I just spent a mind-expanding week at the Knight Center for Digital Media in Berkeley and was exposed to five programs — Photoshop, FinalCut Pro, GarageBand, Soundslides and Flash — along with 19 other journalists. I am not quick on the uptake. I grasped only a small amount of what was thrown at me by a patient training crew. But I did produce a Soundslide story and observed or assisted in a slew of other tasks. I got over my fear of video editing and realized that basic Flash was within my grasp. I have the confidence to get  the refreshers and advanced training that I would need to become a proficient multimedia journalist. I understand how to let the story choose its media, and have at least some sense of how to get the story done.

It was the longest six long days of training I’ve had in a good long while. And great fund. Only one point I heard caused me to disagree.  I think journalists have to invent (ethical) new ways to make money. A remark to the contrary at the end of the session is what prompted me to disagree. Professional journalists used to look down money-making. Someone else did that; ad sales or classifieds or circulation. But the old systems are eroding. If journalists don’t invent ways to get paid for their services they are doomed to extinction. Or so it seems to me.

The story is about Demand Media, a privately-held Web company that will earn $200 million in revenues this year producing thousands upon thousands of  content bits using a combination of algorithms and freelancers.

The algorithms sift through search terms to anticipate what people might want to know; determine whether there is a glut or surfeit of content in that regard; then estimates the likely revenue-potential of that content through pay per click advertising.

Human freelance editors turn these machine-generated leads into topics that are posted on a work board (Wired author Daniel Roth says, “It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot.”) Freelancers claim the topics. Short how-to articles may be worth $15. Brief videos $20.

As the article says, Demand Media has discovered that “online content is not worth very much.”

Surely that bodes ill for content creators.

But I agree with Jack Shafer of Slate who thoroughly debunks the notion of legislation to benefit newspapers. In his piece, “Saving Newspapers from their Saviors,” Shafer writes:

Propping up troubled papers has a cost. It weakens the enterprises that are rising from below to compete with them to deliver advertising and, yes, deliver news.

If market forces doom incumbent media that doesn’t mean using news to build a community can’t be a money-making venture. It just means new people with fresh ideas will have to figure out how to do it. Meanwhile, as one of the incumbents who hasn’t been moved out or moved on, I have to work harder and think differently, because this is an interesting time to be in media.

You have to go back to 1965 to find a year with revenue lower in 2009 dollars than what this year is projected to be. That year, the industry took in $4.42 billion, which works out to $30.22 billion in current dollars. The industry can only hope this year hits 1966 levels, which work out to $32.4 billion in real dollars.

I wondered how the revenue picture aligned with newsroom staffing. I wasn’t able to find a comparable time series but I did scan a recent Congressional Research Service report on the state of the newspaper  industry which said:

Daily papers cut their newsrooms by 11% in 2008, the biggest one-year drop since 1978. Daily newsroom staffing is off 17% from the recent, 2001 peak of 56,400.28 According to Erica Smith, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, nearly 10,000 journalists were laid-off or took buyouts in the first five months of 2009 alone.29

Since then Limbaugh has arguably become the nation’s demagogue in chief. A July 6 cover story in the New York Times Magazine reveals that his contract with Premier Radio Networks earns him about $38 million a year. Limbaugh says:

First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates.

Writer Zev Chafets says Limbaugh has gone deaf and wears a cochlear implant so he can hear callers. Not that he’s there to listen. That’s the audience’s job, as Chafets writes:

Limbaugh’s program that day was, as usual, a virtuoso performance. He took a few calls, but mostly he delivered a series of monologues on political and cultural topics. Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script, just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk.

Or what passes for political talk in America, I suppose. The wonder is that a man who, as we learn has a private jet and is considering the purchase of an NFL franchise, has apparently dialed in to a wide swath of the American psyche. The best line in the piece was an observation by his friend, Joel Surnow, that a movie of Limbaugh’s life would be “Citizen Kane” meets Howard Stern.

What’s up with the newspaper industry? Surprisingly, readership is up in developing nations where globalization is raising incomes, according to the World Association of Newspapers which recently unveiled its exhaustive summary of the print news industry in 2007. A WAN press release offers detailed results by region and country. The other big theme I noticed is the rise of the free dailies which are proliferating faster in mass-transit dense Europe than in the suburbanized USA.

