How the Web can help the WaPo (and other papers) write a new chapter about the world of books

March 6, 2009 by

Book lovers mourned, some angrily, the Washington Post’s decision to kill off its free-standing Book World, which, until Feb. 22, was part of the paper’s Sunday print package. But the good news was the Post’s promise that the estimable literary section would stay alive online. “We intend to develop a strong, easy-to-navigate, well indexed Book World site,” new Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli (who wielded the ax) wrote in a response to the 122 Book World contributors who protested the decision.

But just how “strong” will Book World be online?

When the Los Angeles Times eliminated its free-standing print Sunday Book Review in 2008 as part of its nonstop cost-cutting, the section was reincarnated online as Books in the Living section of the Times website. In addition to reviews, book-sale reports and a literary calendar, Books features a blog called Jacket Copy. But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality. Overall, the online Books isn’t capitalizing on the strengths of the Web – particularly community building – and it doesn’t seem to have preserved the critical authority that was a hallmark of the print Book Review. Browsing through the skimpy site, you get the feeling it’s produced on a shoestring. There is no Steve Wasserman or Digby Diehl – past editors of the Book Review – setting and executing high standards.

The Washington Post is not going through the same financial duress as the LA Times, which is a helpless appendage of the fast-sinking and bankrupt Tribune Co. But the migration from print to online life, whatever the circumstances, is always tricky.

The print Book World was distinguished by both its gravitas and sprightliness. Holding it in your hands was like eavesdropping at a literary salon through which passed the likes of Morris Dickstein, Dahlia Lithwick, Laura Miller and George Packer, not to mention section regulars like critic Jonathan Yardley and essayist Michael Dirda, both Pulitzer prize winners. The only thing missing was the well-stocked bar.

Happily, Yardley and Dirda will continue to appear in the online Book World. Strangely, though, the lustrous brand name “Book World” seems to have been dropped. The departmental logo is now just “Books.”

It’s too soon to make sweeping judgments about the online Book World (or Books), especially whether it will meet the same fate as the online version of the LA Times’ Book Review. But it is dismaying to see how dull the newly unveiled site is, even in its pupae form. Yardley and Dirda are there, thank goodness, but they’re barely promoted in 8-point type.

The blog Short Stack, created back in 2007, is now daily, but, like the similar LA Times blog, has multiple authors, which impedes it from developing a personality to which readers can relate and react. The blog also seems to be limited to one entry per day. That’s way too leisurely to grab users’ attention and get them to join in what is now basically a one-way conversation. Why not at least add a paragraph or two at the end that wraps up always plentiful literary and publishing news and gossip?

The Post – and the LA Times – could learn some lessons about creating an online book section from the Guardian in the UK. Its site is big and splashy, but has enough gravitas to do a “Top 10” on books about Rome that includes Robert Graves’ “I Claudius.” The entire section draws loads of comments from users. (You have to wonder if some other newspapers that have eliminated or cut back on book coverage couldn’t learn from the Guardian too.)

For all their literary excellence, the print Book World and the Times’ Book Review weren’t suited for reader participation (beyond rationed letters to the editor). The medium was truly the message – a one-way message.

Kassia Krozser, founder and editor of the lively blog booksquare.com (“dissecting the book industry with love and skepticism”), said in a discussion on PBS’ News Hour last July: “What we’re getting online is, people are excited about books. They want to talk about books. And that’s really incredible….”

And how. Librarything.com, one of the earliest reader sites, claims 500,000 users. It recently sold a 40 percent stake to AbeBooks,com, which specializes in selling used, rare and out-of-print books

Fast-growing Shelfari.com last year completed funding whose investors included Amazon, the champion online bookseller.

Book World shouldn’t mimic sites like Librarything or Shelfari. But it now has a potential audience of 10 million unique visitors – more than 10 times the potential readership it had in the Post’s Sunday print edition.

What an exciting new chapter this could be in Book World’s life – if only the publishing and editorial bosses at the Post inspire it to be written.

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The New York Times needs an online impresario to help it pay its bills

February 11, 2009 by

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. Why doesn’t the Times mobilize its redoubtable 1,300-person-strong newsroom to start producing added-value online content for which, I’ll bet, a good fraction of nytimes.com users would pay a monthly fee? A lot of the content would help out-of-town visitors make their trips to NYC and other cities more interesting and even memorable. I spelled out some content specifics for what I called TimesPlus in an OJR article last December.

The Times is already half way there in producing added value beyond the daily report – and for which it rightly charges (and finds willing buyers). Except you can’t find it online.

There’s the New York Times Travel Show – Feb. 6-8 this year at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center – for which tickets cost $15. The Times charges as much from $30 to $65 ($100 for “VIP” seating) for lectures, musical performances and other events at TimesCenter, the popular multi-purpose venue in the New York Times Building. Those events, and others like them, could be re-purposed as part of the multi-media TimesPlus subscription package. After all, millions of out-of-town nytimes.com users can’t go to the Javits Center or TimesCenter.

