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As Eli Sanders at The Stranger‘s Slog notes, the P-I Web site’s ever so slightly added more links to outside news sites. Sanders then wonders out loud whether this is a harbinger of a future online-only P-I remaking itself into a local version of the Huffington Post.
Paul Andrews has expanded thoughts about this prospect. Go read his stuff yourself, then come back here.
Back so soon?
OK. HuffPo’s a great site, with healthy readership figures and ad revenues. Andrews is right to nail “news as personality†as one leg of its business-model tripod. (The other two are original blog entries and carefully chosen links to other sites’ news stories.)
It’s the “personality” that differentiates HuffPo from all the headline aggregators out there. At its heart is Arianna Huffington herself (even though she lives in LA and the site’s produced in NY). Her personality, and her range of interests, define the site’s general political POV, its curation of content, and its audience niche.
But despite its slogan (“The Internet Newspaper”), it’s not a source of much primary information. It has a couple of staff reporters, and it pays the Associated Press to post AP articles on its own pages, but most of its news items are carefully chosen (and re-headlined) links to stuff researched and written by others. HuffPo’s blog posts are mostly original (a few are simultaneously “cross-posted” at other sites), but none of them are paid for.
For all its accomplishments, HuffPo’s not the elusive answer to the conundrum of online news reporting and how to pay for same.
HuffPo’s formula, by itself, isn’t going to preserve the P-I as a professionally staffed newsroom.
But it might provide two ingredients toward the final recipe.
One is establishing mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers and solo Web journalists.
The other, more subtle, component is a site’s “voice” (or, to be coldly corporate, its brand image).
The P-I already has a stronger voice than any other mainstream print daily in the region. Thus, it has a head start in this department.
For another angle on branding, consider the Northwest beer industry.
Around the time the P-I shotgun-married the Times in the papers’ first Joint Operating Agreement, the first local microbreweries (Redhook and Grant’s) started up.
At the time, our region already boasted five major breweries, all producing nearly-identical watery lagers, differentiated mostly by advertising. The last of those breweries, Olympia, closed in 2003.
Instead, WA and OR now boast a lively array of smaller outfits creating a vast array of products. These products really are unique, not merely advertised as such.
As news moves online and becomes more decentralized, it will, by necessity, morph from the verbal equivalent of the old stubby-bottle Oly into a wider palette of flavors, crafted on a more artisanal basis.
I’m reminded of how Weimar-era Berlin had as many as 70 daily newspapers. These weren’t all huge endeavors. Some were raucous little scandal sheets. Others were intellectual and ideological journals. But each of them scraped out its own piece of the market.
That’s what news sites will need to do.
Jack Shafer believes there’s good precedent for charging users for online content. But it has to be content people really, really want, and it should be packaged in some form other than what we now know of as Web pages.
The “general news” sections of newspapers, and their affiliated Web sites, typically provide the opposite of what an online user could be persuaded to pay for. Based on theories of storytelling that go back to the days of street-corner newsboys, papers slice and dice the local events of the day into simple narratives that can support flashy headlines and cute or shocking images.
Consumers, we’ve learned, will pay for content that will guide them toward deciding where to invest and/or gamble (cf. the paid-access portions of wsj.com and espn.com). Business people will pay for information that’s relevant to their particular industries (cf. the Puget Sound Business Journal).
How can these lessons be applied to coverage of local government, politics, civic planning, social trends, and spot news?
That will be a topic for a later post.
…Nicholas Carr believes ad-supported online news will become profitable once the supply/demand imbanance is resolved—i.e., when a lot more news organizations go out of business.
The Newspaper Guild’s looking into midwifing a Post-Intelligencer employee buyout, which, at the paper’s recently-announced financial burn rate, would obligate each of the paper’s current employees to $80,000 or so in annual losses. On the surface it sounds like a no-go from the get-go; but an employee buyout, perhaps with outside backing added, could be one way to keep the paper (or at least its Web site) alive through the long process of hashing a new business model together.
