The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

Owen YoungmanOwen YoungmanOwen Youngman

Category Archives: Business of media

Verbing a noun, in 19 easy lessons

Steven Levy discussing "In the Plex" at Medill, 3/13/2012

The winter quarter at Northwestern is wrapping up, and with it the first offering of my new Medill course for undergraduates from across the university. In response to a suggestion that I find a way to integrate the topics I have been covering for graduate students (economics, marketing, technology, innovation) into the undergraduate curriculum, I went looking for a unifying theme, and I found one in Mountain View, California. Big surprise, eh?

The objective of “The Misspelled Noun That Became a Verb: American Media through the Lens of Google” was to use scholarship, reporting, and reflection about Google to understand the media world around us. The students were to read, think about, react to, and write about excerpts from a handful of books published over the past few years, as well as to combine newspaper and magazine reportage, blog posts, and YouTube videos with observation of their own habits.

On the books front, the issue was identifying which ones might add up to the broadest view of the topic that might fit into 19 two-hour class sessions, which I devoted to Google’s intersection with individual topics such as research, advertising, news, video, mobile, privacy, and even democracy. Six titles made the cut:

  • The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle (Portfolio, 2005)
  • What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis (Collins Business, 2009)
  • Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, Ken Auletta (Penguin Press, 2009)
  • The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry), Siva Vaidhyanathan (University of California Press, 2011)
  • In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Steven Levy (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
  • The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser (Penguin Press, 2011)
Jarvis and Vaidhyanathan were gracious enough to Skype in for class sessions during the quarter. William Poundstone, whose Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? was published in early January, both visited the class and delivered a public lecture (which Vaidhyanathan would have done, too, save for a last-second family emergency). And Levy, as indicated by the photo above, came to campus this week for a conversation with me on stage in the McCormick Tribune Forum (which, if you have an hour and the right version of Microsoft Silverlight, you can watch here or by clicking on the image).

In addition, I was hoping we’d have some news during the quarter to keep things fresh. That part turned out pretty well:

  • On Jan. 12, we were scheduled to discuss the implications for users of personalized search. On Jan. 10, Google launched “Search Plus Your World,” perhaps making it all the more likely that no two people’s search results for the same topic would never be the same again.
  • On Jan. 26, the syllabus called for the first of two sessions on privacy. On Jan. 23, Google announced it was combining 60 of its privacy policies into one; helpfully, it went on to explain why by using some of the same cute stick figures it had been using to outline its extant practices in a print and online advertising campaign it called “Good to Know” (right).
  • On Feb. 2, the topic was video and YouTube. On Jan. 16, the New Yorker ran a fine piece of reportage by John Seabrook about YouTube’s “original channels” initiative. On Jan. 23,  Google launched a cute little Web site to trumpet the factoid that one hour of video is now uploaded to YouTube every second.
  • On Feb. 7, since it was a Tuesday, I had scheduled a focus on Google’s impact on democracy as seen through the presidential primaries and campaign. Here I had expected to use as the centerpiece the previous fall’s YouTube-sponsored Republican debate in Orlando, but on Jan. 31 President Obama cheerfully participated in a Google+ “hangout” that helped to round out our subsequent discussion.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Did I mention that the Motorola Mobility acquisition passed antitrust muster on the morning of the mobile class?

Add in a visit from by my former Tribune colleague David Tan, now head of SEM agency development for Google, and a field trip to Google’s Chicago offices that Dave hosted near the end of quarter, and you wind up with a pretty interesting quarter, I think. Along the way, the students logged the Google text ads they encountered as they browsed the Web; visited the Northwestern University Library, some for the first time; and debated whether the widespread and automatic use of search engines to answer every question they encounter is making us smarter or dumber.

Tuesday’s public conversation with Steven Levy of Wired was essentially the climax to the quarter, as all the themes and ideas listed above, and many more, pulse through his book. For the purposes of my students (all of them, actually; my graduate students read In the Plex for their final on Monday), it was a chance to hear an expert talk not only about the past, but to publicly mull several possible futures. What might Google do with Lake County-based Motorola Mobility?, an audience member asked. Give away its phones for free to tether its users to Google products and services, he suggested.

What, then, did the students learn, you ask? I could speculate, but I’ll know better in a couple of days, when they turn in their final papers . . . where they have to tell me whether the pronouncements and warnings in the titles and subtitles of our six main books ring true after a quarter of moving the “Googlization of everything” from the background to the foreground of their consciousness.

Sliding away

My brother Randy is a craftsman.

Randy Youngman
The younger Youngman

Randy started in the newspaper business the same way I did, as a high school sportswriter in Ashtabula, Ohio. “High school” in this case means a high school student writing about high school sports for a daily newspaper, the Ashtabula Star-Beacon. When I left for North Park College in 1971, Randy took over the job I had filled since 1969 and stayed at until he came to North Park in 1973.

