Bastrop and Smithville are suburban, not exurban, now, and most of them are suburban. And, because Bastrop and Smithville are exurban, not suburban, their websites, unlike the other four, shouldn't have been rolled up into new Statesman versions, IMO. The other four? Given that they, in print, may be nothing more than zoned-like pages inside the Statesman within a decade, that's different. But, those two should have been kept separate. Again, whether a Statesman decision or a Cox one, not smart.

Who knows? Maybe Cox is doing its own version of what newspaper analysts rumor is Advance's endgame ... spending out to the finish line. 

Jeeesuhus H. Christ on a crutch, it gets worse.

Try to subscribe to one of their suburban papers from that suburban paper's website, and you can't. Even if you enter the zip code appropriate to that suburban or exurban area. It tries to sign you up for the Statesman itself, and it offers the web option first.

What fucking idiocy.

As for their level, and particulars, of use of social media, I'm not that impressed at Bastrop. It's nothing really out of my pay grade, and not bad for a paper that size, but nothing to set the world on fire. If I were to be managing editor at a place like that, I might be a bit short on video skills, but  that's about it.

Finally, I had started by wondering if the Statesman, in looking for a managing editor with social media skills, but not emphasizing that desire for social media skills, wasn't flirting with age discrimination. I still haven't totally dismissed that idea, though it has certainly diminished. 

And here's why.

I was in the Metroplex when, as part of the "bleed," in 2008 or 2009, the Dallas Morning News canned a bunch of older staffers, almost all of them columnists and critics. It got sued — I haven't Googled in a few years to find the results. In the filing of the suit, the plaintiffs mentioned that computer skills, or alleged lack thereof, and ability to learn and/or improve them, or lack thereof, were among the reasons for the dismissals, and that these were "code phrases" for "get rid of the older people."

I'm not saying that's what was happening here. I am saying that, in conjunction with their Web staff's screw-up, for reasons I postulate or others, and with the background I just mentioned? It was a possible conclusion. That's even more the case since I don't recall the Statesman, in its ME for Bastrop search, being THAT interested in social media skills. So, an interview could have been more focused on that. Besides, there's this.

As for the claims of not noting my social media background? Per the top 1/4 of the first page of my resume:

COMPUTER SKILLS

• Quark  • Photoshop  • InDesign  • Office • Video • Web content  • Social media • QuickBooks

Last I checked, "social media" was spelled as, uh, "social media"! So, that's undercut right there. Plus, "Web content"? That means that, using either a house-based system or a third-party web host, I have experience (and it's extensive) in website "publishing" for various newspapers. I've done that for years.

And, discrimination can be done unconsciously or subconsciously. I recently read a great book called Blindspot, by two psychology researchers. They have online tests, using series of pairs of photos, to test for unconscious bias in race, sex, age, and sexual orientation. One of the two authors, in fact, was dismayed that the author's self-testing showed more bias than the author wanted to believe.

If nothing else, I consider this precautionary for myself and advise it to be precautionary for other print journalists who may be above "X" years of age. Even if you're not asked, play up social media skills in your interview, and even your cover letter. If you're not asked about them during an interview, raise the question yourself of how they're valued.

This is even as Facebook is continuing to choke the reach of for-profit pages, Google+ continues to look like tumbleweeds and Twitter has seemed to plateau. The newspaper biz, when it's not stuck behind the curve on things like paywalls, chases fads without asking whether the for-profit folks on the other end of the fad might not wind up doing a bait-and-switch.

Beyond that, leaning too much on Facebook, especially if you're a larger community paper, or even worse, a daily? Soon enough, you just have people reading Facebook, not your paper. And seeing Facebook ads, not your paper's. (That's if they don't have AdBlock Plus, so they don't have to see your ads OR Facebook's.) And, your web traffic drops. And, your ad rates drop more than they already do. 

In short, newspapers in general? You can hire for newspaper editors and reporters, or you can hire for social media writers. The choice is yours. Sadly, I expect most newspapers will make a choice that is at least partially incorrect. 

I'll admit that part of this is personal frustration, too.  

And, I want to say that I was shown courtesies during the interview process. At the same time, I've been shown courtesies during other interview processes that were even more "formulaic," at best.

Overall, my estimate is that is was about 40 percent no "fault" anywhere, 40 percent age discrimination, even if primarily unintentional or subconscious, and 20 percent bad interviewing. I felt a good rapport with my interviewer. But, as noted, "social media" is at the top 1/4 of the first page of my resume. And, I was never asked detailed questions about social media; in fact, I don't recall really being asked at all about it. Some, something, somehow, is kind of rotten in the state of Austin. 

As for their commitment to social media, it's been five days since I asked why, if they're so committed to social media, all their community newspapers have links to Statesman feeds, and I've not heard back yet. Sorry, Thomas Jones, but, especially since you said you like people to be outspoken, and I assume that would include "outspoken" questions, then I'd like an answer. Until then, I'll keep connecting dots in my mind, and blogging about them as desired.

I think I was likely the best candidate for the position. I've had that reinforced by knowing that I've won additional first-place awards in this year's Texas Press  Association newspaper contest. And, I wasn't given the full opportunity to show that, in my opinion. 