Meanwhile, Hearst is rumored to still be considering a small-staffed online P-I, but is still weeks away from announcing anything.
And, from way back in December, here’s David Byrne comparing what’s happening to the newspaper biz these days to what happened to the record biz in the ’80s and ’90s—consolidation, buyouts, corporate debt, layoffs, and an institutional death spiral.
I’m tempted to say the piped-in-music giant wouldn’t have gotten into this trouble if it had kept its HQ in Seattle. The reality is it was leveraged-bought-out, in a deal that saddled it with debt and coincidentally took its HQ out of Seattle.
…(a population subset that again includes me) should view the CNBC documentary House of Cards, next airing at 5 and 9 p.m. PT tonight (Monday). In two hours, you learn just how the mortgage bubble grew and burst, taking countless common citizens with it. In short, greedy bankers + unregulated markets + creative math nerds = global fiscal disaster.
Dave Winer, software entrepreneur and untiring self-promoter, is one of those who believe the future of journalism is not only online but unpaid: “The key is to look at all those empty newsrooms, and to envision, before they completely shut down, filling them with volunteers—who we can teach to write the news.”
It should be noted that Winer, who calls himself one of the pioneers of both blogging and podcasting, has long believed Web content makers shouldn’t expect renumeration, at least not directly, from their sites. The most one can hope for, in Winer’s model, is publicity for one’s offline for-profit ventures. When he’s asked about people whose real work, whose “product,” IS their words/images/sounds, Winer invariably changes the subject to how the Grateful Dead sold lots of concert tickets by freely allowing bootleg tapes. As if the Dead’s business model could even have worked for non-“jam band” musical acts, let alone for writers or illustrators.
It’s only natural for newspaper people to think in a formula-driven, routine-driven manner. It’s how they’ve gotten their product out every day these past decades.
Inventing new products/services for the new media age takes a different kind of thinking. A lot of people are trying to retrain newspaper people into this new way. They include the Next Newsroom Project, Brandon Mendelson, Mark Potts, Alan Mutter, Steve Outing, Philip Meyer, Jane Stevens, Dan Vigil, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, my pal Paul Andrews, and ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley.
These folks have a consensus on many points. For instance, they all believe online news is both more populist and more niche-market than print news.
They disagree on by-the-slice or “micropayment” systems for news sites. Some believe they’d probably be more trouble than they’d be worth. Others, including Andrews, believe a workable scheme for subscriptions or one-shot purchases can be figured out; it’ll just take a little ingenuity.
As per the local situation with the endangered Post-Intelligencer, we’re talking about three scenarios here:
1) Preserving both the print and online P-I under new ownership, with the goal of making the combined operation self-supporting or close to it;
2) Preserving seattlepi.com alone, either under Hearst or new management;
3) Starting one or more all-new, all-online info ventures.
A lot of the local community talk this past month has concerned option 3, the only one that could proceed no matter what Hearst chooses to do.
Unlike a lot of folks in this conversation, I believe option 1 is both preferable and possible.
But it’ll take new ownership willing and able to shoulder continuing losses while evolving the paper and the Web site into new models. These models may or may not include online subscriptions or per-story payments. They may or may not include .pdf files or downloads for “e-ink” readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.
They will include many of the steps the P-I‘s already begun—staff and freelance blogs, other online-only content, community outreach, all-day site updates.
I’d revise or dump the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times, a company that’s recently been proven lousy at generating ad revenue.
But I’d keep a printed paper, every damn day. A print product adds brand value to the Web property. It enables many kinds of combo ad and sponsorship deals. It keeps the P-I tangibly visible in stores, restaurants, buses, and street corners. And there’s still money to be made in print ads and inserts.
But the online dog would wag the print tail.
The site would have the full coverage and more, from a professional reporting team plus stringers and community bloggers.
The paper would be a compact-sized digest (perhaps free, perhaps without home delivery). It would offer the key pieces of the Web site’s coverage, for those readers who still prefer print. This would bring the print product at least closer to profitability, keeping the newsroom more-or-less intact while the quest for an optimal online business model continues.
