SimsBlog

What is the future of media? Good grief, are you kidding me?

How about an easy question like “What is the purpose of the universe?”

A journalism student recently contacted me asking what I think the future of media is and if he will some day get paid for working in the media. 

Truth is, despite my blathering on about what media companies should be doing, I don’t think anyone can predict the future of media at this point in time.  Best I can give is a few hunches I have about where things are going.

1.    There will be fewer paid journalists.

No way of getting around this I’m afraid.  The Internet removed two barriers to entry: geography and access to a printing press.  News organizations are not only competing with the passionate bloggers and citizen journalists in their own markets, but in reality, with every other content provider in the world.  The Winnipeg Free Press now competes with the New York Times, which is now competing with the BBC. 

Competing with the rest of the world means that many traditional content areas are becoming commoditized.  Think movie, TV and music writing, national news reporting, foreign news reporting, lifestyle reporting, travel writing and even some sports reporting. 

To survive, news organizations will have to focus on what they can do better than anyone else in the world.  That’s producing high quality, original, local or national (depending on the site) news reporting and analysis. 

That’s a much smaller content pie, and it will mean fewer journalists.

2.    The new world of media will consist of a mix of professional and amateur journalists and profit and non-profit websites. 

Author, blogger and Outside.in founder Steven Johnson gave a fantastic speech earlier this year illustrating what the new media ecosystem might look like.  He says it better than I could.

3.    Portals and sites with a traditional newspaper structure will fade away and verticals will rise.

There’s a reason Yahoo!’s new “It’s You” campaign has gone over like a lead balloon despite millions of dollars and a very beautiful TV spot.  The problem is that the site experience doesn’t deliver on the campaign promise.  It’s actually not You (or me), because Yahoo! is for everyone.  It’s a portal.

Just like newspapers with their broad range of content, Yahoo! was designed to appeal to a large, diversified audience.  Sure there’s many content channels on Yahoo!, but they are all under the single umbrella of the Yahoo! brand.  Frankly, it’s old fashioned.  Clay Shirky calls it incoherent and industrial. 

Of course print readers have been creating their own verticals out of the bulk newspaper for years.  I can’t tell you how many focus groups I’ve sat through where the participants described how their families separate the sections of the newspaper on a Saturday morning with someone taking Sports, someone taking Autos, someone taking Living, Comics, Classifieds, Flyers, etc.  The bundle made sense because readers were willing to get some of what they didn’t want for a little of what they did.  Besides, there was no alternative, and if there were, it would have been very expensive to subscribe to all of those publications.

Online, mass is not where it’s at.  Specialization of content and concentration of audiences are.  Simply put, vertical content sites lead to highly engaged audiences, greater ROI for advertisers and therefore more advertisers paying a higher rate.

This is why I like AOL’s strategy of creating both branded and non-branded vertical sites.

4.    New role for editors

My entire understanding of what news organizations were to become changed in March of 2006 when I saw Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters speak at an OPA conference in London.

Tom outlined the three new roles of media companies: 

The Seeders of Clouds: generate high-value, original content that is credible and reliable which is then linked to, reacted to, commented on, etc. 

The Providers of Tools: promoting open standards and interoperability, which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content.  Think of the Guardian’s API.

Editors and Filterers: The world has never been in more need of editors.  Tom says it is their job to “spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt”. 

I think all of these roles fall into “content curation” – it just sounds more Internety – and it includes user interaction. 

As a curator, the new editor works in tandem with their content community.  They provide links to related articles, videos, documents and maps and highlighting interesting articles and blog posts on other sites.  They identify sharp, engaging commenters and invite them to participate more through a blog or a special piece.  They ask users for story ideas and/or questions for interviewees.

5.    Aggregation and networks

The fragmented nature of the Internet can make it much more difficult for users and advertisers to navigate.  Content can be aggregated by topic or with a particular audience in mind.  Same goes for advertising networks.

