media

Pondering the Future of News at Chicago Ideas Week (Oct. 10-16)

The greatest takeaway from Chicago Ideas Week was something Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of AllThingsD and a leading voice in technology since the early nineties, said: “The federal government has lain down on the job,” when it comes to supporting new technologies within the US. This indictment came at the tail end of a panel discussion called “The Future of News” at the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Swisher pointed to China and South Korea as examples of countries that invest heavily in the technologies of tomorrow. She had recently returned from these destinations and was amazed at how far their screen technology has come: They are thinner, clearer, and more interactive than anything she’s seen here in the US. She insisted that our government is not investing in the technologies of the future to the same degree, and she won’t be surprised when we get left behind as a result.

To illustrate, Swisher recalled when her very young daughter reached out and touched the family’s new TV. When the screen didn’t respond, she said, “Mommy, it’s broken!” Swisher agrees.

Her other predictions about how technology will continue to shape media:

1. Media will be promiscuous.
2. Media will be everywhere.
3. Media will be noisy.
4. To succeed in the new media landscape, you will have to be flexible and entrepreneurial.

These intriguing—and conceivable—forecasts from Swisher were not revealed until the end of the talk. The discussion that preceded them, however, did not lack its own enlightening moments.

Music and Media

Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time, guided the conversation after introducing himself and the other panelists: Evan Ratliff, founder and editor of The Atavist; Kara Swisher; Joe McGinnis, author of The Rogue: Searching for Sarah Palin and ten other books; Ayman Mohyeldin, foreign correspondent for NBC News; and James Warren, columnist for The New York Times and the Chicago News Cooperative. The diversity of the panel contributed to a lively discussion about how technology will continue to shape how news is reported, delivered and consumed.

Stengel began the discussion by relating the news industry to the music industry. Indeed, today many people regard the album as an organic art form from which today’s MP3-driven culture has sadly strayed. However, Stengel pointed out that the album itself was the product of a technological innovation—the long-playing record. Before that, music was distributed on a song-by-song basis much like it is today.

In fact, The Atavist’s business model relies on this same purchasing behavior to sell its news stories individually. The stories can be downloaded directly to mobile reading devices like the Kindle or iPad. After lamenting the demise of magazines because they once provided him an outlet for stories that wouldn’t work as books, McGinnis pointed to Ratliff as his “savior” for his progress toward restoring long-form journalism. As more people get comfortable paying for stories rather than entire newspapers or magazines, we could see this model gain popularity.

From an organizational standpoint, Ratliff attributed a lot of his company’s success to its small size. Swisher echoed this sentiment, saying today’s new tools for journalists are allowing her to “do more with less people.” She even claims to pay her writers better than the writers in other departments of Dow Jones.

Regarding the ways in which people will get their news in the future, no one seemed to have any preference. Swisher joked that news will be so ubiquitous we might soon see content printed on salami. McGinnis is a little nervous about how new technologies are making it easier for people to avoid any news and opinion that challenge their beliefs, leading to what he calls “Palinization.” Warren complained about the lack of cohesion on the local level, but he maintained a positive attitude about the future, even if he doesn’t know what it will bring.

Mohyeldin explained that he puts a lot of effort into producing his stories, and it doesn’t matter to him whether you view them on TV or your watch. His outlook was based on one simple tenant that has only recently come into question. He said, “Good journalism will always sell.”

Let’s hope so.

– James

Tags: atavist, ayman mohyeldin, chicago ideas week, ciw, evan ratliff, james warren, joe mcginnis, kara swisher, media, museum of broadcast communications, nbc, New York Times, news, palinization, rogue, sarah palin, technology, time
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Nope. There’s still hope. Lots of it. Along with serious questions. Lots of them.

Closings, layoffs, and bankruptcies are manifestations of current economic chaos. “But in chaos lies opportunity,” said Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, published by Tribune Co.

Joined by Scott Flanders, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., Kern spoke Thursday March 18 at “A Discussion on Print Media in the Digital Age,” moderated by Bradley J. Hamm, Dean of the IU School of Journalism and jointly sponsored by the journalism school and the IU Maurer School of Law.

If you read media reports and analysis, it sounds like a “crisis” leading to Armageddon, for American democracy as well as journalism, Hamm began. It’s actually more of a business story that the reporters and editors are more interested in than their audiences, Flanders suggested.

“It’s the business model that’s restructuring, not audience consumption,” Flanders said. “There’s an insatiable appetite for information (especially about celebrities).”

As The Economist reported in “Network Effects” (subscription required) on 15 December 2009, “The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. The news business will survive.” (The story is noteworthy because it reports on a similar time of technological disruption in the media business, with the commercialization of the telegraph in 1845.)

Audience interest remains high. The media and journalism will survive, though not exactly in their current form, Kern and Flanders agreed.

