News Design School » Future of newspapers

Online advertising looking good for newspapers

Bob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:01:43 +0000

Online advertising is starting to help beleaguered newspapers a bit — surely good news for the troubled industry.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, newspapers’ online revenue in 2009 hit $2.7 billion. This while newspapers’ print revenue continued to fall to about $24 billion, about half what it was in 2000. So the good news is that newspapers aren’t bleeding as much.

It may not be a financial savior, but I hope it’s enough to keep newspapers alive for awhile, if only online. I still say they are our best hope for the future because their newsgathering staff, as cut back as it is, is still superior to that of broadcast stations. Let’s face it, if you want local news, you are going to get it from a newspaper web site, not a television station.

What happened to convergence in the newsroom?

Bob — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:35:09 +0000

On one of my mailing lists the other day (Gads, just saying mailing list instead of Twitter account or Facebook page makes me feel out of step), someone asked whether people at newspapers who consider themselves “print-only” or “web-only” are dead in the water, that newspapers are moving toward convergence.

Isn’t the asking of this question alone a sign that you are dead in the water yourself?

I was at a meeting the other day with local media professionals and the newspaper design maven at the local paper said that “silos” didn’t exist at the paper any more and that we need to prepare college grads for the new reality.

This means that we need to prepare them for life as a mojo or at least prepare our so-called “print” majors for a career with multimedia. With flip video cameras, the iPhone, digital audio recorders, Audacity, netbooks and such, how can this question even be asked today?

According to Bob Papper, who yearly does a “Future of News” study that he presents at RTNDA, newspapers lost an estimated 5,000 or so jobs in 2009, approximately 11 percent of newsworkers. TV stations lost only about 1.5 percent.

Stories hitting my computer recently include ones about how we are re-entering the world pre-Gutenberg when words were less important than oral communication and how the Ventura (CA) newspaper is using the iPhone (and other assorted gadgets to make the iPhone functional) to record video in the field and upload it immediately to their web site.

It is clear to me that the word is in danger of losing out to the image. In fact, that’s the title of an excellent book from 1998: The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.

The newsroom is already converged, baby.

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Some people will pay for content

Bob — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:19:44 +0000

In a study of 27,000 people across 52 countries, Nielsen found that consumers might pay for content, that is if it is not something they can get for free elsewhere.

Consumers are most likely to pay for movies and music (sort of expected) and least likely to pay for content that is user generated, i.e., social media sites, consumer-created movies and blogs.

IN THE MIDDLE are news and information sites, such as newspapers and magazines. The problem once again is that consumers can access a lot of news and information for free. As long as that choice is around, it is going to be very difficult to set up paywalls.

A friend of mind who is a publisher of a small daily in North Carolina told me recently that his great paywall experiment is going like this: more than 4,000 subscribers to the print editing, a little over 350 to the online version. It may seem like a small number, but it’s a start.

In the Nielsen study, consumers had a few requirements for content they would pay for. For instance, 71% said that content would have to be much better before they would consider paying.

That leaves a door open it seems to me, because quality is something we can control. This means stop the cutting of the newsroom: they are your only hope to survive. They are not an unjustifiable expense.

For the full read, go to: http://tinyurl.com/yka7vez

New York Times OKs paid content

Bob — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:39:28 +0000

The New York Times has decided it’s time to end the speculation and say they are definitely going to a paid model for their wen site about a year from now. According to the WSJ, paper execs say that core readers are ready to pay.

The plan calls for a limited number of free reads per month for everyone, then you’ll have to pay to gain access. Subscribers to the print edition will have full access.

The key is to avoid fungibility.

The key is to avoid fungibility. Too much of news is fungible, i.e., it is easily exchanged for another similar product.

AN EXAMPLE is wheat stored in a silo from a variety of farmers. The exact kernels are interchangeable — what matters is the number of bushels each farmer has stored, not which individual kernels are his.

Too much of news is fungible, i.e., it can be substituted for by others’ news quite easily, so why pay for it? The NYT, and others who will inevitably follow, needs to create content that is unique, that cannot be found by going elsewhere.

How they do that is up to staff creativity and hard work. But who better to show the way than the Times?

The Times is basing its decision largely on the success of the iTunes music and app store. What is the secret of that store’s success? It’s content isn’t fungible. It cannot be gotten elsewhere.

When readers are cornered they will pay. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

PREVIOUS POSTS: Read more about the future of newspapers.

Poll results: Newspaper paywall a go

Bob — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:02:36 +0000

The results are in from my second poll: “How much would you be willing to pay to access a news web site?”

Somewhat surprising to me, 77% said they would be willing to pay something, 13% said no and 12% said maybe. Of the people who said yes, 44% voted for $1 a month and 33% voted for $1 a month or $5 a month. I expected there to be more no’s.

A potential confounding factor is that the people who visit this site and probably those who voted as well, are news junkies and not typical of the every day reader.

PEOPLE WILL PAY

Still, I think it shows that people will pay for mediated news, although probably not very much, and it better be unique. One commented summed it up quite well: “[I would pay] nothing unless it was in some large way better than I can get for free.”