U.S. press leaders are part of WAN. The following quote from Dean Singleton, chief executive of the MediaNews Group, caught my eye. Singleton owns a string of papers in my San Francisco Bay Area, including the Hayward Daily Review, to which I subscribe. According to WAN Singleton says:

Why should we cannibalize our newspaper, why not simply adjust and wait and see? Personally I prefer to have a cannibal in my family rather than to have one as my enemy.

I assume that Singleton made those remarks in the context of explaining why newspapers should be moving their businesses to the web. But seeing as how MediaNews employees will soon vote on whether or not to join the Newspaper Guild, let me emphasize that Singleton could not have meant cannibalism literally. California law would clearly forbid such behavior though I believe the federal protections may have been amended after 9/11.

Meanwhile there must be consternation in the Los Angeles Times newsroom as the Tribune Company enforces a chain-wide edict that there be a 50-50 split between pages devoted to advertising and news. According to MediaPost:

If the 50-50 policy were already in force, this would have necessitated a 13% reduction in editorial volume, resulting in a total size reduction of 26%. Plotting the trend out, presuming that advertising inches decrease at the same pace, the newspapers would be less than one-quarter of their current size within five years.

But while newspapers, the foundation of mass media, suffer readership and advertising declines, it appears that readership is growing for alternative papers that are presumably weekly in periodicity. When the Media Audit looked at readership in 117 alt papers in 88 media markets, it found a three percent increase in print readership and a seven point increase in web unique visits. The print gains sound good in comparison to daily newspaper losses but the online viewer ship seems anemic.

What does it all mean? Search me, but the prevailing wisdom is summarized in an IDC forecast to the effect that:

Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. During the forecast period, Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large.

So maybe Dean Singleton is right. Newspapers shouldn’t say “cannibalism” as if it’s a bad thing.

]]> http://minimediaguy.org/2008/06/10/feast-famine-cannibalism-in-newspapers/feed/ 2 http://minimediaguy.org/2008/05/28/e-paper-lets-you-zoom-in-on-the-staple/ http://minimediaguy.org/2008/05/28/e-paper-lets-you-zoom-in-on-the-staple/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 15:20:44 +0000 Tom Abate http://minimediaguy.org/?p=1253

I like to take long hops on the beach and . . .

Paid Content points to a USA Today article about Zinio, a company that publishes web editions of magazine content. The article says:

“digital editions let readers click on links embedded in articles and ads to peruse video, audio and related stories.”

Subscribers pay for this richer experience. Why? Playboy is among the 750 magazines in Zinio’s stable.  USA Today reporter Jon Swartz says since Zinio launched e-Playboy in 2005:

“it has sold some 1.7 million digital issues. They cost $19.97 for a dozen issues, and $4.99 for a single issue. (Playboy‘s average annual magazine circulation is 2.6 million.) Main selling points of the digital magazine version include the ability to zoom in and out on photos, view video and photo outtakes and listen to music clips.”

The article notes that “paid circulation of consumer magazines fell 1.7%, to $277 million” in the second half of 2007, continuing a seven year slide since paid circulation peaked in 2000. We are told that “70% of newsstand copies go unsold” making e-displays a green technology — as in saving trees and money. “Playboy, for example, has saved $1.2 million from lower manufacturing, distribution, paper and postal costs.”

Here’s a story that Corporate Media would rather you didn’t read, hear or see. Three U.S. senators have asked the General Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, to investigate how media mergers affect public discourse.

The letter from Democrator senators Dorgan, Leahy and Kohl is in reaction to a decision by the five-member Federal Commission which voted 3-2 in December to allow media companies to own television stations and newspapers in the same town. Until now federal rules designed to promote open access to “the public airwaves” have limited so-called cross-ownership of broadcast media by print news empires.

The FCC tried to lift the same rule in 2003 but its decision was reversed by a series of congressional and finally court actions. Now Corporate Media is back. It has convinced the FCC that competition from the Internet puts plenty of voices into the public domain. The FCC majority has accepted the Corporate Media argument that merging print and broadcast is the best way to protect the news-gathering muscle that is being lost as newspapers lays off staff to compensate for declining advertising revenues.

