Entries Tagged 'Print' ↓

Print circulation showed another dramatic decline in the US in figures released on Monday.

As Louis Hau from Forbes says in the article linked from Romenesko, circulation decline isn’t the biggest problem, it’s monetising an increasingly online readership.

The industry’s most pressing problem isn’t the state of print circulation, which has been in decline since the mid-1980s. Instead, it is figuring out how to generate more advertising revenue from both its shrinking but still lucrative print product and its growing online properties.

Is it the beginning of the end for newspapers? Not likely, since dropping circulation has been ‘the beginning of the end’ for the last 20 years according to Hau’s quote above.

It’s just the beginning. Smaller community newspapers will continue to provide local news, including in a web presence. Larger metropolitan dailies may become media outlets, of which their newspaper is a component of the news distribution methods they offer, rather than their defining characteristic.

Until someone comes up with an effective monetisation strategy for web and mobile content that can either match current print advertising revenue, or at the very least break even, the doom and gloom outlook for newspapers will continue.

Sourced from Romenesko:

Print newspaper circulation continues on its steep downward slide
Editor & Publisher
Some ABC FAS-FAX numbers for the six-month period ending March 31, 2008:
* New York Times down 9.2% on Sunday, 3.8% daily
* Washington Post down 4.3% on Sunday, 3.5% daily
* Wall Street Journal up 0.3
* Los Angeles down 6% on Sunday, 5.1% daily
* USA Today up .27% to 2,284,219
* Boston Globe down 6.4% on Sunday, 8.3% daily

> How the top 25 daily newspapers performed in the FAS-FAX report (E&P)
> Louis Hau: Why circulation declines aren’t a wholly reliable barometer of overall performance. (Forbes)

ACP Magazines announced today it was closing down Australia’s longest running magazine, The Bulletin, effective immediately.

Circulation has fallen from a high of 100,000+ in the mid 90s to just 57,000 in the last audit in September 2007.

The press release said the trend was “symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre”.

Surprisingly, The Bulletin will not remain in online form.

Director of Communications for PBL Media Arabella Gibson said there will be no online presence remaining, and the website would likely be taken down over the coming weekend.

At the end of the release, some information about ACP Magazines boasts that of its stable of 70 international magazines, “integral to its success are vibrant, information-packed reader websites”.

The Bulletin website is certainly information-packed, perhaps it’s just not ‘vibrant’ enough.

Related links:

• ABC: Union blames media ownership changes for Bulletin’s death
• Crikey.com editorial and article.
• ACP Press Release
• The Bulletin online (link active as of noon Thursday, January 24)

Of Ryan Sholin’s list of 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head, there are a few points I particularly like.

• New delivery systems - RSS, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, etc. - aren’t the competition. Ignore them at your own peril.
• You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind.
• Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators.

I also like the first comment response by online journalism educator Mindy McAdams, who says user-generated content shouldn’t exist in a backwater (or not at all), but in “a place where the public’s concerns and interests (not just their opinions) are brought out and discussed”.

This ties in with the idea that bloggers = readers = neighbours = community sources.

And not only that, but online-savvy community sources.

Mark Glaser from MediaShift  gives his breakdown of how the newspaper of the future will thrive, minus the paper.

It basically breaks down to these seven things.

• community and citizen journalists
• niche topics
• staff with multiple skills
• transparency
• audio and video aren’t “web extras”, they’re just part of the story
• respond to criticism positively
• leave the “save it for print” mindset behind.

Essentially, become a web-first newsroom.

David Lazarus in the San Francisco Chronicle argues that, for newspapers to “survive in an age of free online content” they need to start charging for the use of their products online.

The argument is counter-intuitive.  It is an age of free online content.  That is the fact.  

If newspapers start charging for their online products, they won’t survive in this age of free online content.  People will simply go elsewhere.

Should newspapers sue Google or Yahoo for their content appearing on news aggregators?  No, but perhaps in their concern they could collaborate with Google to count online readership.  Surely another way of counting online readership for individual mastheads could be when they are read externally, in the same way RSS readership can be counted even when your site is not visited.

Also stake claim to some of the advertising click, or visit length, revenue being collected, and it becomes desirable to a media outlet that their content is seen freely by as wide an audience as possible.

Whatever else, newspapers must demonstrate that their online content has value.

“The students I teach really do believe that everything on the Internet is theirs for the taking,” Kirtley said. “Young people have been conditioned to believe that they’re entitled to this content.”

It’s time for newspapers to condition them otherwise. 

No, it is time for all media outlets with online interests to demonstrate their content has value, and then to stop harping and work a bit harder at figuring out how they’re going to get advertising to pay for it - in the same way the advertising pays for their print stable.

I haven’t got the time to go into the specifics, but search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of web production and driving traffic to your site. The following seven articles will give you more than enough information to get started with.

1. How to Write Magnetic Headlines
2. SEO Copywriting 2.0
3. Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Copywriting
4. Blog Architecture: The reason I’m ignoring your blog
5. SEO with WordPress for beginners
6. How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide
7. The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

In truth these aren’t necessarily the top seven SEO articles ever written.
What is true is that they are all excellent guides to what everyone in web production should be looking out for.

Here’s an excellent interview by Terry Heaton with Tom Kennedy, managing editor for multimedia at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. Read the whole thing for some good insight to a successful - or at least well-funded and innovative - online video newsroom.

I can say with certainty that a young generation of video journalist/editors is being created world wide, in part by the fluidity and ease of digital gathering and editing tools, and the natural inventiveness/curiosity of a generation weaned on visual media and consumer culture. The trick is getting the best values and practices of mainstream journalism inculcated into the individual arsenals of those practitioners and reworking our journalistic gathering and dissemination practices in a way that enables fluid, personal, evolved, visual story-telling to occur.

