OJR front page archive for February 2009
Someone's going to get rich in Denver next week...
February 27, 2009
...and then, someone else will get rich later this year in San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Minneapolis if papers in those cities close, as they are rumored.By now, you've heard that the Rocky Mountain News in Denver is publishing its final edition today. Owner E.W. Scripps is closing Colorado's oldest newspaper, two months shy of its 150th anniversary. I write those words with a deep sigh, as I used to work for the Rocky, and consider my experience there essential to my development both as an online journalist and online entrepreneur.
For a little over three years I edited the Rocky's website, and I remain darned proud of the work a tiny staff did during that period. But what does the Rocky's closing have to do with someone getting rich? Hundreds of journalists just lost their jobs!
Yes, and hundreds of local advertisers just lost the publication that they were using to connect with local readers. Those advertisers have budgeted the money they would have spent, some have even written checks and will await reimbursement from the Rocky for ads never run.
With the economy tanking, some of those advertisers, I suspect, will just bank the money and forget about the ads. But smart businesses will not. They still need to reach local consumers.
Like lottery money falling from the sky, that advertising cash will land somewhere.
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Recession? Local news sites are hanging tough
February 26, 2009
Mary Morgan couldn't have picked a more difficult time (the middle of a recession) and place (Michigan and double-digit unemployment) to start a new community Web site. So why is she smiling?It's because Ann Arbor Chronicle is coming up on its six-month anniversary, it's meeting financial targets, and Morgan and husband/business partner Dave Askins are able to pay household bills out of revenue from the site. "When I was a business reporter, I used to laugh at firms that marked each anniversary," said Morgan, who acts as publisher. "Now I know how they feel."
With a deep and potentially long recession set in, I wanted to circle back with Morgan and some of the other for-profit news site owners I talked with last fall, and see how their mostly new operations were faring. The question has taken on more urgency in recent weeks. As economic conditions have worsened and newspapers have shown accelerating signs of stress, the health of these online-only news sources seems suddenly more critical.
The anecdotal answer from my small sample group is this: So far they're hanging tough.
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Newspapers' supply-and-demand problem (Why you should quit doing what everyone else is)
February 25, 2009
A lot of bits have been spilled over the apparent absence of a viable business model for news on the Web to replace one that no longer works for print. The ad-supported model doesn't seem to work, but clearly neither do pay walls. There's even talk of micropayments again (hello, 1998!).I'm no economist, but I think the problem comes down to this: The Internet is a single, efficient market governed by the laws of supply and demand*. Because there's surplus ad inventory online — particularly low-grade inventory — prices are falling. But what if the surplus inventory is largely the result of a glut of duplicative content? Would the problem go away if news organizations simply stopped doing about half of what they do and focused on the stuff nobody else is producing?
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Journalism is the business of building communities - so newsrooms must hire from within those communities
February 20, 2009
Can democratic communities survive without a newspaper to provide them the civic information they need? That's the question on many journalists' minds these days?But I think it more enlightening to flip that question, and ask again: Can newspapers survive without the communities they need to sustain them?
That, I think is where so many news organizations have failed over the past generation. In a drive to professionalize the journalism industry (and, then, to cut costs), we've cut our publications off from the communities they are supposed to represent.
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Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist
February 18, 2009
As an academic, I've been given a front row seat to the unraveling of the news industry without having to worry about my job. But if I were a journalist, the first thing I would be thinking about is what kind of skills I might need in order to retool for the digital age.However, my 500-foot view from the ivory towers urges caution: it's not the skills that you get that will save your job, or repurpose you for the future, it's whether you can learn how to think like a journalist in the Web 2.0, or what some are even calling the Web 3.0 world.
I make this observation after working with newsrooms who have tried to implement broad training initiatives, as well as after interviews with many journalists who have attempted to gain new skills themselves. Here I get to take some license in that the journalists I've worked with cannot be named, as they are given anonymity for human subjects research protocol by the university.
But I can say that one of my major discoveries has been that training – learning to take a digital photo, the writing for the Web, the digital audio and video editing, the flash, and the social media, to name a few – is not for everyone, nor should it be the answer for everyone.
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The ethical journalist's guide to selling ads on a website: Part three
February 13, 2009
I hope that over the past two weeks of this series [week one | week two], you've come to see the parallel between advertising sales and news reporting: That is, to be successful, you must do a great deal of reporting before you write anything on paper or the Web.Now, it's time to take that next step. As we do that, let's not forget that the key to landing an advertiser is to make the case that by advertising with you, the client will be able to reach an audience of readers who are interested in the client's product or service and open to trying it.