As we mentioned on Monday, part of the key to holding a loyal online audience (and, potentially, commanding higher online ad rates) is to create a more direct, more honest relationship with that audience. Among other things, it means offering material people really want to know about.
The sports, business, arts, and lifestyle departments already offer plenty of that. There are people who really want to know about the new Seahawks coach, or about who’s performing in the clubs tonight, or about Starbucks’ latest marketing gimmick.
The “general news” section needs to become just as needed.
And it can.
The national success of Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and their brethren show that politics, economics, and similarly mundane topics can draw and keep enthralled audiences, if they’re presented by writers who can tell compelling stories.
Again, the P-I, with its continuing heritage of oldtime Hearstian populism, usually has more compelling local news content than the Times. The latter remains stuck in its longtime “what the Chamber of Commerce wants to tell you” mode of operation.
Here’s my list of what should be the essential reporting beats of any major local news operation, with or without the P-I brand. Some of them might be outsourceable to freelancers. Some of them might be doubled-up (one person servicing two or more beats). Your own idealized local newsroom might swap out some of these assignments for others:
Local news: City government County government State government Legal/courts Seattle neighborhoods The region (Eastside, south end, north end) Police Transportation Science/biotech Environment K-12 education Higher education Political columnists (2) Human interest columnists (2) Investigative unit (2) Breaking news/general assignment (at least 2) Opinion: Opinion editor/columnist Forums/comments editor Editorial cartoonist Business/economy: Editor/columnist Aerospace Tech Retail Real estate Labor/workplace Economy Port General assignment Arts: Editor/columnist Film Stage Pop music Classical/dance/opera Visual art Books TV/radio Restaurants Calendars/general assignment Life: Editor (and syndicated-features buyer) Food Fashion Travel Home/garden Outdoors Health Culture/lifestyles Sports: Editor/columnist (2) Mariners Seahawks UW football Men’s college basketball Women’s college basketball/Storm High school sports Sounders/general assignment Participant sports/outdoor recreation
Local news:
Opinion:
Business/economy:
Arts:
Life:
Sports:
And, of course, there’d be ad sellers (all of whom would work on both print and online ads), IT people, admin staff, designers, a few photographers (though reporters would also be equipped with digicams), and, yes, copy editors.
This scheme would preserve at least half of today’s P-I staff positions. That’s a lot more than what some observers believe is feasible.
But this particular concept is about holding the line, preserving the ongoing production of first-level, relevant local information while developing a new business model to support it.
And who’s going to do this?
My amateur number-crunching skills tell me this plan could cut the P-I‘s losses within a year, from more than $1 million a month to less than $300,000. This shortfall should drop further as new revenue sources develop. (These might include online section sponsorships, paid access to investment databases, direct online sales of merchandise and event tickets, and, eventually, paid online subscriptions.)
But it’ll lose money before it makes money. Like any new or reinvented business venture.
It would probably take more than one investor to shoulder this. (Or, if the nonprofit route’s chosen, more than one donor.)
We’ll need a coalition of the local mighty and the local good. People closer to the P-I than I are already trolling some of these still-rich people.
But there’s one name I’d especially troll for if I were them.
It’s a guy who’s currently in the business of charging for content. Digital content. Verbal digital content. Ephemeral, periodical, verbal digital content.
Don’t call me, Mr. Bezos. You should contact Roger Oglesby direct.
…(known among many customers by a two-letter initial): My week of cablelessness ended this evening, as I gave in and paid up what I owed ’em. The basic channels and local HDs came on promptly when I called; at least the visual portion. After some jiggling, I got the sound back on by turning up the VOL on my cable remote. There were still no cable HD channels or digital tier channels, and no menus. I had to call back to get them to “ping” a reset signal to my cable box (which seems to be the all-purpose answer to such issues).
How does it feel to be no longer tubeless? Great. I feel again connected to the great global media tether. Yes, I survived without it for a week. No, I didn’t instantly become a better person due to any magical power of tubelessness. Yes, I should keep it (and the DVD player and the Web browser) turned off while I’m writing.
