Archive for the ‘Audiences’ Category

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Life at the confluence

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
The prototypical confluence

The prototypical confluence

It was a regular, and solemn, invocation for Monday Night Football in the years when the Pittsburgh Steelers turned up there as often as ABC and the NFL could manage it: Howard Cosell, in his fullest declamatory splendor, telling America that he and we would spend the next several hours “at the confluence of the Al-le-ghe-ny and Mo-non-ga-he-la Rivers” – the origin of the Ohio River, and therefore the very eponym of Three Rivers Stadium.

There are a couple of football games this weekend that don’t include the Steelers, but we are spending the end of January at a confluence nonetheless.  Two mighty rivers of ink are flowing together, inexorably, even as we speak: that which has been spilled in anticipation of the Apple tablet, and that which has been spilled in anticipation of the emergence of a coherent strategy for paid news content on the World Wide Web. For a handy list o’ links that should satisfy your need to drown in either river, visit the Nieman Journalism Lab for Mark Coddington’s week in review.

Perhaps it was when Bill Keller, editor of the NYT, talked about an “impending Apple tablet” to his staff in October that the stories became inevitably linked.  But, once the Times sketchily sketched out the state of its sketchy plans on Wednesday morning, we had to wait less than 24 hours for the heartwarming Wall St. Journal headline, “Apple Sees New Money in Old Media.”

In between – actually, just a few minutes after the Times announcement on Wednesday – I was in front of a class of first-quarter Medill graduate students, introducing them to some of the ideas that I flesh out further in my current class, “How 21st Century Media Work.” The Q&A centered not on the Times, but on the larger question of finding the money to support the journalism they feel called to do.

As a matter of fact, my answers dipped a toe into each of the merging rivers.

  • I do expect to see models for paid content emerging, and this year; some will be for-profit (GlobalPost), some low-profit (Chicago News Cooperative), some nonprofit and intentionally so (Texas Tribune).  They will have in common a focus on what their users find valuable, not their managers.
  • I do expect that many new devices will carry with them ways to extract revenue in exchange for the convenience or other value they bring; the media’s battle for desktop revenue will be miserable, but the chance for different models to flourish in the palm of your hand seem high.

Meanwhile, it’s back to waiting – till 2011 for the debut of the Times pay wall; till next Wednesday for whatever it is that Apple wants to tell us. Hey, Vladimir!  Hey, Estragon! Can I wait alongside you?

cropgodot

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So Twitter ‘will endure’?

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

(Adapted from a post to the internal discussion board for my winter 2010 Medill course, “How 21st Century Media Work”)

“I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay,” David Carr writes in Sunday’s New York Times. “And I’m not alone.”

I’m thinking he’s probably right, and for the same reason: “the real value of the service is listening to a collective voice.”

It didn’t start that way for me any more than it did for Carr. It was July 16, 2007, when the Tribune’s Brad Moore told me about a new text-messaging service that RedEye had started to play with. He was reporting to me as its general manager then, and his folks were doing their best to stay on top of communication trends that its twentysomething readers were starting to embrace.

As it happened, I wouldn’t even join Facebook till August of that year, and FriendFeed, Fark, and Digg were even further in the future. Anyway, I signed up, though I didn’t get around to “tweeting” for another month. And it wasn’t until 2008, when the interns that I’d hired to build the Tribune’s social media profile started to show how Facebook + Twitter + Digg = Pageviews, that it dawned on me that those 140-character messages might be a big deal. So I opened a second account — @YoungOwen, the one I’m still using today, since I have been unsuccessful in getting Twitter to untether my first one from my extinct Tribune mobile phone.

And sure enough, I’ve learned enough from tweeting and reading other people’s tweets to see that, like fax machines and filing cabinets, this service is something that’s not going away. As Carr observes, it has become part of the infrastructure; he quotes Clay Shirky: “Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it.”

It goes (almost) without saying that the precise business model hasn’t quite emerged. But let me be the one millionth person to note that countless companies are piggybacking on it, mining the real-time “statusphere” or “Twitterstream” to keep track of their brands, promote themselves, or find potential customers. All of those uses are applicable to journalists and media companies as well as technologists and gossips.

It is a peculiar and arcane skill, tweeting something that might be of interest to people you don’t know (which can happen all the time with the right #hashtag). But since journalists need to do that nearly every day in their “real lives,” it seems also to be a useful one.

If you’re not on Twitter, you could do worse than to follow Carr (@carr2n) and the nine users he highlights. You might well wind up deciding to tweet what you learn.

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Was that a year? Well, it was 50 weeks of one.

