RS: We have our print ads that ran in Ad Age and The New York Times and The Washington Post—about 400 newspapers ran our first ad—and we have online banner ads that have been running on Web sites. And of course we have the Web site up and running. And we’re going to be producing a series of print and online ads; I think the next round of ads will be more focused on consumers. We started off with a simple, straightforward message: “Newspapers have great reach and a lot of readers.” That’s a nice point of departure, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the campaign. What we hope to do is to create discussion amongst consumers about how people still depend on newspapers. It’s a 55 billion dollar a year industry with 100 million satisfied clients who every day who read the paper. It’s not going away overnight, despite the wishes of some of the pundits and prognosticators.
MG: What about op-ed pages and commentary sections—do you see those as integral components of newspapers, or could they ostensibly be ceded to blogs?
RS: I’m just speaking personally, but I think that op-ed sections, and the opportunity newspapers have to publish interesting voices from an audience, are really under-leveraged. There’s a hunger among consumers to see wider ranges of viewpoints—and there are certain editorial pages and op-ed sections across the country that do a marvelous job of that. I feel that the elimination of op-eds, and the elimination of editorial pages, is a big mistake. Instead, they need to be a lot more interactive, and a lot more inclusive, with new, emerging voices, as well as older, established ones. They’re still in a great position to thrive in print and online. And, online, there’s a lot of exciting work to be done around social networking—particularly as it pertains to people who want to discuss and debate mutual areas of interest. A well-done editorial page and op-ed section can be a linchpin for newspapers to develop very effective social networking platforms that would be not only be very popular, but also very engaging for important subsets of their audience.
MG: Do you see local papers and national papers developing those platforms in ways that are fundamentally different—or fundamentally similar?
RS: At the end of the day, it’s about how well papers can serve their readers, and how well they can build an audience, both in print and online. And once they build those audiences, whether they’re able to sell advertising and subscriptions around them, with all the new products they’re developing. I know from my travels at work that a lot of the mid-size and smaller-market newspapers are doing much, much better than their brethren in bigger, major metros. So it’s hard to generalize about what the appropriate evolution will be. But at the end of the day, the question is how they can serve their communities with quality news and information, and make it accessible to those communities on all sorts of different platforms. And, in that respect, there are definitely many different formulas for success.
MG: How did the idea for the project come about?
RS: We discussed amongst ourselves, periodically, how there’s this feeding frenzy of negative news about the future of newspapers. We felt that it was all out of proportion. The reality is that certainly newspapers have challenges—and we’re not being Pollyanna-ish about them—but everyone in the media has challenges, whether it’s at Yahoo, whether it’s at CBS, whether it’s at ClearChannel, whether it’s at XM Radio, whether it’s at a big consumer magazine. Everyone needs to innovate and evolve, because we’re in the midst of a media revolution. And at the end of this, newspaper companies will be left standing, because I believe that they’ll do the right things to evolve and thrive, both in print and digitally, that those innovations will help safeguard their future. People want quality information now more than ever. That’s one foundation that newspapers are in a great position to build upon.
In terms of the project itself, this whole effort was created in the last four weeks. We pulled some staff together, and we update the content on the site every single day. And hope to build out a bigger staff for that. But this has really been done as a grassroots effort. It’s a collective of newspapers. It started with four of us in Parade’s office, on January 7. We had our first and only meeting, and then we’ve been calling each other and e-mailing each other furiously, and we just started emailing all our contacts and making phone calls. And our colleagues responded beautifully. Now we’ve got 400 of our colleagues involved.
I think people in our business realize that we’ve done a mediocre job of telling our story and communicating the viability of newspapers going forward, and there was a real hunger for this sort of effort. And that’s what we’re really excited about continuing over the days and weeks and months ahead.
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Newspapers seem to have taken a hook to the chin lately, however, one might wish they show a little courage and counter-punch back.
Here in Minnesota our state largest daily newspaper, the StarTribune has declared bankruptcy. The right-wingers screamed that the papers doom was pre-ordained because it is too "liberal" and "socialist." Ridiculous. The web denizen's proclaimed the era of print (ink and newsprint) as a dead and everything will be digital and all information wants to be free. Silly and wishful thinking.
The fact is that the paper was bought and sold and then resold by investment groups and financed under terms untenable to profitability. This failure has nothing to do with slant of the editorial content or the ink and paper it is printed upon. It has everything to do with bad investment and business management. The paper was being run by a distance investor who had no idea on how to run a newspaper. Critically bad decisions were made not in service to its readers but blindly to the investor group.
But that's what bankruptcy is designed to deal with over time isn't it? To realign its capitol investment with its revenue potential and profitability. Newspapers are not dead but bad investments should die.
Posted by Robb on Mon 9 Feb 2009 at 01:28 PM
Please. (1) Show me a fully in-context occasion when "Eric Schmidt at Google [said] that 'all information wants to be free'" and left it at that, as though he believes anything close to what Siegel implies, which is that google just loves 'exploiting' NYT content for only its own gain. (2) Show me serious "pundits and prognosticators" whose "wishes" are that newspapers will be "going away overnight." There aren't any.
All of which is, of course, why Siegel's effort, which is the opposite of "grassroots," doesn't really appear to desire "productive debate and discussion" at all.
Posted by Josh Young on Mon 9 Feb 2009 at 04:16 PM
"This failure has nothing to do with slant of the editorial content or the ink and paper it is printed upon. It has everything to do with bad investment and business management."
The same thing could be said about the perpetual stumblings of Community Newspaper Holdings. That company has run its newspapers into the ground. It took the Thomson playbook and added to it. It's alienated community members. It's destroyed any hope for legitimate journalism in its towns. It's reneged on promises.