One happy discovery: During the extended wait to reach a live person during my first call, the on-hold music consisted of recent and current TV themes. The signature sounds of The Office, House, Desperate Housewives, Survivor, and more serenaded me with the promise that all these pleasures would again be mine.
Whilst we were all looking forward to the big inauguration late last month, I failed to notice that Broadstripe Cable’s filed for bankruptcy. Rumors that Broadstripe would sell out to Comcast Belltown viewers would finally get On Demand) have been denied.
…of a major life experiment.
I’m without cable TV.
For the first extended period of time (except while traveling) since mid-1984.
Sorry, videophobic hippies: Tubelessness hasn’t instantly transformed me from some brainless, tasteless, corporate-drone “sheeple” into an all-wise Renaissance Man. I’m still the same imperfect meat-n’-potatoes dude I’ve always been.
Of course, I’ve quickly learned that most everything I’ve been regularly viewing is available either on regular broadcast TV or online. The two major exceptions:
What’s it like so far? I can’t browse away through the 121 or so channels to discover something novel and bizarre. Also, I’m missing a lot of the cheap snarky fun I get from sneering at particularly dumb commercials (Shamrow, Snuggies, Obama collector plates, funnel cake machines, etc.).
And as for the background noise, which I’ve come to need for certain types of creative brainwork, I’m learning to get it from substitute sources, including online audio/video sites.
This experiment will last at least until I can pay two months’ back bills to the cable company. Beyond that, we will see (or won’t see, as the case may be).
…from the handsome Seattle City Council chambers. The room, and the new City Hall it’s in, may go down in history as among the last huge publicly-funded examples of New Seattle world-class-osity before economic conditions made such statements fiscally obsolete.
Today’s meeting is of the council’s Culture, Civil Rights, Health and Personnel Committee. (I wouldn’t have put all those functions in one heap, but what do I know?)
Nick Licata heads this committee. Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen are also here. Right now, they’re going through regular committee business, to wit interviewing potential members of a LGBT health task force. The item I’m here for, a panel discussion on saving daily newspapers, will follow later in the meeting.
So let me give you a verbal image of the chambers, since many of you haven’t been here. It’s a big, bright, uber-clean room finished in light wood tones, glass, polished steel, and black vinyl seat covers.
Now the newspaper panel’s being seated.
Your panelists are:
Licata’s now reading from Jim McDermott’s P-I guest op-ed. I’ll post a link to it later. (Update: Here it is.)
Now, Licata’s reciting statistics about the Huffington Post. It’s more popular than all but eight newspaper sites. He didn’t mention that HuffPo still doesn’t pay its bloggers.
Licata sez he loves reading print, but acknowledges “we may all have to adopt to our changing ways.”
Prof. Roger Simpson tells of his long career working for newspapers and being a scholar about them. We’ve had daily newspapers for 220 years. Presently 1,400 dailies in the US, down 200 from 20 years ago. Total readership’s steadily declined also. In 1900, most households got 2-3 papers a day. Now, less than half even get one. “The newspaper though has always been the center for the consciousness of a community.”
The government, Simpson notes, has been wary of regulating this industry from an antitrust standpoint, until joint operating agreements were OK’d in 1972. Twenty-nine JOAs eventually formed. Today there are only nine JOAs left, including Seattle’s.
Prof. Underwood continues the talk about the industry’s changes. The newspaper we know is a product of an industrial era, and is subject to changes in technologies. JOAs, he says, were undermined when the Feds allowed the second papers in St. Louis and Miami to shut down but continue to share profits with the surviving papers of their towns.
Underwood says local-monopoly papers have become stodgy, and are having a hard time transforming themselves. Sites like HuffPo draw readers more effectively than papers’ sites with personalities and panache. But sites like HuffPo “depend on existing news companies to provide the product they riff off of.” In Norway the govt. subsidizes second newspapers in major cities. Should we?