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

There were still two weeks left to go until 2010, but on Dec. 17 I bravely joined Michael Miner of the Reader and Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher on Milt Rosenberg’s “Extension 720″ on WGN Radio to discuss the year in Chicago media.

If you are looking for two hours of background chatter as you organize gift receipts and packages for an afternoon of exchanging and refunding at the mall, you have come to the right place.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 1 – WGN Radio.

Extension 720 Uncut Podcast 12-17-09 Part 2 – WGN Radio.

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Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

Monday, November 30th, 2009

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share.  In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang.  Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.

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Throw out this lifeline

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; oh, hasten today
And out with the lifeboat! away, then away!

(Refrain:)

Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is drifting away;
Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is sinking today.

– From the hymn by Edwin S. Ufford, 1888.

Today I was one of six lecturers at the annual kickoff symposium for “Know Your Chicago,” a 61-year-old fall tour series run out of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies. What quickly became clear as I delivered my talk, “When Worlds Collide: The Journalist, Technology, and the Audience,” was that this particular audience … several hundred folks who were mostly my age and older, mostly women … was deeply invested in being reassured about their morning newspapers.

In fact, I was only interrupted by applause twice, and then only in the Q&A:  once when I said I was one of those folks who valued having a printed paper in the morning, and once when I opined that some newspapers would certainly be around as long as I am (or words to that effect).  This after I had pointed out that Col. McCormick’s classic definition of a newspaper —

“The newspaper is an institution developed by modern civilization to present the news of the day, to foster commerce and industry, to inform and lead public opinion, and to furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide.”

— really didn’t require that the newspaper actually exist in newsprint form. What folks cherish is the idea of a newspaper, whether the Colonel’s or someone else’s.

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Who will pay?

Friday, September 11th, 2009

It was a piquant question . . . well, piquant if you took it the right way . . . and then-Chicago Tribune publisher Scott Smith seemed to ask it at all the right times.

“Who will pay?”

There was never any shortage of product ideas, and in fact never a shortage of good product ideas, at the Tribune during Scott’s era, roughly 1997 to 2008. For nearly all of these ideas, it was a simple matter to quantify and project the costs. For nearly as many, it was pretty straightforward to estimate the size of the audience and its members’ potential enthusiasm.

“But who will pay?”

Were there advertisers out there – real ones, not notional ones – ready to support this idea with actual dollars (and would those dollars be new, or just shifted from somewhere else?)? Were there potential partners willing to help bear the costs due to mutual self-interest? Or might there be actual consumers ready to fork out a quarter, or a couple of bucks?

Once in a while, we could answer Scott’s “pleasantly stimulating” question, and before long we’d have a RedEye or a Chicago Home & Garden or a Triblocal.com. But probably more often, we had to confess that we just had no idea.

I flashed back to this question today when I read of the demise, or transition, of the Chi-Town Daily News, ex-Tribune reporter Geoff Dougherty’s effort at nonprofit community journalism. (For a dandy compendium of links to reports and analysis, from harsh to hushed, head over to Eric Zorn’s Change of Subject at chicagotribune.com.)

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The death of ‘place,’ the death of papers

Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Richard Rodriguez: "The civic fabric has been ruptured." Richard Rodriguez: “The civic fabric has been ruptured.”

I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying. When a metropolitan newspaper of that magnitude  stops publication it indicates that there has been a death of the metropolitan ideal.

via Richard Rodriguez: The Death of the SF Chronicle – NAM.

In 1995, Witold Rybczynski published his classic assessment of the devolopment of the American city, City Life. One reason I remember it so clearly is his long lool at Chicago, where “in many ways twentieth-century urbanism got its start.”  More famously, of course, he argued that it was perfectly OK that American cities were not at all like Paris. He refers only glancing to the role of newspapers, though many writers have documented the ways in which the fates and fortunes of cities and their newspapers have always been intertwined.

I was reminded of all this today when I encountered an interview with Richard Rodriguez, the American writer whose prominence stems partly from  his memoir Hunger of Memory and partly from his ideas about ethnicity and identity, at the website of New America Media.

The edited transcript (and the whole interview, provided as an MP3 on the site) constitute a powerful alternative take on 2009’s inescapable “death of journalism” discussions, articles, posts, and memorial services.  Not because the idea is entirely sui generis, obviously; if newspapers and cities grew together, it might well follow that they might die together. But because of Rodriguez’s argument that “Americans are going to news outlets, not for what news used to provide — the sense of the local, the sense of the parochial, the sense of this place–but rather almost as an escape from place.”  In fact, he says that even the metaphors we use about the Internet – “the ether,” “cyberspace,” “the superhighway” – are “almost against the spatial.”

imagesThe jumping-off point is a question about the San Francisco Chronicle, as are several of the examples and explanations Rodriguez cites.  But Rodriguez’s thesis is as much about the idea of a city as it is about the fate of The City, and it summoned up for me a definition of a city that I think I learned in philosophy class: a community founded on common acceptance of social norms.