Economic Origins

In Flanders’ analysis, what has brought about much of the current crisis in the newspaper business is the same thing that brought about much of the crisis in much of the economy: too much debt. As with all businesses that are essentially monopolies, the newspaper business was highly profitable for years.

Publishers were underleveraged, in the view of the finance industry, and ripe for increased borrowing. They loaded up on seemingly inexpensive debt. Now they can’t sustain the hits of the recession, and some companies are going bankrupt as a result.

With the recession, the most highly profitable part of a newspaper—classified advertising for cars, jobs, and houses—is way down. So is cash. So are profits. “If craigslist and Angie’s List hadn’t cut out the most profitable part of the business, the classified ads, there would be no problem,” said Flanders, who came to Playboy last June from Irvine, California-based Freedom Communications, Inc.

For a complete view of the media business and audience today, see “State of the News Media 2010,” a study by the Pew Research Center, released 15 March 2010.

Business Model Changes

Now the entire media industry is looking for different business models, and much of the reporting on the media business centers on either the search for a business model or the potential damage to democracy with the demise of high-quality reporting.

Readers have never supported media content in the United States. Advertisers have, and at a higher percentage here than in most other parts of the world, and advertising will not likely ever subsidize American journalism at the same high rates. Online readers in particular will never be willing to pay for content that they now read for free.

What’s also becoming clear is that some readers will pay more than others depending on how they receive content. Both Playboy and The Tribune are looking to the future of mobile information consumption for additional income.

“Mobile users are conditioned to pay for content,” Flanders said. “Mobile is the place where we want to spend the most time and development.” Media companies, the good ones at least, will experiment.

Marketing Journalism

The newspapers that survive will have a “diversity of portfolio,” Kern said, with various properties in print and online. The key will be “super relevant information that people cannot get anywhere else. That will be the value proposition.”

I grew up in a newspaper family, and I saw Lou Grant on TV as the epitome of the hard-bitten editor. I don’t think Lou Grant would use the term “value proposition” or the term it originated from, “unique selling proposition.” I don’t think he would talk like an online marketer, with concerns about whether “content” is “relevant.”

I’m very glad that Kern does. It’s an even better example of things that must change in journalism than either he or Flanders gave in making the point that business deals that seemed inconceivable in the past are happening today. Much of what journalists have considered to be matters of conviction are, in fact, matters of convention, Kern said, and too much convention will lead to extinction.

What also struck me is that one of the answers for media lies in tradition. News organizations must, in Kern’s words, “define what you stand for that’s better than anyone else.”

The most important defining characteristic is the one that keeps my family’s paper, The Chesterton Tribune, in business: local coverage. “The newspapers that survive will not seek to have a national or even a regional force. They will be intensely local,” Kern said.

“Hyperlocal,” to use the term that appears in 2010 media trends reports.

As a reporter covering town meetings, I noticed that it was flooded basements after torrential rains that brought people out to meetings, not so much the everyday business of government. That’s intensely relevant content, Kern agreed.

Media people are intensely interested in public affairs, and it’s a good thing. Many, if not most, people are not.

We’re simply witnessing the latest chapter in the long and ongoing debate over the public interest and the media’s mission to protect it. The level of the public’s interest in public affairs (or public opinion) has always been lower than journalists think it should be. “The narcissism of professional journalism is striking to me,” Flanders remarked.

The Dollars of Sense

Yet Dean Hamm’s question and concern—who will pay for quality journalism?—remains. Early in the week, he attended the New York opening of the play Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, which included a post-play talkback on the work surrounding the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. The panel included several of the people involved, including former U.S. Dept. of Defense analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the papers to The New York Times.

It’s clear, Hamm said, that today the Pentagon Papers would be posted on the internet immediately and in full.

But who would make sense of them? The New York Times paid for a team of reporters and lawyers that spent three months reviewing the papers and looking at such questions as national interest, national security, and public information. The Times’ team then digested the results into a long series of articles, fighting—and paying for—a seminal case for press freedom along the way.

Who would do that now? What do you think?

For more on the state of the media business and its economics, see:

“The Cable Wars,” by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, 19 January 2010.

“Social Reading,” by Collin Canright, Onlines Blog, 27 May 2009.

“Marc Andreessen’s newspaper deathwatch,” Fortune, 4 March 2008.

“End Times,” by Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, January/February 2008.

- Collin

Tags: Chicago, Chicago Tribune, Indiana University, journalism, marketing, media, media economics, mobile, New York Times, Playboy
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Although I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote it, my take on today’s employment reports, which showed both a decrease in the unemployment rate and a loss of jobs, may be among the most pessimistic. When our Canright Calendar email comes out on Monday, today’s report will be referred to as a “job-loss report,” in contrast to most-often used tag of “jobless report.”