Bremner: We started the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town [CTNT] in ’03. Every citizen has a public responsibility. There’s so many important issues for us in having two newspapers in this town. We were pleased to be involved all the way in preserving the P-I for a while.
Bremner introduces Kathy George, one of her committee colleagues (and a onetime P-I reporter). She says they’re considering all options. A few ideas people are kicking around: Finding a civic-minded buyer or group to buy the P-I. The city council could provide leadership in guiding a purchase. Creating an endowment or non-profit to support in-depth reporting on local government and other community interests. Creating an employee-owned newspaper, such as the one in Omaha. You’ve read in local blogs about the possibility of creating a local public development authority. An online-only P-I is better than no P-I. But CTNT calls on Hearst to reveal its intentions as soon as possible, and to publicly reveal whether Hearst is making its annual, required $1 million payment to reserve its first right to buy the Seattle Times, should the latter be offered for sale. The public’s help in seeking these answers is invited.
Godden asks if an online-only P-I would still be part of a JOA. Kathy says the terms of the JOA are ambiguous about this.
Jane (sorry, no last name recorded here), another CTNT associate, asks Underwood about Norway’s subsidized papers. Underwood says there are official barriers keeping governments from influencing editorial content in these papers.
Licata asks Brown about Hearst announcing it may fire all the P-I staff. Brown mentions the Rocky Mountain News, Detroit News, and Chicago Sun-Times facing potential demise. The Baltimore Sun and Minneapolis Star-Tribune are in bankruptcy.
Newspaper Guild membership has gone from 820 to 420 members locally since ’00. Unionized press workers have gone from 140 to 43. Some 120 P-I jobs may be lost.
Brown says the Guild’s negotiating severance conditions with the P-I. She says Hearst said they didn’t know whether they’ll keep the option to buy the Times. “You don’t hear a lot of journalists out there talking about what’s happening… I don’t think they feel empowered to talk about the conditions of their industry.”
Towney, on the phone from Illinois, expresses her alarm about Starbucks’ layoffs. “Coffee and newspapers go together.” She lauds the value of reporters who have the time/money for long term research. Models she’s explored: Employee ownership, co-op ownership (“serving members over profits, in this case readers”), and non-profit ownership, a la NPR. She notes four papers in the US are owned by charitable trusts, but the papers themselves are still organized as for-profit entities. Her Peoria group opted to explore a hybrid of the three models. It would have both employee and community stockholders, and would be tied somehow to a subsidized non-profit. The Peoria paper had been employee-owned in the 1980s, then sold to a chain for $175 million. But that chain put it up for sale in 2006. The staff looked to the community for help. The paper was bought by another chain instead. The Peoria Guild held a public meeting to gather support. “The only thing stopping us from putting it out to the community is we don’t have a credible [business] model if we run a paper the way papers are run the way they’ve been run.”
Towney continues: They next explored an “L3C” organization. “Low profit limited liability corporation.” A foundation can invest in it. Its charter says community service comes before profit. Companies under it must create jobs and provide vital social benefits. “It opens up new funding channels.” The IRS, though, has consistently denied non-profit status to newspapers. Congress is now about to introduce a bill to allow L3Cs nationally.
Record: When you talk about saving newspapers, you really talk about saving journalism. Newspapers as a product and an organizational model may be becoming obsolete.
There are new ways of news gathering and dissemination coming up. In some ways they may be better than newsprint. Her site and similar ones around town have 100,000 regular readers; specifically in neighborhood-specific info. “We are serving our neighborhoods on a granular level to a greater extent than may have ever been done before.” Don’t be afraid of the future necessarily. Find ways to support journalism, the people who do the incredible work. This may be in blogs and smaller online operations. Her site is finally paying its way. Also: More discussion should be put into increasing information access to seniors and low-income people who don’t have computers.