…there is a chance to develop this form of story-telling and create the vehicles that enable it to find an audience just as surely as today’s “reality shows” have worked for mainstream broadcast media. I would argue that we are the ones creating the true “reality shows” of our planet’s stories. I would also argue that public appetite for our content is there once people find it and are exposed to it.

When the local newspaper is sending out 26 print journalists and photographers with video cameras every day, where do you think people are going to go for their news?  Online, because no TV station can match that volume of local news coverage.

Local news stations, please take note.  As all media move to the web, the local paper is your direct video competitor - and doing a much better job.

via Rosenblumtv

Have a look at what four of Britain’s major dailies are doing with online.

They look at the online strategies of the Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mirror

Part 1: Logistics Matter
Part 2: Let readers lead your content
Part 3: The web provides opportunities to show content on more than one platform. Use it wisely.
Part 4: Don’t forget your staff, or the bank balance

In lamenting the cutbacks he says are destroying the Los Angeles Times, Sasha Abramsky says its an industry-wide problem that is driven more by a relationship breakdown with readers than a profit grab by shareholders who, up until this point, have been taking a large part of the blame.

It’s not that there isn’t an appetite for international reporting and serious investigative work in the US Rather it’s that the symbiotic relationship between readers and newspapers has broken down.

He says “the internet risks killing off the goose that keeps laying its golden eggs”, particularly if what he calls a ‘critical mass’ of people cancel their print subscriptions because they can get the same content for free from online news services like Google or Yahoo.

But the internet also presents amazing opportunities. That a business can’t effectively harness those opportunities presented to it will simply see market forces at work. Innovative and creative people, taking an entrepreneurial approach, will drive the market - as they always have. I don’t believe for a second that news is just a commodity, but it is and has always been a profit-making business.

People will still be informed, as long as the media in their community don’t allow themselves to get left behind.

Another report along the lines of the previous - Web revolution leaving newsgathering in a lurch

The problem with cutbacks media-wide, according to Tom Rosenstiel (director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, publishers of the State of the News Media report), is that in many communities, “people will suddenly discover that there hasn’t been a reporter at the city council meeting for weeks and that no one is checking the police blotter. It could happen little by little and be discovered after the fact.“

And with the reliance on newspaper journalism driving daily radio and TV stories (because of their own staff cutbacks), the loss of a newspaper or even just a diminished capacity to report as it once did, will have news coverage consequences for radio and TV also. Naturally this translates to a less-informed public because of a dearth of coverage media-wide.

There is an argument that online should be 24 hours, news straight to the web rather than waiting for the print run, hourly update or 6pm broadcast, but lack of resources, if only in staffing, presents the same problems for the online arm of newspapers.

“…most newspapers are ramping up their websites to stay relevant. But because online advertising lags in comparison to print, many newspapers can’t adequately staff their websites with reporters who gather news.

What is it readers want, content or design?

A recent eyetracker study has shown what web designers might already know - less information and more white space on a web page results in better recall and comprehension.

Featured findings:

1. Rewrite + reformat = remember
2. Precise and relevant editing = successful design
3. Photos edited for relevance = photos viewed

Read the study here and see images of the eyetracker ‘hotspot’ results.

If you had to decide between content or visual aesthetics, it’s quite clear that content is king. No matter how good your site looks, if the content can’t keep people, visitors won’t stay beyond the “oo, that’s pretty” phase. But too much content, and more importantly cluttering the screen with it, can lose people as well.

Basically, as LostRemote says, “Give your audience the essentials, give a clean presentation and they will remember the information. Time to clear out the clutter from your sites.”

A personal experience of this for me was a news site where I was looking for video content. I was convinced I had looked carefully for any links to their video, and finally in frustration emailed the site asking for direction. The video content link ended up being on the front page of the website, but below the fold (scrolling). Had the page been better designed I should have seen it easily. Finding information on a news portal shouldn’t be like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

From the study:

At one point, the media wasn’t sure how to approach the web - should they ridicule it, ignore it and wait till it goes away, or see it as a threat to be dealt with? The Internet and those who populated its content were seen as unprofessional, unreliable, unreadable and apparently a waste of time. Now that it’s making an impression, however, mainstream media still may not be entirely sure how to harness the Internet, but they’re at least making cautious approaches.

In his assessment of the State of the News Media report released earlier this year, Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune has found that media companies are terrified of the Internet. The upside, he says, is that they’re finally taking the web seriously and making moves to exploit it but, being 10 years behind the curve, there’s a bit of work to be done.

“…journalists now see the Internet as a possible salvation and not this horrible threat to their standards. They are experimenting wildly, but no formula has emerged and maybe even less of an idea of how to pay for it.

And as always, how to pay for it is the problem. With global newspaper readership in decline (except in China, India and a few other parts of the third world), the media have to figure out how to harness the precious advertising dollar on the web, because almost nobody is prepared to pay for news content at this point.

See the State of the News Media report in its entirety.

Perhaps it’s a result of recent numbers released saying newspaper circulation has declined yet again, but David Letterman’s Late Show Top Ten list the other night was “Top Ten Signs Your Newspaper is in Trouble“.

In reference to the post title, I don’t think news is a joke. Newspapers shouldn’t panic, but take heart that there is also a trend to increasing online readership. The revenue lost from print isn’t yet being returned online, and it might never fully be, but in the long run media outlets are not likely to go out of business. They’ll just be smarter about how they manage their resources and news collection. For example, in the form of unpaid citizen journalist contributors.

From David Letterman’s Late Show

Top Ten Signs Your Newspaper is in Trouble.