Step 7) Create your ad sales material
You will need material that you can post on your website, as well as printed material that you can hand or send to potential advertising clients.
This material should include:
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The New York Times needs an online impresario to help it pay its bills
February 11, 2009
The New York Times should indeed use its website to generate more revenue – but not by charging for any part of its presently all-free daily report. Executive Editor Bill Keller's recent ruminations on the touchy subject of paid content have led to speculation that the dearly departed Times Select will be reincarnated in some more palatable form. Times Select required users to start paying for the paper's columnists and some other stories. It threw in as a sweetener the paper's archives going back to the 19th century. But most of the millions of nytimes.com users decided they wouldn't pay for content they'd been getting for free.A confidential memo from multimedia publishing pioneer Steve Brill obtained by Romenesko argues that the Times should "[flip] the Web's lethal dynamics" and start charging for online content. Under Brill's elaborate pricing scheme – you have to read his whole, alternately maddening and inspired memo – nytimes.com visitors would pay $55 a year to get access to all content. Search engines and aggregation sites would continue to get free access to the headline and first paragraph of each story – to help keep nytimes.com relevant as an information source on the Internet. Brill, who unsuccessfully tried to sell paid content with his Brill's Content during the dot.com boom/bust, acknowledges in his memo "all of this may seem unrealistic," but nonetheless concludes, "There is no alternative."
Times Select was a bust, as was Brill's Content. But there's another way for the Times to exploit the potential of its website to raise needed revenue that advertising by itself can't bring.
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The ethical journalist's guide to selling ads on a website: Part two
February 6, 2009
This is part two of a three-part series showing journalists how to sell advertisements on their websites.Last week, I urged you to select other news websites to examine and learn about their ad packages, including what those other publishers are charging for them. I also urged you to install traffic measurement tools on your site, if you hadn't already, and to start testing various network ad slots within your site templates.
[Note: For this week's piece, I will assume that you've been using the Google AdSense ad network on your site, since that's the largest, and for many (though not all) publishers, the most lucrative "plug and play" ad network. If you've chosen to use a different ad network, just apply my references to AdSense to whatever network you are using.]
Step 4) Price your ad packages
Start by using the information AdSense collects for you to get a ballpark idea of what ads on your site might be worth to advertisers. You will need to create a "channel" within AdSense's reporting interface and assign a unique channel to each ad slot that you create for your website. If you move an ad slot to a different position on the page, or change a position's ad size, create a new channel to track it. Also create a "URL channel" for your site's domain.
Then take a look at the CPM that each ad slot is earning. [Again, here's OJR's glossary if you need to know the definition of any of these acronyms.] The site-wide URL channel will allow you to track the site's overall per-page CPM.
If that number looks real low, don't worry. Remember, Google has taken a cut from what it charged each advertiser. And those ads were sold in a real-time auction by people looking for live leads, not folks whom you've sold on reaching your site's specific readers. My rough calculation, drawn from personal experience, is that you can expect to sell ads directly to advertisers at a rate anywhere between two and six times the AdSense eCPM for the same ad slot.
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Taking a ride with carousels
February 4, 2009
Are rotating displays of Web content an effective way to promote news stories? This is the second in a series of articles about findings from the studies conducted for the member of the DiSEL's Eyetracking Research Consortium.One challenge that faces all of us who have a wealth of content on our Web sites is how to best promote it. Unlike a print magazine or newspaper there is no big stack of paper to provide a clear physical indicator that there is much to read and experience beyond the front page.
Although we can debate the effectiveness of using a Web site’s front page when it comes to promoting content1, our industry is trying a variety of methods to tackle this challenge. One method is the “carousel” – or a rotating display of a site’s content that appears in a dominant spot on the front of the page.
You can see a variety of carousel styles on sites such as MarthaStewart.com, aol.com, msn.com and even the newly redesigned whitehouse.gov. This past October, the Yahoo! Developer network launched the “carousel control” in their user interface library. They describe it as a widget that provides a means for “browsing among a set of like objects arrayed vertically or horizontally in an overloaded page region.”
So, the obvious question from the DiSEL research consortium was: Do carousels work on news sites? Also, is there is a preferred design style that is most effective? With the help of page prototypes created by USAToday.com2 we put some carousels to the test. Here’s an overview of some of our findings.
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