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Journalism

Media Roil Call

These are perilous times for traditional media.

Things are changing so rapidly that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone predicts “there won’t be any newspapers in two years,” according to BusinessWeek magazine (Poynter.org, 4/27/10).  Never one to resist a dig at rivals, the cantankerous Redstone says his rival Rupert Murdoch “lives in ink, and I live in movies and television. Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.”

If one thing is clear, however, there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to technology.

Consider that some 800,000 U.S. households cut the cord to cable and satellite TV in favor of such alternatives as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes in the past two years, according to the Convergence Consulting Group, which predicts the number to reach 1.6 million by the end of 2011. [TechCrunch, 4/13/10, http://tcrn.ch/cordcutters]

Last year, 12 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watched at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online; this year the number is 17 percent and next year it’s expected to be 21 percent. There are clearly changes in store for the $84 billion cable/satellite TV access industry, although there are forces at work to slow the progression of programming to the web (such as the $34 billion that cable companies paid last year in programming fees).

Meanwhile, newsprint, as Redstone gleefully noted, is fast dissolving into memory. Newspaper companies are falling into bankruptcy (13 major ones at last count), while commentators of all stripes welcome the destruction of old media fortresses; leftists slam them for their “reactionary” institutional and corporate bias and right-wingers for the perceived “liberalism” of their staff. The more politically agnostic simply feel newspapers just don’t “get it” — that is, they don’t know how to price their products correctly and stay ahead of technology. The current consensus of the technorati seems to be that online newspapers should be either free or, if they go to the paywall model, unbundle their content – following the Internet or Apple’s revolutionizing the music business.

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ADDENDUM: Happy to see that the NY Times paywall seems to be working … it would seem that some people ARE indeed willing to pay something for that priceless (yet costly to produce) product called journalism.

Businessweek (Re)Blooms

When Bloomberg LLP purchased hoary old Business Week magazine from McGraw-Hill you could be forgiven for wondering what they were thinking. The multimillion dollar price tag may have been mere pocket change to the maker of ubiquitous and highly lucrative financial data machines. But still, why bother?

After all, Washington Post Co. is jettisoning Newsweek after nearly 50 years of ownership and a recent complete redesign, because it can’t make the property pay.

Now called Bloomberg Businessweek, both the print and electronic versions of the specialty publication have undergone less of a redesign than a re-imagining. And therein lies the promise of its success.

From it’s very name, it’s clear that the reborn media property is part of a new family and new strategy — the new owner  is the brand, and businessweek is its extension.

It’s a larger and more complicated media property now, packed with information packaged all sorts of ways, serving distinct groups from traders to cultural zeitgeistists. There are short, snappy pieces along with narrative features (Meg Whitman on the campaign trail, municipalities deep-sixed by sophisticated financial trades, etc.), investigative pieces (former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld’s perjury, for-profit college scams), and continuation of special areas of expertise (for instance, the importance of design to productivity).

There are lots of moving parts to manage, so Bloomberg’s strength in low-key, by-the-book management will come in handy. In contrast, other recent attempts to reinvent the business magazine such as Conde Nast’s Portfolio failed, in part because of editorial/managerial temperament.

Bloomberg’s challenge (as with whoever ends up owning Newsweek) is less to make print relevant in the electronic age than to revitalize a trusted (and therefore valuable) brand so that it nimbly adopts new technologies to reach varied audiences in varied ways.

Check it: http://www.businessweek.com/http://www.businessweek.com/

Making Content Pay

What do the following have in common — The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and ESPN?

They are among the news organizations (now called “content creators”) that are successfully charging folks to read their content online. That is, they have walled off their valuable content so that readers have to pay to enter.

Their success in this endeavor is studied with great interest by hundreds of other media outlets starved for funds and perplexed how — in this information-wants-to-be-free era — they will ever get back paying subscribers and the advertisers that go with them.

Will people pay for local news coverage? Mike Klingensmith publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune more than hopes so. He’s planning on it.

