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.

Newspaper ad revenue is where it was in 1982 in inflation-adjusted dollars . . . paid circulation per capita is half what it was in the 60s.

A key finding in his analysis of online versus print news readership is time spent on news consumption. The online reader spends about “70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day,” Varian notes in a blog entry. “Not surprisingly, advertisers are willing to pay more for their share of readers’ attention during that 25 minutes of offline reading than during the 70 seconds of online reading.”

I ran into Varian last week and asked what this means for print news professionals who hope to gain more e-readers as print subscribers dwindle.

First, he said, most of that 70 seconds of online news consumption occurs at work, so newsies will have to  engage the audience into consuming more news on their own time. That means making online news reading more like the habitual leisure activity that it is for print subscribers.

How will newsies convince the audience that the electronic news product is worth more of their attention? Varian thinks this will entail adding multimedia elements to make online news more engaging and entertaining. “You’ll be competing with television,” he said.

What a tough transformation for shrinking news staffs whose incumbents have few multimedia skills.

Thanks to my friend Howard High for alerting me to Varian’s analysis.

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

(Continued from last week when I first considered enlisting because I was broke.)

Although I had forgotten completely about the Navy and journalism, chance intervened. My mother’s birthday is in February and I went over to visit her one day. While I was in her kitchen the phone rang. It was Petty Officer Hall. There was an opening in the Defense Information School, the training site for military journalists. Did I still want to enlist? He had to know and get me signed up in order to guarantee me the training. I remember standing there thinking that this must be karma. I rarely visited my mother. If I had not been there at that very moment it is doubtful that I would have gotten the message or acted upon it in time. So I said yes and took the train back to Coney Island to sign the papers. A few weeks later I went off to boot camp to complete basic training and be indoctrinated as a sailor, which was the prerequisite to getting the journalism training that I wanted.

Boot camp was a memorable experience. It is an exercise in brainwashing accomplished through a great deal of yelling and insistence on following meaningless rules just for the sake of building the habit of taking orders. If I close my eyes I can still remember the hot bourbon-and-tobacco breath of my drill instructor, Petty Officer First Class Gibson, standing almost nose to nose with me, screaming, “Do I look like your momma, recruit?” One instance from that 9-weeks of calculated abuse pertains to my journalism saga.

It was about midway through the cycle when I was told I had to take a typing test to qualify for the journalism training program. I used an old manual typewriter. I had to type either a dozen or 15 words per minute accurately. I failed. The boot camp authorities told me I could not go to the training program. No problem, I said. You can send me home. Because I was guaranteed a spot in the school and if you can’t hold up your end of the bargain, I should not have to finish my enlistment. I would have been more than happy at that point to call the whole Navy thing off. But whoever was in charge of such decisions figured it was the journalism program’s problem to teach me to type. Boot camp couldn’t afford to lose a recruit.

Next: DINFOS-trained killer

]]> http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/22/navy-journalist-by-chance/feed/ 3 http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/12/stumbling-into-journalism/ http://minimediaguy.org/2009/06/12/stumbling-into-journalism/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:19:14 +0000 Tom Abate http://minimediaguy.org/?p=1339 My first job in journalism was for the U.S. Navy. How that came to be takes me back to the winter of 1973 when I dropped out of New York University. I was about 19 and barely getting by as a waiter at a restaurant when I got laid off.  I briefly managed to get a job installing windows but I lost that after just a couple of weeks and so one day I found myself with only train fare, then 35 cents, to get myself to the Navy recruiting station in Coney Island.

Why the Navy? To see the world. I naively thought I could enlist and get whisked away that very same day. It turned out to be more involved than that. I also chanced to get an outstanding recruiter, Petty Officer Hall, who took the time to talk me through the various specialties for which I was eligible to get trained.

What caught my eye was a designation called Navy Journalist. Watergate was then all the rage and I was impressed by the potential for having the same title as the guys who had brought down Richard Nixon. Petty Officer Hall told me I would have to wait for an opening in that training program, and I said fine. As the reality of joining the service loomed closer, I had started to get cold feet. He asked me for a phone number. I didn’t have a phone so I gave him my mom’s number. Then I jumped the turnstile to take the train back to the apartment I had expected never to see again – I literally had only one-way train fare at the time.

When I arrived home I found in my mailbox a financial aid check for about $1,500 dollars. I should have returned it but instead I took it as a sign that I was not destined to join the military. I paid the rent and took a ski trip with my then girl-friend.

But the money went quickly and within a month or two I was broke again.

To be continued.

Doug Millison mashes up a 1979 B&W graphic by Josh Gosfield

In this final essay in a series let me explain why I accuse mass media of dereliction of duty for helping mislead the nation into war, for uncritically swallowing the sensational and for too often ignoring complex problems until they erupt into crisis.

 Idealistically I am just a very sad American who feels that our nation has strayed from Lincoln’s mission to be “the last best hope of Earth” and that much of responsibility for this lies with the failure of the working press, of which I am part — although I am now on vacation and speak only for myself.

