Battle Plans for Newspapers NYTimes

See original article here.

February 10, 2009, 12:15 am
Battle Plans for Newspapers
By The Editors

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Virtually every newspaper in America has gone through waves of staff layoffs and budget cuts as advertisers and subscribers have marched out the door, driven by the move to the Web and, more recently, the economic crisis.

In some cities, midsized metropolitan papers may not survive to year’s end. The owners of the Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer have warned that those papers could shut down if they can’t find buyers soon. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis recently filed for bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News will soon stop home delivery four days of the week to cut operating costs. Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers in this country, recently said it would require most of its 31,000 employees to take a week of unpaid leave.

What survival strategies should these dailies adopt? If some papers don’t survive, how will readers get news about the local school board or county executive?


Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School Joel Kramer, editor of MinnPost.com Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer magazine Geneva Overholser, Annenberg School of Journalism Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org Andrew Keen, author Edward M. Fouhy, founding editor of Stateline.org Rick Rodriguez, former editor of The Sacramento Bee
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Define What Will Be Lost
Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia University Journalism School.

In many cities, newspaper readers are already seeing a much thinner, less complete paper than the one they used to read a few years ago. On the future-of-journalism conference circuit, one often hears that this situation fundamentally imperils the Founders’ vision of how American democracy ought to work.

This is too facile. For one thing, in the days when the First Amendment was drafted there wasn’t much journalistic reporting (according to most historians of journalism, the first modern reporter’s interview didn’t take place until 1859).

Be precise about the social function we need to strengthen, and creative and non-doctrinaire about how to strengthen it.
The Founders were probably thinking about printed political arguments when they wrote about freedom of the press. For another, until a few decades ago most big-city newspaper reporters did work more like Hildy Johnson’s in “The Front Page” than like Woodward and Bernstein’s during Watergate. For another, not everything that appears in a newspaper is information you can’t get anywhere else.

So there are two ways to look at the problem. The first is to assume that the way to shore up newsgathering is to shore up newspapers, since the daily paper in most cities is the organization with with the largest staff of reporters and editors.

This can be done in a variety of ways, some involving pure business strategy (charging for content on newspaper Web sites, establishing new sources of revenue, cutting production and distribution costs) and some involving enlisting the help of outsiders. Nonprofit organizations like ProPublica, for example, have started to provide free content to newspapers on subjects they care about.

Alternatively, the gap in independent reporting on matters of public importance left by ailing newspapers could be filled by other organizations. They might be new, Web-based news services, like GlobalPost, or local news organizations, like MinnPost in Minneapolis, or beefed-up versions of existing entities other than newspapers: radio and television stations, alternative weeklies, magazines.

What’s essential right now is that we be precise about the social function we need to strengthen, and creative and non-doctrinaire about how to strengthen it. Reporting does not happen automatically — it takes time, money, and training. It needs a support system. The best local newspapers have been a pretty good one for a generation or two. They may not be any longer.


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Fewer Readers, Paying More
Joel Kramer is chief executive and editor of MinnPost.com. He was editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune from 1983 to 1991 and publisher and president from 1992 to 1998.

Given the sharp decline in what advertisers will pay to reach eyeballs, I don’t know if there is a way for high-quality journalism to be profitable any more, especially locally. Shifting to the Internet saves costs, but because of the low barrier to entry in Web publishing, the ads sell at a fraction of what print still commands. Meanwhile, readers who paid pocket change for their daily paper, and their children who never paid for a paper, want their news to be free.

That’s why I’ve started a regional journalism Web site based on a not-for-profit model. MinnPost.com sells ads and sponsorships, but much of our revenue comes from annual donations from people who care about serious news coverage of Minnesota. Serious journalism is a community asset, not just a consumer good, and people (and foundations) should support it, as they support museums. We’ll see if that argument persuades enough people.

Publish a newspaper worth $2 a day, the price of a cup of coffee, and $5 on Sunday — and raise the quality.
I do think there is a strategy that might keep a high-quality regional newspaper modestly profitable in the future: Rely much more on revenue from readers. Publish a newspaper worth $2 a day, the price of a cup of coffee, and $5 on Sunday. Raise the quality. Make it more in-depth, more analytical, to complement the immediacy of your free Web site, and do not make that deeper, more insightful coverage available for free on the web. Perhaps make the printed product a tailored mix of sections that appeal to different readers: For $2, you get to pick, say, four sections out of six.

