Robert Niles: January 2011 archive
Don't let the bottom line distract you from the finish line in news publishing
January 28, 2011
The minister at my church riffed during a recent sermon on the reaction to the shooting this month of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). He spoke of how he saw our society valuing life, in both its rhetoric and its economics. The statement, late in the sermon, that has stuck in my mind was his assertion that "We too rarely think about the society we want to be, and instead settle for the society that we think we can afford."The minister connected this attitude to what he described as a business-driven mentality about government spending: We can't waste time with pie-in-the-sky idealism, but must instead limit ourselves to what our current income can support. Temper your expectations and learn to live within your bottom line.
The funny thing is (and this is where we get to the OJR stuff), that no successful entrepreneur or business person I know actually thinks that way.
Forget-what-we-want, just-do-what-we-can is the mantra not of the business leader, but the middle manager. It's the philosophy of a second- or third-generation CEO who's trying to run out the clock before his retirement, not someone who's trying to build a business.
Unfortunately, it's also too often the attitude of journalists when they attempt to launch their own news website businesses.
I suppose you can't fault them. If the only business role models you've had during your professional career are the "let's-bleed-the-print-side-for-every-last-buck" managers of the newspaper industry, you might be lulled into believing that bottom-line myopia represents the way you're supposed to approach business.
When we work with aspiring journalist entrepreneurs in our annual KDMC boot camps, we try lead them to look past the "Big M" - money. Focus instead on the "pain," the community need that you hope to alleviate with your business.
In other words, think about the community you want to live in, and not your bottom line. More...
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Publishing tip: To earn more money, try showing fewer ads
January 21, 2011
Allow me to offer you a completely counter-intuitive piece of advice - one that's nevertheless helped me to increase income from the networked ads I publish on my websites.To earn more money, try showing fewer ads.
You might think that online advertising works linearly: More ads = more money. (This equation certainly seems to reflect the thinking behind many ad-laden newspaper websites I read.)
But placing more ads on your website might actually hurt your ad network earnings - and not just because you'd be driving readers away with a lousy site experience.
Ad networks, such as Google's AdSense (the network I use most often on my sites), often use complicated proprietary algorithms to decide which ads to show on your website, and how much they'll charge the advertiser for each click. AdSense uses what Google bills as a real-time auction system to determine which ads show in the AdSense slots on a publisher's site.
But it's not simply a case of the highest bidder wins the space. Google's system is trying to determine:
- what ads are relevant to the content of the webpage, or
- what ads are relevant to the interests of the reader on the page, and
- of those potential ads, which one would most be likely to elicit a click, then
- do the math to figure out if an ad less likely to elicit a click could actually earn the publisher more money, even factoring in the lower chances of getting clicked.
- And after all that, the system has to determine if the selected advertiser is behind or ahead of schedule for the amount of money they've been charged from their daily ad budget that day. If they're too far ahead of schedule, the system ignores their ads for while and this selection process starts over again.
Finally, even after a reader clicks on an ad and the advertiser is charged, if too few of your readers come through for those advertisers after they leave your site - they fail to buy something, register on advertiser's website or simply view enough pages there - Google might charge those advertisers less money for those clicks from your site. It's called "smartpricing" and can cripple your revenue.
That's more variables than I ever had to account for in my high-school calculus class.
If you don't understand the way your ad network's software "thinks," you never can expect to make a living wage income from networked ads. But if you take the time to learn about these systems, you'll come to realize that certain pages on your site actually can work against you. More...
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Don't neglect to set aside time to build the personal network that will guide your journalism career
January 13, 2011
[Update: We've extended the deadline for applying to the2011 KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp to Monday, January 17 at midnight, Pacific Time.]Any journalist ought to know that your stories are only as good as your sources. Start with bad information, and you'll deliver bad information to your readers.
Running a news publication is like that, too.
If you don't go into publishing with good information - about your market, your environment, your legal and tax requirements - you'll soon find yourself wasting an enormous amount of time learning what you should have known from the start. And that's time that you could have spent building your business.
