Robert Niles: February 2012 archive
Hyperlocal news sites stay away from election endorsements
February 28, 2012
It's election primary season in the United States, and I've noticed a traditional element of newspaper election coverage missing from the hyperlocal news websites I follow.Endorsements.
My first full-time job in newspapers was writing editorials, so I've spent a fair number of days interviewing local politicians who shuffled through our offices in pursuit of an endorsement. We told ourselves that our endorsements helped educate local voters and led to more enlightened decisions at the ballot box.
I soon learned that the folks in the newsroom didn't always share that view. (/understatement)
So I decided to email many of the editors I know who are running independent local news websites, to see what their plans were, and what they thought about the tradition of news endorsements.
Not one of the editors replied that he or she was planning to endorse this election season. Not only that, I got a "No!", a "NO" and an "absolutely not" among the responses, so some editors appeared to, uh, feel strongly that endorsements were a bad idea. More...
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The advertising industry Rorschach test
February 24, 2012
If you're working at a print newspaper (or magazine), here's a link to the scariest chart you'll see this year. (And here's the original source.)If you thought print was dying, well, according to that chart, it's not even started to get really sick yet. Life is going to get much, much, much worse for the print industry.
The Flurry study cited above showed that while the percentage of all money spent on advertising that went to television and radio ads roughly matched the percentage of time people spent watching TV and listening to radio, the percentage of money spent on print advertising was nearly five times larger than the percentage of time people spent reading print, versus consuming other media.
In short, even with all the recent cuts in print advertising revenue, the ad industry is still way overspending on print versus the amount of time consumers are paying attention to it. More...
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If your news website ads aren't selling themselves, you're not ready to sell ads
February 21, 2012
If you're interested in how to make a hyperlocal news website work, please take a few moments to read the transcript of the chat I did with several other news entrepreneurs for the ASNE yesterday. ASNE put together a panel of half a dozen journalists who are running hyperlocal or start-up websites and asked us how we make these things work.Here's an important point I'd like to give a bit more time than we had in the chat:
If ads aren't selling themselves, you're not ready to sell
The question: "Can a journalist learn to sell advertising?" My response? Ultimately, you don't need to. Not the way that most journalists (in my experience) envision what "selling advertising" to mean.
Our first advertisers on my family's websites came to us. They were members of the community, loved what we were doing and wanted to make sure that we had the commitment and the resources to keep the site going. Other journalist entrepreneurs I've met have had the same experience. If you build a large enough community of readers, who are engaged in the topic or neighborhood you're covering, advertisers will come to you looking to get access to those readers.
Believe or not, some businesses really do take the long view. They understand that anything that helps promote the health and prosperity of their community helps their business in the long run. Businesses do better when they're surrounded by other successful businesses - not isolated in some uninhabited backwater. So if you've built a resource that's helping to engage and strengthen the local community, these businesses will want to help you to succeed, as well.
Many advertisers are also desperate to find effective successors to the local newspaper ads that they (or their predecessors) used to place to connect with engaged local consumers. If they see you as reaching the potential customers they need to reach, they'll come looking for you, checkbook open, trying to place an ad campaign.
If that's not happening? Well, that's often a sign that local businesses don't yet see you as a valuable community resource, or attracting a significant number of consumers they want to reach. So instead of spending time on the uncomfortable task of pitching skeptical local advertisers, work instead on building your readership community. When your site gets to the point that money's coming to look for you, that's when you'll know you're ready to turn your site into a business. More...
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Don't forget the importance of planning in a world without deadlines
February 17, 2012
If you want to run a journalism business, you can't keep thinking and acting like an employee.When you're a newsroom employee, your "customer" is you boss. That's the person who approves your check, after all. So you do things to please that boss. And your boss is doing things to please his or her boss. Eventually, there are people in the advertising and circulation departments who are trying to please readers and advertisers, but with the exception of some commissioned sales reps, no one in the company is getting paid by them. That's why so many newspaper companies can't react to changing markets. Everyone within the company is just too isolated from the readers and advertisers whose needs the company is supposed to be meeting.
Go to work for yourself, and the lines on the org chart separating you from the community go away. So stop thinking about pleasing a now-imaginary boss, and instead start focusing more on the needs of the people in the community you're covering.
We've written about a community-focused approach to news entrepreneurship before, but today I want to offer one qualification - a point of advice that I hope can keep some beginning journalism entrepreneurs from losing their way.
Don't forget that it's still your site. You can't lead a community if you're simply reacting to it. You're a servant, not a slave.