Warren Buffet's gamble on community papers a loser — and other stupidities

Warren Buffett doubled down on community newspapers a couple years back, and it's a loser, so far. Hell, I could have told Bloomberg that. First, despite Buffett allegedly supporting paywalls, here in Central Texas, his two small 7-day dailies only paywall the PDF e-edition, which means bupkis, especially as nobody reads PDFs on mobile devices. And, the HTML news stories on site are all free. Given that most non-daily community papers still think this is what a paywall means, it's no wonder that community newspapers are basically, with some differences in detail, about at the same spot in the financial stupidity curve as larger newspapers were a decade ago.

Linked to this is that smaller metropolitan areas, at least here in Tejas, aren't fully sharing in the economic recovery of the big cities.

Take Waco, where the Tribune-Herald is one of the two papers I'm talking about. On Saturdays, which should be a big day, the paper struggles to hit the 30 percent mark on ads, and that's counting the inches of paid obits as straight ad space. I don't know about Bryan-College Station, but I venture to guess the Eagle's in somewhat similar boat, though maybe not as bad.

Beyond that, whether his investments in the biz are small or not, Buffett knows nothing special about newspapers, other than fairly typical slash-and-burn. At the Buffalo News, early on, he was strong on union-busting as part of reducing costs.

Back to the main point, though. PDFing an e-edition while posting in HTML all your main news stories for free is NOT a paywall.

What it is, is stupidity and a waste of time even as newspapers try to do more with less on staff time as well as money.

And this isn't likely to get better in the near future.

Meanwhile, per Editor & Publisher, "winning stratetegies" of small and middle sized dailies include:
1. Publishers using the C-word. Any time a publisher mentions "content," I reach for my revolver.
2. Newspapers "rediscovering" special sections. Problem? If you're hosting the event for which the special section is about, and "hosting" as in paying costs to put it on, having staff on the ground, etc., aren't you losing at least part of your profit? If so, how much? Are you trying to minimize this by having only salaried and not hourly people do this? If so, how much, if any , comp time are you giving them?
3. Newspapers "partnering" with folks like chambers of commerce for tourism guides, etc. Sounds good — until your chamber of commerce does ill-advised spending of hotel-motel tax money, or the equivalent in your state, and, you have to write a story about it. What if the chamber, the economic development board, etc., then "un-partner" with you?
4. A newspaper saying that its expanded database of email addresses for discount blasts have helped ward off Groupon. If you're that worried about Groupon, a company more and more despised by merchants, and you're that worried in part because you've not read NEWS STORIES and not CONTENT that has reported exactly this about Groupon, then [sigh].

What can you expect from such stupidity, though? Per Poynter, back with the big boys, the Boston Globe is now going to a metered paywall, with 10 freebies per month, vs none before. But, it refuses to call it a paywall, just using the term "meter." It's unclear if the totally free Boston.com is staying around. If it is, then the Globe is as stupid as the Chron in San Francisco and the Snooze in Dallas.

That said, the stupidity isn't limited to the U.S.

The Guardian is getting a pretty penny for selling its majority stake in Auto Trader, but, without a paywall, Alan Rusbridger and gang will continue to burn through Scott Trust money, and this "infusion," like money's going out of style.

The company, which has divested of non-core newspaper assets such as GMG Radio – the third largest radio group in the UK which owned brands including Real and Smooth – for £70m has revealed that the sale of its majority stake in AutoTrader has secured the financial future of the newspaper portfolio for a minimum of 30 years.

Yeah, we'll see if this last for 30 years. Meanwhile, how much profit were these other assets making? Maybe you should have kept them and done more to fix the Guardian's bottom line at the same time.

I mean, you can chase the allegedly "lucrative U.S. market" all you want, but since that market, for newspapers, is expected to have another 8 percent ad revenue decline this year, it gets less lucrative all the time. And, new numbers on digital circulation aren't doing a lot more than offsetting print subscription declines, in many cases.

There is essentially now an infinity of digital inventory, very different than scarcity in print, so you can buy digital advertising anywhere and everywhere,” (Ken Doctor) said.

This is something I've been hammering myself, as the flip side of the Gnu Media gurus talking about how the digital world offers an infinity of room for news stories, length of news stories, etc. Throw in programmatic advertising, which is further driving down rates, primarily in print, but surely in digital, too.

Add in that digital dimes are likely to be replaced by mobile nickels, especially per my note above about PDFs and mobile devices, and, Rusbridger can chase diminishing returns all he wants.

Unfortunately, the only real hope Doctor sees is from points 2 and 3 under the "best practices" above:
Growth may come, he suggested, as companies expand into “third, fourth, and fifth” businesses, in addition to the first two, advertising and circulation. Newer revenue sources include digital marketing services, sponsoring events and conferences, and in-house publishing activities to help other papers looking for publishing services.
So, let's look once again at this.

Digital marketing services? In small towns, papers may have a partial edge on this. But, big cities? Nahhh. That's what public relations companies do, Ken. Thousands of them, both newer and older, flood Monster, Indeed, and other job sites with "SEO specialist wanted" ads all the time.

So, scratch No. 3.

No. 4? I've already poo-poohed this on conflict of interest grounds. Or worse, on sponsored conferences? We've already seen this backfire with the NYT and WaPost. And Politico.

No. 5? Given that more media companies are already consolidating printing services, and the long-term future points digital only, how can you even offer this one?

Shows that outside stereotypical Jarvis, Rosen, Shirky, and other Gnu Media gurus, other analysts aren't so brilliant all the time, either.

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?

#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.