I think we can freely define “better” as including “unique” and “well chosen and edited.”

It is clear that the pay-for-mediated-news (note the mediated) angle must be explored.

Earlier post on “portal” vs. “paywall.”

Newspapers and the 3 umpires

Bob — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:04:48 +0000

Three umpires were talking before a game:
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call them as they are.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, but they ain’t nothin’ til I call ‘em.

I use this little tale to get my students talking about critical thinking, scientific research, evidence and writing. But it has value beyond the classroom.

One simple parsing of the third umpire’s statement is that naming something helps create the “isness” of that something. Calling a dandelion a flower is different from calling it a weed, in terms of our emotional reaction toward it.

Calling the act of charging for the processing of information and data into news a “paywall”
is part of the problem. A wall naturally separates two things. Calling it a wall gives it a negative spin. Why not call it a portal?

People used AOL for many years as a paid “portal” to both its own content and eventually to
the Internet. That ended after a while not because people refused to pay at all, but because AOL no longer offered content that could not be gotten elsewhere for free.

Despite the many people who say that the toothpaste is out of the tube, that newspapers can’t go back to a paid web model, I think they can. Maybe. If it is done right and by a lot of papers at the same time.

They may not have a choice.

Sure, they will lose some subscribers, probably a lot of subscribers initially, but if they offer value, people will pay to get it.

People pay today for access for all sorts of cable channels they can’t get for free elsewhere. They pay for cell phones, text messaging, Netflix, and they pay for high speed Internet access, although you can get dial-up for free or virtually so. I bet most people would be willing to pay a few cents per tweet.

The issue is not so much that people WON’T pay, it’s that you have to give them something they want. Then they’ll pay.

I think that’s going to have to be the model moving forward. Give people something they want and ask them to support it by paying. Relying on CPM advertising is no longer a workable model. Corporate sponsorship along the lines of public radio and television stations might help as well.

This is going to be a painful time for newspapers, and the new version won’t look much like the old, but the creative and bold will survive if they can metamorphize from their caterpillar past into their butterfly future.

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Newspaper design: 6 things I think I think

Bob — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:36:30 +0000

Here are some things I think I think about newspaper design.

1. Good design is important, but content is king. I think most people – except maybe for out-of-work designers – would agree. I do believe the point bears repeating, however. It should become a mantra, chanted throughout the newsroom. Readers don’t care whether you use Arial or Franklin Gothic for your cutlines. They do care about getting good content and design that doesn’t get in the way.

2. Designers are important for setting up the format and overall layout and spacing guidelines, but are less important than reporters and editors to the day-to-day overall product. It almost pains me to write those words, but I think it is true. Push comes to shove, I would rather have writers and editors than designers.

Good design is important, but content is king.

3. Design cannot be treated as a cosmetic add-on after all the content has been gathered. Design concepts must be integrated into the newsgathering process from the very beginning. The best time to think about design is when the assignments are being made. Bring the visual people into the planning meetings. Don’t simply hit them up on deadline for some clip art to “dress up” your story.

4. I don’t think people who lay out ad-free pages should worry about making each issue a unique set of pages. Readers don’t care, and the reality is only a handful of placements on pages work well any way. It would speed up the process to have a designer create a series of 5-6 templates and then get out of the way.

The copy desk folks could then call up the template that fit the best and make the few, small changes the content requires. No need to re-invent the wheel each issue and no need to pay designers to do layouts. That’s like paying police officers to be school crossing guards.

Pages with ads on them need designers even less. The ads pretty much limit what can be done beyond slotting in stories and packages in the space available. Again, get a designer to set up some standards and train the desk folks in the basics and be done with it.

5. I think newspaper designers worry too much about typeface, color and related issues that readers simply don’t care about. Although I think branding and user experience can be helpful in market differentiation, most newspapers have a monopoly. The web, magazines and television are competitors only if you stretch the term a bit.

There’s an understated beauty in black-and-white, and I think an all B&W newspaper could be successful. It would be an easier and slightly cheaper paper to produce. Every buck you could save would help.

I’d spend money on solving circulation problems and getting ink that doesn’t come off on your hands, clothes and tablecloths.

6. I think the Society for News Design has created this monster by (a) handing out thousands of awards each year, and (b) rewarding “pretty” when it should have been rewarding “successful.”

All those awards are ridiculous, and SND still pretty much ignores the vast majority of newspapers in the country, the small-circulation dailies and weeklies. It would be like handing out 15 Best Picture statues at the Oscars. Those awards remind me of the many self-congratulating awards that advertising folks hand out to one another in a number of competitions. The creative ads win, sure, but I want to know whether they succeeded in moving product. That’s a good ad.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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Newspaper design challenge: shrinkage

Bob — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:36:10 +0000

Newspapers are shrinking faster than a cheap cotton t-shirt in a hot dryer, both in terms of the business and the format. Revenues? Smaller. Circulation? Smaller. Number of pages? Fewer. Format? Smaller.