Donna Barrett, president and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, is not part of the solution. She and her company are a part of the problem -- a big part.
The only way newspapers can thrive again is if companies like Community Newspaper Holdings are removed from the equation and then held up as bad examples that never should be emulated.
Posted by Wenalway on Mon 9 Feb 2009 at 11:24 PM
I'm curious about Siegel's statement, "But it’s easy for the folks at Google to say that, when they’re making billions of dollars by selling ads around other people’s content. And the content of news organizations, in particular, which have to incur the costs of the journalists’ work, and of all the investment that goes into creating compelling journalism."
In fact, the only place where Google indexes news organizations' content is on Google News. Yet Google News doesn't -- and never has -- accepted or displayed advertising. So, where exactly is Google making dollars selling ads around news organizations' content?
Indeed, Google News merely indexes and displays an abstract of news organizations' content, not the content itself. And if any news organization wants Google to stop doing that, all the news organization has to do is place no-indexing code atop its pages. His verbal whipping of Google is a straw man' argument.
Posted by Vin Crosbie on Tue 10 Feb 2009 at 09:52 AM
I'm curious about something different. "This notion that bloggers will somehow fill the void if local newspapers were suddenly to disappear..."
Whose notion is that? Does Randy have a name of someone who believes it? Maybe a quote? Is it a prominent blogger who thinks the void could be filled that way? Is it a new media journalist? A professor? A community leader? Someone in a think tank perhaps? Who? We know that Randy thinks it's an overly simplistic solution and it must be batted down because it's all over the place, but whose solution is this?
I've never been able to find out, and I have been asking for quite a while. As far as I know it's a phantom claim, which is repeated endlessly because debunking it is a lot easier than, you know...actually thinking or problem-solving-- but maybe CJR can do better. I would be grateful if you could find out who Randy Siegel was accusing of "wishful thinking" when he said that he rejected the notion "that bloggers will somehow fill the void if local newspapers were suddenly to disappear."
My guess--and I could be wrong--is that it he has no idea whose notion this is, that he is arguing with a phantom and thus increasing the "noise" factor in the discussion, but he figured CJR would not challenge him.
Posted by Jay Rosen on Tue 10 Feb 2009 at 10:24 AM
Fwiw, it's not at all clear that Google makes nothing from Google News. In fact, Marissa Mayer has claimed it's indirectly worth $100MM:
http://networkednews.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/google-news-is-worth-100-million-dollars/
In that vein, consider the simple case of someone who just wants to browse headlines. They might have gone straight to the New York Times, but instead they go to google news. That's lost revenue for the Times. Any time a reader would have gone to a newspaper's site to browse headlines but instead checks out google news some news outfit loses money.
Now, I certainly (absolutely!) don't blame google for that. If a user chooses google's offering of headlines, it's probably because google does a better job--on average, at least. But, @vincrosbie, it's not that helpful to grouch about how news outfits should effectively opt completely out of the web because others are better at offering certain fair uses of their content than they are.
Posted by Josh Young on Tue 10 Feb 2009 at 03:43 PM
If someone walks past a newsstand, kiosk, or a New York Times vending box; browses the printed editiono's headlines; and decides not to purchase that edition, is it the fault of the newsstand, kiosk, or vending box? Did they cost the newspaper that sale?
No, it's the fault of the newspaper itself.
So too with someone reading a NYT headline indexed on Google and deciding that it doesn't interest him enough to click through to th story (i.e., the content) on that newspaper's site. The fault isn't Google's, the vending box's, the newsstand's, or the kiosk's.
I can see why Google's Marissa Mayer has claimed that having such headlines available on Google is nonetheless indirectly worth $100MM. Most kiosks and newsstand earn far more selling other products than newspapers and magazines.
The facts are that Google News has no ads, doesn't feature the real newspaper content (the headline isn't the story), and isn't at fault for the newspaper industry's decline.
Posted by Vin Crosbie on Tue 10 Feb 2009 at 05:37 PM
I'm told that CNHI is slashing jobs in its newsrooms right now. This is happening as this bunch is saying things like: "At the end of the day, it’s about how well papers can serve their readers, and how well they can build an audience, both in print and online."
Really? How is that supposed to happen? Are the workers supposed to toil, serf-like, as the non-thinking, non-doing elitists in this group stand off to one side and spout platitudes?
Bottom line: This bunch has no credibility. It can't be trusted to do anything it says it wants to do.
Posted by Wenalway on Wed 11 Feb 2009 at 01:43 PM
The example of flying correspondents into Iraq demonstrates that Randy Siegel really doesn't get what is going on. You don't need to fly in correspondents. Experts, like Juan Cole, who speak the language and read the newspapers and fly in in the course of their jobs now write blogs. Much of journalism used to be interviewing experts, and then reporting on the interview. The web removes the need for the middleman. This is a point Jay Rosen makes repeatedly.
Posted by JayAckroyd on Wed 4 Mar 2009 at 11:28 AM
Wenalway - you sound like a disgruntled ex-employee of CNHI. I believe CNHI has some credibility. I understand they are operating in the black. More than most newspapers can say right now.
Posted by newslady on Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 01:45 PM
If CNHI is really in the black -- and I would need much more proof than some anonymous person's vague claim before I would believe that -- it's because the company has slashed to the bone and then some in many of its newsrooms.
Yes, I have some CNHI experience. It was awful. The good writers fled, and the bad managers were promoted. Lots of lying and deception; lots of mismanagement and intimidation. Lots of platitudes such as "Do more with less." It was definitely an eye-opener as to how poorly managers can run a newspaper.
Posted by Wenalway on Sat 14 Mar 2009 at 11:51 PM