Recently, what had been a brand-new printing press at the Star-Beacon – it was installed just months before I started working there – stopped running for the last time. It was halted by the current economics of the news business; the Star-Beacon is still publishing, but the current owners determined it would be more efficient to outsource their printing to a newspaper in nearby Warren. (The elegiac story about the last call for this particular piece of big iron is heartwarming and sad at once, and quotes people I know who were still working there. Those people, too, are craftsmen.)

For more than 25 years, the younger Youngman, as I am wont to call him, has been writing a sports column for the Orange County Register, where his career as a baseball writer had taken him in 1984. Along the way, he covered sports for the St. Petersburg Times, the Orlando Sentinel, the (late lamented) Baltimore News American, and the (late lamented) Dallas Times Herald. He has been in the business for 40 years.

Would have been. Like the aforementioned press in Ashtabula, the current economics of the news business caught up to him yesterday. The Register is still publishing, but the current owners determined he was among around 10 employees whose services it no longer required.

Mark Whicker on Facebook

What he said. Click image to see comments, if you are on FB.

Continue reading →

Who will pay?, revised and expanded

What's a year of the newspaper worth to you?

This morning, Crain’s Chicago Business quoted me in a story about a possible new books section or supplement under discussion at the Chicago Tribune. Lynne Marek’s reporting indicated that the Tribune hopes to charge separately for it, and she called yesterday to see what I thought.

To expand on the quote she used, I have been saying for a while that the news industry needs to find out what readers want to pay for and do more of it, not just make some changes and hope advertisers will line up in support. Whether a new books section were launched as an add-on to the paper, or as a separate product carrying the Tribune brand, why wouldn’t you seek the answer to that eternal question, “Who will pay?”

In the days when the operative, profitable strategy was to aggregate as much disparate content as possible in order to aggregate as much audience as possible for a range of advertisers, adding a new section “for free” was a viable idea. I did it plenty of times myself. But as advertising dollars flow to disaggregated and targeted niches, news organizations clearly need consumers to pay more . . . and it would be folly merely to charge more for what they’re already doing, or what’s left of it.

Not that charging more is wrong, particularly if you are targeting those who are passionate about the print reading experience. There is a particular conversation I have at every public event, dinner party, charity gala, or board meeting that I attend, and it goes something like this:

Interlocutor: “The Internet is fine, but I need my printed newspaper. I just can’t live without it.”

Professor O: “I understand. I still subscribe to three or four printed newspapers myself.”

Interlocutor: “Do you think they will all go away?”

Professor O: “It probably depends on what you are willing to pay.”

The New York Times has not been shy about finding out what consumers will pay, of course; my annual payment for seven-day service (after credits for vacation stops) went from $550 at the end of 2006 to $700 at the end of 2010 (my quoted rate is $769.60). But as you can see from the graphic at the top of this post, I have way more data — 20 years’ worth, in fact — on my Tribune subscription. And for 17 of those 20 years, home-delivery pricing tracked inflation so closely that the chart isn’t worth showing. (If I may anticipate a potential question, I did not take an employee discount at any time during this period.)

What actually is a little more interesting is the next chart, which compares my annual payments to the “discount” a subscriber received off the newsstand price. This is not a notional number; until moving to the suburbs, I was a newsstand buyer, since my first editor at the Tribune insisted that we buy and read the street-sales edition, not the home-delivered one that had closed hours before the record of the day’s events was complete. The timing of my annual payment, which over time has shifted depending on the Tribune’s internal strategy for changing anniversary dates if there are vacation stops, to some degree accounts for the volatility. But still:

Subscription vs. newsstand pricing

Charge for convenience, or lock in a reliable revenue stream?

When advertising was good (pretty much throughout the 1990′s), there was little reason to worry about the size of the subscriber “discount,” even when the price of the daily and Sunday papers increased significantly. And throughout the early years of the 2000′s, circulators who still remembered the pain of increasing the street-sales price from 35 cents to 50 cents in September, 1982, found equilibrium at or below a 10% differential and stuck with it, trying to retain as many copies as they could, particularly on behalf of preprint advertisers who were paying by the piece. But ultimately the economics had to dictate that, after 15 years, the cover-price status could not be quo, calling the question on how big an increase subscribers might stand for.

The big difference this time around is that with a 20% increase in 2009, and the 35% increase that hit last month, we are seeing an aggressive bet that passion will be more important than pocketbook to a newspaper’s most important audience (seemingly outlandish, preprint-revenue-focused Groupon offers aside). The introduction of the purported pay-as-you-go books section thus would be a variation on that theme.

And one last thing: with this last round of increases, my annual $390 Tribune bill has been uncoupled from the Consumer Price Index. My $162.68 annual subscription payment in 1992 would translate today to $262.36. Formulas like that are likely to be what keeps at least some newspapers, in my interlocutors’ phrase, from “going away.”