Obviously, circulation would drop. A newspaper that sold 400,000 copies at 50 cents daily and $1.25 on Sunday might sell only 100,000 at four times the price. But there would be a business incentive to keep quality high, because each extra copy sold should increase profit, not subtract from it.

There would still be ads, and the selling proposition would be attractive — here is an audience that really cares about what we’re delivering. But the business would be much less advertising-dependent.

Would this work? I don’t know. I think it has a better chance than going Web-only and charging for the content, and a much better chance than trying to become profitable through Web advertising only. It certainly beats just wringing your hands and cutting staff every year.


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‘Culture of Free’ Is Suicide
Steven Brill founded The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV and Brill’s Content. He is chief executive of Clear-Verified Identity Pass, the fast pass for airport security, and teaches journalism seminars at Yale College and Yale Law School.

For big or small newspapers and most other forms of quality content, there has never been a business model that was not partly supported by readers paying for it. Of course, there are free shoppers, but regional newspapers have always competed effectively against them because advertisers know that readers of freebies are not nearly as engaged in those freebies as they are in the publications that they pay for.

With the current model of free online content, newspapers have essentially turned themselves into shoppers — but, ironically, still with great quality, created by the same culture and people whose work consumers used to pay for. This is complete suicide. Newspapers should, in fact, be more profitable online — because it gets rid of the cost of paper, printing and delivery. This should be the golden age of journalism, delivered without the trucks.

Local papers should charge online because they don’t have as many competitors for the good local reporting they do.
Newspapers bought into the idea that the culture of the Internet is “free,” or maybe they thought initially that online content was just an add-on to attract subscribers, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

Worse, the online advertising model is particularly weak for general interest newspapers. For most advertisers, newspaper sites can’t be as effective as ads placed on search engines or on specifically targeted sites; you can never beat that and it’s foolish to try. What is toxic for newspaper sites is that advertisers like me can get a report on how much was sold online, linked to a site. Newspapers can’t win that contest, and will never win that contest.

So papers have to find a way back to being paid. I think in many ways the prospects may be brighter for papers like the Seattle P.I. or the Star Tribune to charge online, because they don’t have as many content competitors for the good local reporting they do. Local newspapers are the best brands, and people will pay a small amount online to get information — whether it be a zoning board meeting or a Little League game — that they can’t get anywhere else.


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Partner Up
Geneva Overholser is director of the U.S.C. Annenberg School of Journalism and former editor of The Des Moines Register.

We’re likely to see some regional papers close, but the public’s need to know about the size of the city budget, the condition of the county jail, the quality of education in the classroom, the outlook for the local economy won’t end.

Newspapers have to make clear their own reporting from that of community sources, and set standards for selecting its partners.
I wish that newspaper leaders would step back from making indiscriminate staff and news-hole cuts and rethink their focus. First, look around the community to see who is doing good information-gathering and sharing. New Web-only publications may be covering various parts of the community. A consortium of arts organizations may have a reliable events calendar. Television or radio stations may have continued some substantial elements of government news coverage. An alternative weekly may have good reviews of films and theater and concerts. Bloggers may be assembling information from parents at various levels of the local school system and a nonprofit group may be gathering well-researched local health information.

Then ask, what needs are not being met? And what can my paper alone do best? It may be that investigative reporting, coverage of state government, local businesses, religious news and political leaders will make up the paper’s new, more limited profile. This won’t be the complete answer, but it could help editors make smarter decisions about how to allocate reduced resources.

Another necessary step is already taking place in some newspapers — the push to build a networked, collaborative method of providing news and information through print, online and on mobile phones. The aggregation of reporting and information from many sources will be a central function of newspaper companies.

Of course, newspapers have to make clear their own reporting from that of community sources, and set standards for selecting its partners. These changes will be difficult for newspapers which have considered themselves the primary newsgathers, but they may lead to the next chapter of American journalism.


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The Key to Web Success
Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist.org, a free online classified ad and forum site.