But then the figures have shown losses for so long, it appears that my brain sees it as a report of losses and not of data. A review of today’s headlines shows that I’m not the only one. In a search for meaning in the data, major media reported today’s seemingly contradictory figures mostly as a mixture of optimism tempered with the frustration of this recession’s long-declining employment data.

My tag may simply have been influenced by the first report I saw, CNNMoney.com’s article “The big jobs hole.”

MSNBC put a little more positive spin on the figures in “A ray of hope clouded by 8.4 million jobless: Mixed January employment data show how far the jobs market needs to go.”

The business media put the most positive spin on the news. “US jobless rate lowest for five months,” reported the Financial Times. “The US unemployment rate fell to a five-month low of 9.7 percent in January, even as the economy shed 20,000 jobs. . .

The Wall Street Journal followed suit in “Signs of Hope as Jobless Rate Dips.” The report, however, noted the “employers continued cutting jobs in January as businesses remained insecure about the economic outlook.” Indeed, though we hope to add to our staff soon.

President Obama tempered his optimism, according to the Journal, by saying that the report is “encouraging” and a “cause for hope but not celebration.”

Taking the just-the-numbers approach was National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune; both reported “Jobless Rate Drops To 9.7 Percent,” though NPR inserted the word “unexpectedly” in its headline while the Tribune left that information for its article’s lead. The New York Times led in the same way but with the sunny headline “Labor Market Shows Signs of Rebirth in New Data.”

As usual, NPR’s excellent Planet Money team made the most of the situation to explain how reports can show a fall in the unemployment rate with a loss of 20,000 jobs in “Yay!(?) Jobless Rate Under 10 Percent.” The ever skeptical Agora Financial’s 5 Min. Forecast simply tagged it all “Jobs Insanity.”

Finally, my favorite, The Economist, which always seems to provide so much interpretation in its headline decks of so few words:

American jobs figures
Falling flat
More evidence that America is experiencing a jobless recovery

The lead paragraph rounds out the situation with economic context:

A WEEK ago, Americans were told that their economy had expanded for a second consecutive quarter, and rapidly at that: output grew at an annual rate of 5.7%. This week, they are reminded that a return to growth has yet to benefit the jobless. The economy lost 20,000 jobs in January, a decline driven by the loss of 75,000 jobs in the construction sector. Economists had forecast an increase in employment of around 15,000. The unemployment rate, based on household rather than establishment data, showed a slight improvement, dropping from 10% to 9.7%, but nearly 15m Americans remain unemployed. As Larry Summers put it in Davos last week, the American economy is experiencing “a statistical recovery and a human recession”.

For his nice turn of phase, which gives the most accurate and concise summation of the jobs report and economic situation, my business language prize goes to Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council.

-Collin

Tags: business writing, journalism, language, media, public relations
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It’s a quiet week, a time for contemplation, review, and planning. Especially review. The best-of lists—for the year and the decade—started some weeks ago. I started to get caught up last week. My Delicious bookmarks from the last couple of days shows:

• A best-of selection of social media, content marketing, and media links
• A few realistic views on social media marketing
• Some initial economic overview stories

Best-of Media and Marketing Links

16 Must-Read B2B Marketing Strategy Ebooks
A survey of ebooks from lead generation to case study writing. “The New Rules of. . . ” from David Meerman Scott leads title trends.

10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers
Great list of social media and marketing related ebooks.

75 Best Business Blogs of 2009
A broad list covering all areas of business—and it includes some of my favorites.

Top 50 Social Media Stories 2009
A selection of the best social media blog posts from 2009.

10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010
Personal and company news streams, as well as mobile, lead the list.

100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010
More than 100 predictions from 70 of the top content marketing minds in the world. Trends include video, mobile, outsourcing, quality, and offline.

Social Media Realism Links

The word of the year for Internet marketers is…
Is social media dangerous to your wealth? Focus on sales. Focus on markets. Focus on traffic and conversion. And not so much on this year’s new tools.

Anti-Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing as a demand-generation tool is not yet understood. “Old” methods drive most business. Semi-contrarian view I agree with.

The More than RSS Market
Article and links on state and future of RSS market—we see RSS as more useful as a back-end publishing tool than a front-end reader.

How Can Social Media Help Small Biz?
Lead generation is the top benefit but the statics are mixed. Bottom line is small businesses do not understand nor know how to tap social network marketing, reports eMarketer.

Economic Overview Links

The Big Economic Stories of 2009, and What’s to Come
Review of the year in business from The New York Times.

The Past Decade in 50 Headlines
A decade of economic bubbles as seen in the headlines by the Motley Fool.

State of Mobile Banking Market in New England
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston survey published in August 2009 from 2008 data. In electronics, 2009 was the year of the smartphone—the mobile era is upon us.

The 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice
Survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on the transformation of consumer payments to electronic from paper. More new choices. Same old story.

-Collin

Tags: B2B marketing, economics, journalism, media, payments, Social Media
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