To make TimesPlus happen, the paper needs to hire an online Sol Hurok-type impresario – I doubt there’s any such person on the premises now – who could figure out how to creatively unlock all the under-used talent in the newsroom – and maybe in other departments at the paper. One Hurokian gambit might be for the Times to persuade Broadway and other theater producers to permit video clips of their shows to be part of the TimesPlus package. What a draw that would be to lure subscribers. With the theatrical industry facing shrinking audiences in what is likely to be a long-term economic crunch, producers might see such a deal as a win-win.

The annual bill for the Times daily news report is above $200 million, according to one recent estimate. If just 10 percent of the website’s 20 million unique visitors signed up for TimesPlus – at, say, $100 a year – that would pay for a big chunk of the news, which Executive Editor Keller rightly says comes only through “hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work.”

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The challenge washingtonpost.com isn't meeting: How to connect the dots between words and action

January 14, 2009 by

[Editor’s note: Tom Grubisich is a former Washington Post reporter and editor]

The Washington Post does great journalism. Jonathan Krim, assistant managing editor/ local at washingtonpost.com, documents several examples in his response to my recent piece “Washington Post needs to do some structural work on its shaky new strategy.” Except Krim mislabeled this journalism as a serious attempt at “deeper and broader [community] engagement.” It isn’t.

The best example that Krim cited – “Fixing D.C.’s Schools” – actually shows how the Post, particularly its website, remains stuck in this great paper’s legacy of investigative journalism, where the investigators, who are word, not action, people, remain in total control. The series, put together by a team of 12 reporters, editors, videographers and others, is a devastating indictment of how the District public schools educate their students. But the articles, fine as they are, offer no avenues of help to District parents who have children in one of the worst public school systems in the country.

“We need a community…We need parents are every school who are involved,” says April Witt, one of the series reporters, in an online Q & A. Witt comes close to sounding like an action person, but, that’s not the direction washingtonpost.com chose to go with “Fixing D.C.’s Schools.” Krim cites the series’ school-by-school database as an example of community building. While the database admirably pinpoints academic, staffing and infrastructure problems at each school, it has nothing to say about the pitiable lack of parent resources. Yet an email survey of washingtonpost.com readers during the series identified parental involvement as the third most-cited problem with D.C. schools.

The school system’s new chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee (who reports to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty), agrees. Her five-year plan [PDF file] to turn D.C. schools around says bluntly: “Too many of our students’ parents are uninformed consumers of public education who blindly support the District’s public schools without full knowledge of the significant deficiencies of the schools they champion. DCPS believes that if it effectively arms parents with the knowledge and tools they need to understand what a quality education looks like, they would demand action and accountability.” To do that, the system has created an Office of Community and Family Engagement. But because the office appears to exist mainly on paper, it can’t meet on-the-ground needs that are proliferating as Rhee and her team attempt to carry out their five-year plan, which began with the 2008-09 school year.

“There is no PTA and a lack of interest in getting involved,” said one community member at a recent forum on the plan. “I looked around tonight and there were very few parents. There were only six teachers in attendance. We say we want to engage the community. But, when you look around you see the community isn’t in the room. But, the community is here and many people want to be involved and engaged.”

The Post series could have helped to close this gap by creating online sub-sites in each community where parents and others could air their frustrations and, more important, put pressure on the school system to deliver on its promises to provide parents with the knowledge and tools they need, and in many cases can’t get.

I don’t pretend creating sub-sites would be easy to do. It would involve washingtonpost.com deploying editors – I prefer to call them “impresarios” – who would help parents become grassroots versions of the Post’s vaunted investigative journalists. Empowered parents could connect the dots between words and action – something no investigative journalism, however deeply it digs, can achieve by itself. (I use “words” here generically for all content.)

For all its multimedia razzle-dazzle, the Post‘s “Fixing D.C. Schools” series was rooted in the old journalistic way of doing things – tight, top-down control. The Q & A sessions – one of the few places where the public-school community has a voice on washingtonpost.com – contain this stipulation: “…washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control…and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.” Not very welcoming.

What Krim seem to resist understanding is that good and even great journalism doesn’t guarantee community engagement. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (at least the younger Hearst) understood that their papers’ dramatically written and displayed stories of outrage had to be followed up by reform. They helped to make that happen – often by pulling governmental and other levers that no publisher or editor today would dare touch.

Today’s newspapers have to figure how to catalyze connecting the dots between words and action. That’s what real community engagement does. With the enormous potential of its online platform, the Washington Post could lead the way, and, in the process, re-invent its credibility and influence in a media world that is going through a full-blown revolution that will, surely, create jaw-dropping winners and losers. In the midst of these convulsions, the Post is assembling a new team of editorial leaders. Will they push washingtonpost.com toward a new paradigm – call it Web publishing 3.0 – that finally connects the dots between words and action?

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