I think we’re going to see an explosion of highly verticalized content aggregation sites in the next couple of years.  Rotten Tomatoes is already doing this for movies.  Imagine the Huffington post of home decorating, parenting, travel (well actually, USA Today is already doing this in Travel), personal finance, etc.  Find a lucrative advertising category and build a vertical site using a mix of aggregation, blogging and user interaction.  Platforms and tools like Daylife, Evri and Inform make this easier than ever. 

6.    Journalists as brands

If only a few large news brands survive, I think in the future, being a paid journalist will require becoming a brand of your own.   Twitter, blogs and books will lead to more lucrative speaking engagements, and paid assignments with not just one, but a variety of content sites. 

And, it won’t just be writers forming a brand.  Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post about Kai Keikmann, head of Bild in Germany.

This hunch is the foggiest.  We’ll see how it plays out in the coming months and years.

So, will you get paid as a journalist?  I think in the long-run, yes.  But only if you are passionate, dedicated and very good at what you do.  And if you are all those things, not only will you get paid, but you will have the privilege of being one of the pioneers of the new journalism.

That doesn’t sound so bad does it?

I've Been a Blogger Without a Day Job for 3 Months Now

British Customs Guy:  You’re a full-time blogger? 

Me: Yup.

Him: I’ve never heard of that.  You make any money?

Me: No.

Yup, I’m still a blogger without a day job.  For the most part, I’ve found this time in my life to be rather good.  I have more time for going to the gym, reading and walking.  I look ten years younger.  I feel more creative and my passion for online media has increased.

My amazing boyfriend as well as friends and family have been wonderfully supportive, but the real saving grace has been my blog.  When I started it 5 months ago, it was mostly with the intention of putting my money where my mouth was.  That is to say I wanted to finally become a part of the conversation. 

Not only has blogging kept my brain from going mushy, but by making me a part of the online community, it’s kept me from feeling invisible.  I’ve ranted and raved, met people from around the world, learned about their businesses and hopefully, inspired a few mainstream media execs to think differently about their strategies.  I even appeared on the home page of paidcontent.org.

When not blogging I’ve traveled to London and Banff, done some consulting work, knitted a sweater for my sister’s imminently arriving baby, cleaned out all my closets and have even started to learn Spanish.

I can’t say it’s all been easy.  Every once in a while, it hits me “Oh my God.  I don’t have a job!”.  I can see how it would be easy to slip into self-pity and bitterness.  I’ve had my moments.  But I keep thinking about a woman I used to work with whose father and sister died in the same year she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer.  When most of us would have trouble getting out of bed everyday, she did so elegantly and courageously.  Her secret was simple.  “You can get up everyday and you can laugh, or you can cry.  I laugh.”

So there you have it. Must keep getting up and laughing.

Truth is, my greatest fear isn’t that I won’t find another job, it’s that I’ll waste this unique time in my life.  (Well, wasting this time and never having occasion to wear my collection of magnificent 4 inch heals again.  God, I’ve been in flats for 3 months!)

So, next month, we’re off to Chile - Santiago, Easter Island and hiking in the Atacama dessert.  I’ve never been to the Southern hemisphere and I really want to see water go down the drain in the opposite direction.

When else am I going to have time to do that?

A Tale of Two Strategies - AOL vs. Newspapers

Tom Peters said a great thing at a seminar I attended a couple weeks ago.

“The problem is never the problem.  The response to the problem invariably ends up being the real problem.”

This puts me in mind of the state of the media industry.  In a week when Newsday announced it will begin charging for content, the managing editor of the WSJ declared that Google encourages digital disloyalty, and Bill Keller told his digital staff that learning the web side of the business was like taking a graduate level course without the undergraduate prerequisites, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong revealed that his staff of journalists has grown from 500 to 3,000 in the past 6 months.

Much has been said about the newspaper industry’s financial challenges.   They are not alone, as AOL has been experiencing many of the same difficulties.  PC World reports that in the first quarter, AOL’s advertising revenue fell 20%, overall revenue fell 23% and operating income fell 47%.

It seems however, that AOL is going to have a very different response to those difficulties.