Presidential candidate Barak Obama criticized media consolidation in response to a question at a campaign stop in Oregon last week — but I only learned of his unreported remarks by finding a letter critical of the media blackout on the topic.

Actually blackout is the wrong term. I have reported on this. Now so do you. So has MediaPost, Broadcast & Cable, FMQB, TVTechnology and other trade publications aimed at media folks.

It’s just that nobody has told the public.

The film is fun if you have the time to watch it. Meanwhile, the Center for Media Research reposted Nielsen data showing that product placements rose 39 percent in network television in Q1 2008 but fell in cable television. As I noted yesterday network advertising has been off sharply while cable ads have risen. So the hard-up networks are pimping whatever they can. “There were 117,976 brand occurrences on cable and broadcast networks in the first three months of the year,” the Center reported.

Here is the Center for Media Research report on 2006 product placement which was even then growing 40 percent. So the current gains continue a trend. That report said:

“product placement spending surged 42.2% to $2.21 billion in 2005 with double-digit growth expected to continue in 2006 and beyond. Product placement spending in TV, film and other media is expected to climb another 38.8% to $3.07 billion in 2006.”

Finally here below please find my summary of aesthete and critic David Hadju‘s remarks on product placement. One thing in my notes from his talk (at a Columbia University J-school alumni event) was this: circus owner P.T. Barnum used products in his big tent shows and found that circus goers were amused that he had done so. Apparently, Hadju said, the public is tickled that entertainers pluck items out of their lives and drop them into media. Here are Hadju’s previously-published remarks taken from a lengthy blog posting mocking the “religion” of journalism:

I decided to expand my horizons at a lecture from aesthete and critic David Hadju. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t deliver some news I could use. Hajdu talked about the notion of product placement throughout history. Seems like ever since Homer entertainers sucked up to the rich and powerful, a practice that continued up through the Renaissance when painters PhotoShopped their patrons’ faces into artworks. Hadju said this practice stopped during the modern industrial era ((which corresponds with the rise of democracy, n’est-pas?) during which time the “starving artist” made integrity the cornerstone of art. Nowadays, Hajdu said, culture is going to back to this suck-up future, as evidenced by the placement of Tequila references in a Broadway remake of Sweet Charity. So I’m thinking, is this Aristocracy 2.0?, so I ask Hadju something like: Does this mean we’re returning to a he-who-pays-the-piper-calls-the-tune paradigm? And he says something like: Yes. Which I find very useful because it dovetails with an essay from techno-seer Kevin Kelly who recently wrote the New Age Guide to Sucking Up As a Business Model. (Memo to self: work on this ingratiating thing.)

So it was with that knowledge that I picked up a copy of the Tusday, May 13th, edition of the Sound to read a page three story honoring two newly laid-off News-Press staffers being honored by the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table. This local body was saying thanks to sports editor Barry Punzal and reporter Kyle Jahner who were laid off May 1. “It’s so hard to understand why this happened,” Punzal is quoted as telling the  local sports community he had heretofore covered.

That quote was captured by Peter Dugre, sports reporter for the Sound, which I decided to subjct to a cursory curiosity check.

The Sound’s  primitive blog says the paper was founded in March 2006 by Jeramy Gordon who operates the paper/blog through Nodrog Publications. I found a funny, informative and generally flattering report on the Sound’s first 18-months at Blogabarba, which appears to be an anonymous but semi-filtered local discussion place (guidelines).

That reports concludes by saying:

“this Blogabarbara posting is about local political news coverage, not the maturity of Daily Sound Publisher/Trust-Fund-Baby Jeramy Gordon.”

And who is this anonymously maligned benfactor of local news? For that I reached into a long but fascinating Wikipedia entry on free newspapers (pioneered in 1947 in Walnut Creek, California, by Dean Lesher!) to learn that:

In March of 2006 former Palo Alto Daily News managing editor Jeramy Gordon launched the Santa Barbara Daily Sound in Santa Barbara, California.

But not a word about the trust fund! But fascinating to me nevertheless to see continuity in the turmoil that is local news coverage. Good luck to Gordon and his crew who have had their legal battles with the News-Press and local law enforcement (see Sound Wikipedia entry for details).