Even though we’re in a period of “creative destruction,” vigorous journalism, particularly investigative journalism, must be preserved. I’m not a journalist, but I’ve been listening to commentators on new media. There clearly are new factors that will shape how I get my news.

First, new media, particularly blogging, and traditional newspapers are already blurring together. Second, some things don’t change. There will always be a need for fact checking and the courage to “speak truth to power” — whether this is being done by new or old media. As a lover of news and Web businesses, I’m seeing some interesting shifts happening.

Participation is the characteristic of good, small hyperlocal sites — as well as big Web enterprises like Wikipedia, Amazon and craigslist.
For example, there is substantial interest in the philanthropic model for news, like ProPublica.org. Meanwhile, Spot.Us is an organization developing a kind of microfinance model for sponsored reporting. What’ll work? No one knows, but we need to experiment.

There are some things we do know. People are most interested in national/global news, and news regarding their immediate community. Two good “hyperlocal” sites — missionlocal.org and oaklandnorth.net — ask people what they want to know about, which may be the key to their (potential) success.

Truth and credibility have been severely eroded in the past eight years, and there’s a broad perception that the press ceased asking difficult questions. Reporters need to keep trying to get answers, and act with a sense of fairness. Perhaps most important is engaging with the public on issues that matter to them.

The aim should be to create a “culture of participation” as Jay Rosen says. Or to paraphrase David Weinberger, a technology thinker, a paper should be perceived as “ours” (the public) not “theirs” (the owners). Participation is the characteristic of good, small hyperlocal sites. It’s also the key to big Web enterprises like Wikipedia, Amazon and even craigslist.


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We’ll Still Need Pros
Andrew Keen is the author of “The Cult of the Amateur.”

While the print newspaper business model is in terminal decline, there is one nugget of encouraging news from the Internet for publishers of local papers. Marshall McLuhan was wrong — the electronic network isn’t, as he prophesized, a global village uniting people together from around the world. Instead, to misquote Tip O’Neill, most of the information on the Internet is local.

We generally go online to get local information — directions to stores, telephone numbers and addresses of local merchants, restaurant reviews, local political news, the weather, the buying and selling of goods, even local social networking. Local information, therefore, is potentially the most valuable product in the new knowledge economy.

Rather than slithering into the swamp of crowd-generated content, smart publishers should focus on their core expertise — the organization and curation of information.
The reasons that local print newspapers can’t currently compete with the Internet are threefold. Firstly, it is a more immediate medium than print — able to continually update and store infinite amounts of information. Secondly, almost all local information on the Internet is free, while most local papers continue to charge for both subscriptions and classifieds. Thirdly, the physical medium of print is, for better or worse, quickly becoming archaic with consumers.

But the end of local print newspapers doesn’t necessarily mean the death of local online content businesses. The problem with the Web 2.0 Internet is that much of its information is either unreliable or simply wrong. That’s because the industry’s traditional business model has been flipped on its head.

Local publishers once employed an editorial staff to organize and curate local information. The Web 2.0 model is represented by Web sites like craigslist, Wikipedia and Yelp that aggregate unedited user-generated-content thereby “disintermediating” professional editors, fact checkers and journalists. The consequence is an anarchy of annoyingly unreliable and disorganized local information.

I am confident that the next big thing on the Internet — Web 3.0 if you like — will be a layer of professionally curated information sitting on top of the amateur Web 2.0 layer. Rather than slithering into the democratic swamp of crowd-generated content, smart local publishers should focus on their core expertise — the organization and curation of information by professionals. To do this, they should emulate Web businesses, like the search-engine Mahalo, that are using social media tools to organize user-generated-content while continuing to employ professional curators.

The new local Web newspaper will depend on self-employed “parochial mavens” whose livings will be based on their intimate knowledge of local merchants, schools and stores. Publishers who can figure out how to use these experts will find a loyal local audience.


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Your Friendly Neighborhood Journalist
Edward M. Fouhy, a veteran journalist, is the founding director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and founding editor of Stateline.org, a news site that covers state public policy.

It’s hard to detect any big city newsroom angst in the family room where Bob and Maureen Mann publish the three-year-old online Forum of New Hampshire. Nor will you find it in the kitchen where Christine Yeres of Chappaqua, N.Y., presides as co-editor of Newcastlenow.org, a 15-month-old Web site. Instead there’s enthusiasm and delight in good stories.