Brewster: The news industry needs to find other bases of revenue other than advertising. The promise of flow of advertising revenue to the web is still a promise but it has slowed down. There are six other local web-only news sites around the country. In San Diego, Dallas, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Vancouver. The ones that are doing well are non-profit. Crosscut has converted into a non-profit corporation, Crosscut Public Media. It goes from one revenue stream, advertising, to three. The others are membership, as in public radio, and grants.
“Allow these web developments to flourish instead of planting new big oak trees to overshadow them.” Good stuff will grow underneath that if you let them and don’t impose solutions.
Young readers are very adept at navigating this [online] landscape. It doesn’t take the kind of mediation and paternalism these older models have provided.
Relax a bit. Allow the creativity, the ingenuity to figure what are good ways this will come about. It probably won’t be the Twin Peaks model of two equally large newspapers. It will probably be something with one large peak and 14 smaller peaks. Licata asks Brewster, are these web projects hobbies for their contributors or real careers? Brewster: about three quarters of Crosscut’s writers are reimbursed, some at wages that can get you through life, some below that. The model is definitely to pay writers. Record: Our writers are paid, and we expect pro journalism standards from them.
Hester: Our footprint is local. While we don’t have great numbers of viewers on cable, online our numbers have grown tremendously; 5 million hits last year, twice the year before. We’re definitely trying to accommodate the transition to online. I don’t mean just taking our television product and putting it online, but providing additional information and interaction.
I don’t have the answer for print, other than this: We’ve actually been the beneficiary of corporate media downsizing. We’ve been able to use the resources of very talented people who’ve worked here in print and TV.
Yet we certainly don’t have the capacity to make up for the loss of talent in investigative reporting that comes from print journalism.
Underwood talks about the need for “the public sphere.” The Super Bowl’s the only place anymore where you can run ads that everyone will see. For many years, our democracy has thrived despite horrible coverage by the newspapers. Our UW interns provide half the Olympia press corps of the entire state. There are ways to do better journalism than has been done by the dailies. But where do we re-create the “public sphere,” some viable place which carries a sense of importance. Someone in the audience asks via a notecard if the P-I could become a regional insert in the NY Times. Underwood remarks that we’d have to see it the NYT remains viable.
Brewster lauds the cooperation and “coop-etition” among online news sites/blogs. Bremner: It’s not blogs or papers. It’s both. But there’s civic pride at stake here. We’re losing a part of Seattle. Godden asks Simpson about the role of universities in supporting an independent voice in local journalism. Simpson notes the UW’s intern programs and other ways the U connects to the community. Underwood notes the Univ. of Missouri runs the “second paper” in Columbia MO. Serious journalists in all these areas will need to get together and figure out what the new model is.
Record notes corporate ownership of media isn’t necessarily something to save at all costs.
Licata asks how these new models will allow people the time for investigative reporting, and jokingly states, “the city of Seattle is not going to buy the P-I.” Yet he’d like to play a role in finding a solution. “I think at least we helped in this event to raise awareness.”
I’m back home now. What did we learn from this?
We learned about L3C corporations. A quick online search seems to imply these currently exist only in Vermont. And we heard a lot of people give general ideas on how the journalism profession as a whole may be going in the next few years, or how they wished it would be going.
We didn’t hear any concrete schemes to save the printed P-I and/or seattlepi.com.
But then again, it’s still Hearst’s thang, to sell or scrap as it wishes.
I wish there was some real civic leadership around here, to herd and announce a big group of civic-minded investors to first take the P-I local, then to mold the product and the organization into something with staying power.
The Puget Sound Business Journal has a lengthy look back at the comical tragedy that was Washington Mutual’s rise and fall. As you might expect, it involves a corporate culture in which fiscal prudence was equated with cowardice, and in which the only “values” were profit and growth. Shouldn’t we have learned this from Enron and the early dot-coms?
Announce massive layoffs only if you have to, not simply to prop up the stock price.
Circuit City, the (actually mostly suburban) big-box seller of electronic goodies, is shutting down. It wasn’t too many years ago that they were gonna overturn the DVD biz with their own limited-play, disposable discs. Now, they’re disposable (and, alas, so is their 30,000-member nationwide workforce).