 But I am a pragmatist who does not put much stock in hand-wringing. And while Mario Savio’s impassioned remarks (see graphic above or watch video ) resonate with me, I would not take his suggestion literally because only two types of persons throw anything, especially themselves, into machinery — saboteurs and candidates for the meat grinder. I am neither.

Nor have I merely been critical, for more authoritative critiques abound, including “Breaking the News,” “Rich Media, Poor Democracy,” “The Vanishing Newspaper,” “Fighting for Air,” and “The New Media Monopoly“.

So I have suggested how to improve the credibility of mass media by giving rank-and-file media workers blogs, hosted on company websites, so as to drill thousands of connections down into communities, and from these to pull up ideas and stories that would make better journalism and better business than the all-too-common practice of rewriting the empty press releases issued by the officialdom.

It’s good business because it is people who subscribe to newspapers, tune in to broadcasts or click on web sites. And they like to see and hear themselves. Two Stanford business school professors wrote a great article in which they asked Hoover Adams, founding publisher of the Dunn, North Carolina, Daily Record how his paper had achieved a market penetration above 100 percent. This is what the publisher told the eggheads:

It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names . . . . A local newspaper can never get enough local names. I’d happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition if we had the names to fill them up.”

Liberating these suppressed voices is a business opportunity because interactive media is not like mass media. Interactive media is about making connections. People to people. People to information. People to products. Whatever. The old media business model based on distribution is dead. Stick a fork in it. Web-heads like David Weinberger have been trying to tell us for a very long time the Internet is a two-way street. But we still have this mindset of the one-way trip to the driveway. And cannot get to these new land of connections with Soviet-style central planning. We must allow newsrooms to follow their audiences into the 21st Century.

In many years of covering Silicon Valley I’ve noticed how those guys promulgate “laws” to lend authority to their educated guesses. I’d call this a cheap trick but make lots of money doing this so let me tell you about Metcalfe’s law which says the more people who use a network the more valuable it becomes. More connections means greater value plus better journalism. It’s a win-win.

(Question: Is community the new media business model?)

it’s been more than 15 years since the newspaper industry knew how to compete for circulation or revenues

In 2006 the now-defunct magazine Business 2.0 effused over the profit-potential of blogging with a story based on a handful of money-making sites. After an instructive anecdote about BoingBoing (which took about 15 years to become an overnight sensation) the article fawned over Fark.com, a web site founded in 1999 by 35-year-old Drew Curtis, the self-style personification of Joe Sixpack (his Facebook page calls beer his religion). The article describes Fark.com as “a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web.” In short, all things sophomoric. Business 2.0 dwelt on its success as measured in eyeballs (then 40 million pageviews per month) and clicks (advertising revenues were supposedly on track to hit $600,000). The article quoted Web 2.0 darlingJohn Battelle as predicting that Fark.com would become the first independent blog to earn a million a year in profit.

As I fret over the increasingly sensational drift of mainstream media it strikes me that news industry executives have taken the wrong message from the popularity of Fark.com and other lowest-common-denominator sites. And not surprisingly so because it’s been more than 15 years since the newspaper industry knew how to compete for circulation or revenues. That may sound harsh but consider these two facts from the Newspaper Association of America website. Paid circulation peaked and started down in the early 1990s, before the Internet. We wallpapered over the problem because, until recently, we had few meaningful competitors for display and classified advertising (see first column — revenues rise as audience drops).

So I would suggest that the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell got the verb tense wrong when he blogged about 15 months ago that:

“We are dismantling the institution of newspaper journalism precisely at the moment when it seems to be of greatest social value.” (emphasis added)

We were dismantling our own industry by resting on our laurels. Now we are misinterpreting the medium — the Internet — and its message — think niche.

I think the 21st Century newspaper business model is a nutritious blend of FARKish snacks (aimed at the 9-5 browser who needs brief workday diversions) and the New Yorkerish fare (to fulfill the quality and public service expectations of our brand). We will create this blend by using staff-written blogs to drill down into our audiences (as I outlined Monday) and by empowering our rank-and-file to become mini-publishers (as I argue in “The Pyramid and the Cloud“).

Today I will outline the business model to support this scheme but first let me briefly say why I think it would be suicidal for newspapers to race Joe Sixpack to the bottom.

Fark.com and similar sites have first-mover advantage. They’ve cornered the dumb and dumber market at costs newspaper could not approximate even if they “rationalized” their organizations the same way that Herculescleansed the Augean stables.

Business 2.0 said Drew Curtis ran Fark.com with two part-timer programmers; he avoided web hosting costs (upwards of $10,000 a month?); he avoids labor costs by getting users to generate his crap. Is that where the news industry want to go? Even if media corporations could get so FARKin’ lean as to be profitable at the low end, they would find few memo or meeting opportunities in a 3-person shop.