Both sites are part of the surge in local journalism encouraged by the low barrier to publishing made possible by the digital revolution. While daily newspapers slim down their coverage, lay off journalists and try to survive the move of advertisers to the Internet, citizens around the country are responding by building their own local news sites. These newly minted journalists — though they often don’t call themselves that — are not simply slinging opinions. They understand that local government without credible information simply doesn’t work.

“If we were turning out stories that are sloppy or have mistakes or hadn’t been fact-checked, I don’t think people would read us.”

— Christine Yeres
As Andrew Donohue, executive editor of the widely praised voiceofsandiego.org, says, we aren’t “sitting around in our parent’s basement wearing sweat pants, drinking Diet Cokes and firing off a bunch of opinion blogs.” Donohue, 30, like his co-editor Scott Lewis, 32, is a trained journalist. They have inspired their paid staff of twentysomethings to fill the gap in investigative reporting created when the local daily, The San Diego Union-Tribune, began downsizing.

Ms. Yeres says, “If we were turning out stories that are sloppy or have mistakes or hadn’t been fact- checked, I don’t think people would read us.”

The news that the Manns post is the stuff of small town life: middle school basketball scores and a lengthy report on the deliberations of the school committee. Those are matters that don’t much interest the midsized dailies that sometimes cover the Forum’s four small southern New Hampshire towns.

The Manns and their colleagues work hard to get the facts straight. They publish corrections quickly when they’ve erred and they willingly listen to local politicians who sometimes want to be quoted not for what they said but for what they meant.

None of the operations I visited during a recent survey trip is likely to be confused with a newspaper, even a small one. The sites are niche publications, more like the weeklies that every small town once had.

Economic models? There’s no one size fits all. Advertisers seem to like Newcastlenow in affluent Westchester County but there’s not enough revenue to pay either the editors or contributors; the same is true at the Forum. In San Diego where voiceofsandiego journalists are paid, they use a modified public radio model; memberships for readers willing to contribute for first rate journalism, six figure contributions from philanthropic-minded citizens and grants from local foundations. About 10 percent of the annual $840,000 budget comes from advertisers.

It’s too soon to say if these sites are the answer. But what’s clear is that citizens are inventing a new form of locally based and financed journalism while preserving the values of accuracy, objectivity and independence.


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Endlessly Pursuing New Business Models
Rick Rodriguez is a professor of journalism at Arizona State University and former executive editor of The Sacramento Bee.

Struggling midsized metro papers jeopardize their long-term relevancy by cutting news coverage, especially in fast-growing suburban areas. They’re ceding midsized and smaller advertising to competitors. They’re losing footholds in communities where local coverage matters. They’re curtailing the investigations that make them unique.

And yet, combined newspaper and online readership is greater than ever. That’s worth building on, but costs, salaries and profit expectations will have to be reset and lowered for the long term. If regional metro papers do disappear, other news outlets and niche products will try to fill the void. For a while it’ll be the Wild West in terms of journalistic standards, the rise and fall of old and new enterprises and an endless pursuit of new business models.

Government meetings, for example, will still be covered but in piece-meal ways. What is likely to be missing will be a unifying voice.
Among the best bets for adhering to traditional journalistic standards will be smaller, already-established newspapers that can expand their local influence. Alternative weeklies and ethnic media mostly will survive, and possibly even thrive by specializing in coverage of fields like entertainment or local politics.

University-affiliated papers, too, may play larger roles in coverage beyond their campuses. They may become legislative watchdogs as more newspapers close their state house bureaus. Perhaps they will collaborate with seasoned professionals to do investigative and other public service journalism.
Philanthropic groups have already stepped up to finance nonprofit reporting organizations, and some bloggers are starting to cover local news, which is increasingly ignored by bigger papers.

It will be a vibrant, entrepreneurial but much more fragmented journalism world. Government meetings, for example, will still be covered but in piece-meal ways. What is likely to be missing will be a unifying voice that transcends neighborhoods, city limits and political boundaries. That kind of change would diminish our industry and our democracy.