“It’s not an inexpensive process to create the proprietary content we create,” he explains, “and we have to be compensated for it in the future. As I believe almost all content providers will have to be.” [See the original interview by David Brauer in full: http://bit.ly/StarTribInterview]

He favors a web-based product that with all-inclusive, as opposed to a la carte, pricing – with free samples available via as many links as possible. Content that is completely free vs. partially free (a sample) might depend on the reader’s location or story source (such as AP or staff).

His team is not just redesigning the news organization’s website, but rebuilding it into a platform, to act as more of a “content tent” that embraces staff-generated news, vendor-generated services and user-generated content.

The content has to display on whatever type of device consumers use. “We’re going to follow our consumers in that regard,” says the man with deep experience in magazine journalism, which is generally more advanced in consumer marketing. “It’s not for us to dictate; it’s for them to tell us.”

Unmasking Anonymity

Posting comments online is an addictive, and contagious, activity – where would the Internet’s viral vibrancy and interconnectivity be without it? But should site operators allow visitors to post anonymously?

Journalists especially wonder what good purpose it serves for anonymity to be offered to those who add comments to the end of online reportage. Some papers, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, require the posters register, but that information is not publicly available.

Anonymity is no guarantee, however, merely a courtesy or a custom. Case in point, The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently outed a judge for anonymously posting on its website disparaging comments about a local lawyer with cases before her court. Her Honor is suing for violation of privacy.

Bear in mind that not much if any whistle-blowing deserving of anonymity is occurring in these comment streams. Instead they tend to be postings from people who don’t want the boss to know what they’re really doing during work hours — or they’re excretions from the petty, the obscene, and the venomous. “A lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl,” William Grueskin of Columbia University’s J-School said in the New York Times (4/12/10), “with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher.”

So news organizations are pondering and tweaking (… it doesn’t help the cause of anonymity that advertisers don’t care to see their ads pop up next to some unexpectedly nasty comment). The Washington Post, for instance, is planning a system of “user tiers” based on the credibility a user has garnered from other users, much as Amazon.com displays more prominently the product reviews voted “helpful” by other readers/reviewers. The new Post system might give more prominence to commentators using their real names.

On the matter of message board policing, many sites already provide this function but usually lack the resources to keep up with the volume — or check to make sure that divulged identities and email addresses are legitimate. But there is hope for the future of honesty, integrity, and courage (or perhaps just for imprudence): Younger generations tend to be more comfortable attaching their names and faces to their beliefs and preferences (even though it’s often TMI – too much information – another problem altogether).

Calling it an “education process,” Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington told the Times, “As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity.”

NPR.org Rocks!

NPR.org — National Public Radio’s website — just won the Peabody award for distinguished broadcast journalism.

Not what you’d expect from a website. But then, NPR.org isn’t just any website, just as its parent isn’t just any radio network. Both give customers what they want and need, how and when they want it. Classic, yet current in every way.

NPR.org offers news, music, concerts, NPR shows, interviews, widgets on your desktop, features about culture, and more. Just no commercials.  The Peabody folks praised the “topically boundless” nature of the site: “A whole lot of things considered, from ‘South Park’ to North Korea, make this one of the great one-stop websites.”

“This award reflects more than the appeal and usefulness of NPR’s website,” writes Matthew Lasar in Ars Technica (4/2/10). “It’s recognition that NPR represents one of broadcast radio’s few success stories over the last decade.”

NPR has avoided the bankruptcy fate of thousands of stations struggling to stay relevant in the Internet age, and in fact is growing. Due in part to interest in the 2008 election, it now boasts a weekly audience of 27.5 million, an increase of 7%. According to Ars Techica, more than 900 FM radio stations are either NPR affiliates or run NPR programming.

NPR stays current by such moves as developing the Public Radio Player for the iPhone – which 2.5 million subscribers use to select the shows they want to listen to (and when) at hundreds of public radio stations. Pretty nifty.

There’s also a mobile NPR.org (m.npr.org) and a news app for Google’s new Android. Last week, NPR debuted a way for other media services to post content to NPR as well as receive it. Most recently: content and tools for the iPad.

What a great website, company, and service to the nation and our intensely interesting, and interested, world. Tune in today!