When I Googled this last idea today, I was reminded that this is close to the Stoic idea of a city, as a community of virtuous people, “something morally good” (Clement of Alexandria).  Does it follow that if a city dies, the moral good that newspapers can do must die with it?  I’m not ready to go there yet.  But let me give the last words to Rodriguez, and then you can go read or listen yourself at one of the links above:

“The civic fabric has been ruptured. It may be 30 years in the making, but it’s happened now, and we blame the Internet or we blame computers; we blame children because they have an addiction to buttons instead of to paper. But these are really afterthoughts.  These are not the reasons the newspapers are dying…By the 1980’s, there already is the sense that San Francisco is losing interest in itself….People tend not to know what they need until they lose it.”

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Same song, second verse: What cost idealism?

Monday, April 27th, 2009

This morning’s NYT features a dissection of what Brad Stone and Miguel Helft label “the International Paradox”: Social networking and user-generated content sites are finding that huge swaths of their users and traffic are in the developing world – in countries that their current advertisers aren’t all that interested in, and in which they currently aren’t selling much new advertising either”:

Visitors ≠ Revenue. Hmmm.

Visitors ≠ Revenue. Hmmm.

 

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

I’m not so sure that either “international” or “paradox” is the right way to define this particular state of affairs.  In fact, I can think of “fervent idealists” in any number of media spaces who have been running up against this problem for decades, with highly unsatisfying results. 

Let’s root around in Wikipedia for a minute:

  • Look magazine’s issue of October 19, 1971, had a circulation of 6.5 million.  Oh, yes, that was the last issue.  Shrinking ad revenue as national dollars shifted to TV, combined with a mail-centric distribution model focused on low-cost subscriptions, got a lot of the blame.
  • Life magazine’s issue of Dec. 8, 1972, had a circulation guarantee of 5.5 million (reduced earlier in the year from 7 million to reduce costs).  Yup, the last weekly issue.  Going monthly was supposed to overcome the problems that had killed Look a year earlier, but not for the long term.
  • In 1990, beginning a trend that would sweep America over the next two decades, the Des Moines Register substantially trimmed statewide distribution of its main edition to reduce costs.  With the revenue model for most American newspapers dependent upon retail and classified advertising dollars, circulating almost any major metro paper to readers too far away to shop locally was just a losing proposition.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the early mornings of my own driving vacations around the Midwest often revolved around figuring out where I could go to buy a Tribune; when I was in Hilmar, California, I could drive to the local market and find the San Francisco and San Jose papers in an honor box.  I’m still interested today when I am out of town, but the publishers aren’t interested in moving their dead trees quite that far.  We’ve compromised; I bought a Kindle, way better for my purposes than browsing through nearly anybody’s Web site.

None of this rear-view-mirror stuff is meant to be whining, by the way.  My point is more that, for a long time, media companies have proven that they can assemble large and/or far-flung audiences for their brands of news, entertainment, advertising, and other information.  But, for nearly as long, they have needed (or chosen) to subsidize their assembly of audience by selling them to end users below cost, relying on the advertising revenue stream to cure all ills.

Now, of course, thanks to its circulation pricing model and marketing partnership, I can get a New York Times almost anywhere there is a Starbucks (although that seems to be changing a little, too.  I’ve begun to find out-of-the-way hamlets where the local Starbucks carries only the Sunday paper. Sound familiar?).  The point being that sooner or later, fervent idealism begins to sputter in the face of supply, demand, cost, value, and a laundry list of other market forces.  Back to today’s piece:

There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers…

Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States…the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

So how do idealistic entrepreneurs, idealistic journalists, idealistic purveyors of ideas get to serve and perpetuate their ideals?  Can they collaborate with idealistic technologists to create less expensive ways of serving these widely dispersed audiences, or package them in ways that do interest advertisers?  Or can they create models in which the value their users/readers attach to their content actually start to meet the cost of having it provided?

It’s clearly dicey to solve equations that contain more than one unknown.  There are at least five variables in this particular one:  cost, brand, value, convenience, and importance (I put relevance into that last bucket, as well as timeliness and personalization; probably there needs to be an equation just for that).  Getting all five on the left half of the equation so that, to the right of the equals sign, there is a positive number of dollars is not the challenge of the age.  It’s the challenge, period…whether your audience is growing or shrinking, whether your ambitions are grandiose or just grand. It would do society some good to solve this for everyone.  

Volunteers?

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