We all know about shrinking newsroom staffs, ad sales and circulation numbers. That’s pretty old news by now. But newspaper designers are facing their own special challenges as more and more papers are moving from the broadsheet format — which itself has been shrinking toward the proportions of a reporter’s notebook — to the tabloid.

Readers seem to prefer the smaller size, and unlike media professionals, don’t seem to equate tabs to yellow journalism. Advertisers have been slower to embrace the tab. That frightens me a bit, because I believe a successful newspaper is going to have to please advertisers first, then bring the readers along.

But it hasn’t stopped at the tab. Papers in Europe, which seems to be leading the way in newspaper innovation, have devolved to the Berliner format (basically an 11 by 17) or even A4 size, the European equivalent of our letter-sized paper. The A4 is 8.3 by 11.7 inches.

But it doesn’t stop there. Jacek Utko, a Polish designer who gained some fame this year for a talk at the weekly TED conference (watch it at http://tinyurl.com/dc8l7y) , believes that newspapers, and those who design them, need to think even smaller, all the way down to mobile phones.

As with the move from bulky broadsheet to tab, the push is from readers who want portability and ease of use. People today are permanently attached, it seems, to their mobile phones, which are used more like portable information and communication devices than as telephones. The iPhone, for instance, is a great little text machine and web browser, but not so good as a phone. People don’t care. The phone part is secondary to them.

Tomorrow’s designer will have to create a structure for the news on less newsprint than ever before, and on web sites, digital readers (e.g., Kindle) and mobile phones.

When it comes to size, bigger may be better, but smaller appears to be winning the newspaper race.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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Newspapers on campus

Bob — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:54:38 +0000

Could colleges and universities be saviors for newspapers? A few people think so.

I have been a little hesitant to embrace some of the arguments, but I am starting to come around. Universities aren’t in such good shape either, and certainly the movement toward having higher ed work like business is losing traction, given the state of American business.

Maybe it’s time to collaborate.

In March Jonathan Zimmerman of the Christian Science Monitor suggested that professors could write for newspapers for free. After all, he reasoned, they already write for academic journals for free: what would be wrong with pushing some toward getting decent local content into the local paper?

My initial reaction was negative, but I’ve moved in that direction a bit. I believe we could find hundreds of willing professors, who in the world of “publish or perish,” would be happy to swap The Journal of Impossibly Unimportant Studies for The Daily Blab.

Professors are required to add to their field’s body of knowledge through research or work with professional colleagues on important projects to keep their skills fresh. The results of both are meant to be brought to the classroom as well, so that students benefit directly from professors’ non-teaching work.

It seems like a good approach to me. If institutions would better recognize and reward such publications, professors in many fields — not just journalism — would certainly sign up for a byline. If you build it, they will write.

More recently in Inside Higher Ed, David Scobey, a professor at Bates College, brought up the concept of dailynews.edu, another attempt to bring universities into the fray. Scobey suggests three potential models: (1) many public radio stations already are hosted by universities, why not a newspaper staffed by both profs and talented students; (2) something similar to the extension services that are part of land-grant institutions; and (3) something akin to cultural institutions such as museums, theaters and botanical gardens.

All are financial mash-ups of public and private monies that served the local area. Why not do the same thing with the newspapers? The ad model can’t carry the load by itself any more, and having the government simply step in to subsidize newspapers is not an idea I can live with.

Seems like a win-win to me. Professors would get a new creative and professional outlet for their work, students would gain a solid apprenticeship in the field that would supplement their classroom work, and the local public would benefit from the work of both.

I think it is worth considering.

Sources:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0309/p09s01-coop.html
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/08/28/scobey

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What about Sunday ad inserts?

Bob — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:28:14 +0000

My anorexic local paper thumped down by my front door (late, as usual) Sunday morning, but I could hardly find the actual paper among the inserts. Two complete “sections” of inserts, each three times as big as the paper itself.

It is as if the Sunday newspaper carrier is a paid deliverer of inserts, and oh yeah, here are a few pages of news.

On Monday morning when I picked up the paper, it was so thin I honestly thought the carrier had left out a few sections. Nope. Just thinner than ever.

Then I thought about those inserts the day before. ROP advertising is down, but are inserts? Doesn’t seem like it in my local paper. I understand that newspapers get about $25 per thousand for the inserts. This is considerably less than they get for ROP ads, which help increase the pages in the paper.

Clearly, advertisers still want to reach newspaper subscribers, at least on Sundays. In 2007, more than $5 billion was spent on advertising inserts, according to a knowledgeable blogger. It may be lower now, but probably not much.

If the desire to spend that much money remains strong as newspaper readers are going away, what is going to happen to those insert dollars as we move toward the web? Turn inserts into web site pop-ups? That’s not going to work, but I have an idea.

The USPS is losing money. Maybe they could get into the insert delivery business on Sundays — and deliver mail as well, taking Mondays off instead — as newspapers complete their migration to the web. People could sign up or not, saving paper and trees.

Maybe some advertisers would run more Sunday ROP ads instead. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick Sunday morning paper again?

I hope someone will enlighten me about the economics of Sunday inserts….