So let me suggest that we aim newspapers and other mass media at higher value markets as was initially suggested to me by UC Berkeley professor Hal Varian, who is also chief economist to Google.

Now in all honesty, Hal Varian didn’t tell me in just so many words what I’m about to tell you. After all he’s got a better clientele these days. But let me take you back to late 1994 when I heard Varian, then a professor at the University of Michigan, speak at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. The incident sticks in my mind after all these years because it was one of the first assignments I drew after returning from a 12-day strike.

Over and above being happy to still have a job, I knew that the assignment had been “suggested” by Will Hearst, then publisher of the San Francisco Examiner and, more importantly, the person who had interviewed me by phone in 1992 when I told him the little white lie that landed me a temporary job as a science writer (thanks, Keay Davidson, for taking leave to iron out those “Wrinkles in Time“).

I had prepared for that interview by networking with science writers David Perlman, Charles Petit and Jane Ellen Stevens. From them I learned that Will was a devotee of abstract math. I was not. But when he asked me during our long-distance interview what sorts of science I liked to cover, I told him earth science, climate change, health and biology — and then added added math. As I recall we spent the rest of the conversation talking about how difficult it was to get math stories into the paper. When then-Deputy Managing Editor Tim Porter called two days later to hire me (thanks for “top Guild minimum,” dude) the fix was in.

So all of this was in the back of my mind as I wandered that conference beautiful minds — all of whom were taking way over my head. The only lecture that made any sense was this Hal Varian guy saying something to the effect that business of all kinds would have to learn how to charge different prices for the same thing. He cited the airline industry as an example, noting that two passengers sitting side-by-side routinely pay different fares depending on factors like when they purchased the ticket. I blogged about this once before but I searched Nexis yesterday without finding a daily, so I’m guessing my then-business editor Katie Rabin let me off the hook for writing a daily.

So this idea must have been rattling around, uselessly, in my head for about 14 years, until it was catalyzed a few months back by a discussion I had with a trade press publisher. I will keep that name private but I learned how this particular trade press grouo was preparing to harvest high-value, pay-per-click ads by getting a few items of registration data — e-mail address, age, gender and zip code.

Of course the problem with such an approach is how to get even such modest registration data from browsers who refuse to register for much of anything. The answer must be to create something new that they cannot get without this new “payment”. Let’s create what Hollywood would call “extended footage” on DVDs and I think we could call “reporter’s notebooks.”

Here’s what I mean. Say you’re a newspaper reporter who would like to write about how femtosecond lasers could spawn a new industry. Your first problem may be that you are unable to explain the story to an editor and the story may never get done. But in the blog-centered approach I suggest, the beat reporter, who would spend about 20 percent of his or her time publishing unedited topics on the beat, would write a post on the laser that would be read by whom: engineers and science buffs? Just the sort of people that headhunting firms like Heidrick & Struggles or Korn Ferry or Nosal Partners would pay what-per-click for? I’m not sure exactly since we have not yet created nor sold these reporter’s notebooks, but my trade press source suggested it would be 100 times more than the per-click revenue that might come from another FARKin story about Spitzer’s whore.

Here’s the metaphor that describes what I’m suggesting, and this idea comes from my Navy buddy, Lee Clements of Panama City, who used to skipper a ship running supplies out to the Oil Patch in the Gulf of Mexico. Anywhere you put a derrick or a ship or any stationary object, he told me, barnacles and other sea critters start to adhere. Other critters latch on to them and soon you have a little feeding ground (I think of this as ecosystemics).

I think this ecosystem works for non-technical beats as well. Every lobbyist, PR person and interest group in creation will have to log onto our political and policy blogs, and these individuals should have a demographic profile to support something more than run-of-the-mill clicks. (By the way, let me suggest that if anybody tries this, pre-enroll all your paid subscribers in some way because if they are already paying you money for the dead-tree edition, this new product is theirs, thank you very much.)

This idea for monetizing blogs was partially inspired by a conversation I had with Kourosh Karimkhany, General Manager of Wired News, who suggested I pay attention to a concept called radical transparency which basically strikes me as this — you want to bare it all to your audience because what they want is honesty and what you want is their time, or what marketers call engagement.

So if newspapers let it all hang out, if their reporters’ notebooks are public, all those “hidden agenda” arguments evaporate — and we get better click revenues.

I’ll tell you one other thing I’ve discovered — many of my readers know a lot more than about the subjects I cover than me. I recently got some of this expert-reader help in advance of covering a development on my tech beat. As a result my story had more depth than other versions written by seasoned reporters who didn’t have this help. (My Chronicle story says the software approach in question “could tilt the balance of power in personal computing away from the industry’s reigning co-rulers, Intel and Microsoft” — which seems noteworthy and yet is absent from this newspaper account and this online news story .)

So better journalism and new revenue sources. Or we FARK ourselves. Whaddya say?

Friday: Follow the audience into the 21st Century