When you don't have a boss to manage your time and create a structure for your workday, it's way too easy to let yourself get distracted by every phone call, tweet, email and text message that comes your way. My wife talks about the freelance musicians she knows who will drop everything to take a gig when a contractor calls. The gig always gets top priority, even over teaching commitments, personal obligations and family relationships. So many of those acquaintances end up divorced, estranged from children and without students - but they see that as the price of getting gigs.
Those musicians are thinking like employees, always working to please the "boss". You could do the same with your website, always jumping to respond to every pitch, tip or query that comes your way. That might keep your blog filled with fresh posts and even might help keep some income flowing, too.
But are you really going someplace with your website, or are you just running in place? More...
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Want to make money online? Here's what sells
February 14, 2012
Let me take one more swing at killing the zombie belief that "No one can make money online."Consumers are spending billions of dollars online each year, with $165 billion by U.S. consumers on e-commerce alone, back in 2010. And if people are spending money, someone else must be making it.
So why can't we slay this zombie? Perhaps the reason why so many print veterans continue to peddle the line that money's unavailable online is that so many of them are infatuated with getting people to pay for one of the few things that the public shown it won't pay for online:
Webpage content.
Perhaps it's too late to try to convince anyone at one of the big newspaper chains to quit blowing so much time and money trying to craft a paywall strategy that isn't a total disaster. But here are five alternatives to paywalls that are working right now for content publishers who are willing to look instead at revenue streams the market is supporting.
Advertising
With nearly $40 billion being spent on online advertising this year, someone's cashing in on ad sales. And it's not all getting divvied up into infinitesimal amounts by an infinite number of publishers, either. CPMs of $10 and more are easily achievable online, but only for publishers who deliver a community of readers that advertisers want to reach.
Publishers who complain about sub-$1 CPMs too often are putting up pages that fail to gather any community of readers, getting instead only itinerant hits from search engine users, who bounce away as quickly as they find the site. (I wish those publishers would learn to shift resources from obsessive SEO tweaking to true community-building instead.)
You don't need a high-priced (or high-pressure) sales team to earn ad income, either. In fact, in my experience I've found that the harder you work to make a sale, the more likely that advertiser will be to decline to renew the contract. Build a large, engaged community of readers, and advertisers who want to reach those readers will come to you. And stick with you, too. More...
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If you think you can do better than Patch, go ahead
February 10, 2012
Many online journalists have been clucking about AOL's Patch this week, after Jim Romenesko posted on reported changes coming at the network of local news websites.According to Romenesko's source, Patch is asking its local editors to run additional formula stories (lists, best-of tournaments, etc.) to goose traffic while also implementing employee review procedures that will result in the dismissal of workers who don't improve their performance (in the eyes of higher-ups) within 30 days.
Sorry, but - yawn.
Any journalist who believes that Patch is doing something here that newspapers never did before the Internet either (a) never worked at a newspaper before the Internet or (b) has developed a convenient case of amnesia about that era. Newsrooms have been creating and running gimmick stories to attract readers since, well, long before I was born. As they should.
If you want readers to develop a habit of reading you, you need to give them content that grabs them, whatever their mood. That means mixing longer, in-depth investigative pieces with shorter stories, news-you-can-use tips and a variety of other features, including comics, lists and yes, even ads and coupons. Online, it can mean shaking up your front page with polls, discussions, lists and infographics, as well as blog posts and links to longer stories. If Patch wants to change focus and go with easy, formula pieces for a while to pump up the traffic, so be it. They wouldn't be the first site to do so and won't be the last. More...
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You've got to know the truth to tell it
February 7, 2012
Inherent within the whole "truth vigilante" meme lies a tough question for many journalists:"What if I don't feel qualified to decide who's telling the truth?"
If you've ever asked yourself that question, give yourself a well-earned point for honesty. The best journalists remain ever skeptical, not just of their data and sources, but of their own biases, roles and decision-making in reporting a story. But even as journalists challenge themselves, they must be able to meet those challenges.
Stenography isn't journalism. "He said, she said" isn't journalism. Throwing your reporting at the page and hoping that the reader figures it all out isn't journalism. Journalism demands judgment - decisions whether a story is newsworthy, and judgments about the truth of information included within that story.
So, yeah, if you're going to do this job effectively, you've got to be able to tell who's telling the truth - and have the confidence in that decision to make it public in your reports.
Why is this even an issue? Why would journalists be working on beats where they didn't have the deep knowledge and experience they'd need to be able to make consistent calls on the truthfulness of the information they collect?
As usual, the answer is "money." More...
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Look at the bottom, not the top, of your traffic analytics to boost your website's readership
February 3, 2012
How can you increase your website's traffic by looking at your current website readership data?The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction - and could be hurting their businesses as a result.
The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be... to look at what's getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.
Don't do that.
Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that's drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive - and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.
So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?
Instead of looking at what's attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what's working, but what isn't. More...
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