A news website is a business - even if you're running it as an official non-profit or an unofficial haven't-made-a-profit. At the very least, you've invested your time in whatever you publish (or hope to publish) online. That time deserves the respect of a decent return on that investment, whether it be financial or something else.
Simple business education can help you get the most from your investment of time and money in online news publishing. You don't need to go to graduate school for two years to earn an MBA. But you do need to talk to some folks who know what they're doing in this space.
Like you did when you were only a reporter, as a publisher, you need some sources.
"Entrepreneurship is network dependent," teaches Tom O'Malia, the USC Marshall School of Business professor who's helped us develop the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. "Without a good network, an entrepreneur cannot succeed."
That means that you need to talk with other folks who are running news websites - whether they be small, one-person blogs or major-metro newspaper dot-coms. You know journalism. But do you know how to find a foundation to fund your start-up? Do you know how to select the most lucrative ad network? Do you know how to ask for - and close - an advertising deal for your website?
Do you know how to make a budget for your news website? How to promote your site and increase the audience and page views that you'll need to make it attractive to either advertisers or non-profit funders?
What do you know about the business of making a living when someone else isn't writing you a weekly paycheck? More...
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Will an ad network work for your news website? Or are you just going to have to sell your own ads?
January 7, 2011
One of the toughest challenges that new journalism entrepreneurs face is: Do I have to sell my own ads?The journalism industry's traditional ethical "wall" dividing advertising and editorial has left some journalists so frightened by the idea of selling to potential advertisers that they choose not even to try launching their own news websites. Few of us wish to comprise our journalistic integrity by having to sell ads.
But selling ads shouldn't comprise your integrity - it's selling your editorial which does that. If potential customers think that they're getting both for the price of one - well, you'll just have to set them straight, won't you? (Check out our series on selling ads ethically here and here and here for help.)
If you're worried what your fellow journalists will think, well, don't. Here's my new ethical rule: Journalists who've found an active source of customer income (from ads, subscriptions, grants, contributions or whatever) in the post-mainstream-media world don't have to listen to complaints from those who haven't.
Ethical concerns now put aside, new publishers face a more compelling concern in selling ads: Time.
The checklist a start-up news publisher confronts is daunting. Everything that a news entrepreneur can off-load onto someone else frees time for other important tasks.
In an ideal situation, a news entrepreneur would be able to outsource her ad sales to a network, such as Google's AdSense. But ad networks don't work for every website.
The division between sites which make significant amounts of money from ad networks and those which do not is not random. Several identifiable characteristics determine whether you'll be one of those who can leave the ads to an outside service, or if you'll be among those publishers who'll just have to reserve time each day for ad sales. More...
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Journalism's problem isn't the Internet or advertising; it's attitude
January 4, 2011
Forget about Internet competition, the alleged advertising crash, declining news program ratings and newsroom cutbacks. There's only one problem facing the journalism industry in 2011.And that's... attitude.
Too many people in our industry, from publishers to cub reporters, are wallowing in a culture of failure, bringing a fatalistic attitude to their jobs, one that has been and will continue to become self-fulfilling.
Journalists' bad attitude toward their business manifests as whiny entitlement: People should communicate online under our rules; Readers should pay more for our reporting; Online publishers (in this case, Julian Assange) should play nice to the powerful like we do, too.
Winners make money and differences in peoples' lives. Losers make excuses. Which do you want to be?
Sure, you can find (at least temporary) comfort in the familiar. Keep working on traditional, quote-three-sources-including-one-elected-official, inverted pyramid, newspaper-style stories. Maybe add a part-time blog on the side, to feel "hip" and score some points with your boss. If you get laid off (or fear you might be), send clips and resumes to other newsrooms. If that doesn't elicit a job offer, look for a j-school faculty gig. Keep attending the same industry conferences, networking with other newsroom journalists, to commiserate about how tomorrow just doesn't look or feel like the good old days.
People who follow this path are simply trying to run out the clock on their career: trying to make it to retirement before they're forced to make any substantial change in how they work or what they do.
Do you really think you can make it? Even if you do, is that really how you want to live? More...
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