Let’s compare.

AOL

Structure

Time Warner hired an online expert and ex-Googler to run their online business who has in turn re-organized not once, but twice to form the team he needs for AOL’s transformation.

Very soon, AOL will be spun-off from parent mainstream media company Time Warner to form a completely separate entity leaving the AOL team free of the concerns of a mainstream media company as they seek to grow and innovate.

Audience Strategy

And grow and innovate they shall.  Tim Armstrong and the leadership at AOL understand that “fragmentation is our friend”.  The MediaGlow publishing division consists of a mix of 84 branded and standalone vertical sites like Engadget and TMZ that combined have a total of 70 million UV’s and over 7 billion PV’s per month.   

Community also seems to be a priority at AOL.  In hiring those 2,500 new journalists, attention was paid to the audience those writers attracted.  “You’re not just hiring the person, you’re hiring the community they come with.”

This is a smart strategy.  In a world where only 16% of Internet users click on a banner ad and 8% of Internet users account for 85% of banner ad clicks, mindless mass reach is becoming less attractive to advertisers. 

Content and community are the new critical factors for site monetization.

Why?

Quality content is more likely to create engagement, which leads to community activity on the site, which leads to even more engagement.  Engagement leads to more time on site, and the likelihood of more interest in the ads targeted to the site, which leads to ROI for advertisers.  ROI for advertisers leads to site monetization, profit and the ability to further invest in quality.

Makes sense.  In Armstrong’s words “…how do we get shareholder value?  I think it comes from customer value”.

Culture

Armstrong encourages a culture of innovation at AOL and understands that sometimes you have to fail in order to learn and grow. "If you're not going to take risks and you don't think the future is bright," he said, "the Internet is probably not the right place for you."

And they are putting their money where their mouths are.  Hyper-local experiment Patch.com continues to ramp-up.  AOL will soon launch a new content management system that will allow for easier sharing of content across the verticals.  It will also bring in more outside writers by enabling tracking that will make it easier to pay freelancers for the ad impressions generated by their content.  Why that’s starting to sound a lot like the very successful and very smart Glam.com model.

Newspapers

Structure

Newspaper organizations are not led by digital experts.  In fact, newspaper organizations are not spinning-off their digital divisions, but rather, are going in the opposite direction with a focus on integrating the print and web operations.   They are in effect asking their managers and employees to do two part-time jobs.  Create the exciting new digital future while managing the accelerating print decline. 

Bill Keller illustrated the difficulty of this strategy when he lamented that he, unlike his digital strategy predecessor Jon “stop Jayson from writing” Landman does not have the “luxury of mostly detaching himself from a lot of the other problems in the newsroom.  Little things like the print editions and the non-digital budget…” and therefore he won’t “master the intricacies of digital the way Jon did”.

Audience Strategy

For all their talk about the importance of content, most newspaper companies have not created a wide range of content verticals targeting multiple niche audiences.  Sure they have created classified verticals and even mommy forums and a few pet sites, but few of those sites have editorial content.

Why haven’t newspaper companies created national vertical content sites like those of AOL?  My guess is that these companies have never had a product culture.  New features or sections are created by editorial or advertising, rarely both, and never by a person actually trained and skilled at product development.

I find the failure to create content strategies almost more troubling than the attempts at integrated structures.  Clay Shirky says that one of the 3 non-economically based reasons that most newspapers will eventually fail is that the bundle of information they present online is “incoherent”.  That is to say that the mix, of say, crossword puzzles, sports scores and international news was made necessary by the scarcity of printing presses.  Newspapers produced the mix of content that would appeal to the broadest audience possible.   As the web allows for narrower and narrower niches of content, maintaining the old bundle cannot work.

As for community, although more and more newspapers are recognizing it’s importance in the form of commenting and social media, their primary discussions are actually about how to stop it from happening by erecting pay walls.

Culture

In their book, The Three Laws of Performance, Dave Logan and Steve Zaffron make the case that “as people see the world, so they behave”.   

Well, in most newspapers, the mood is like death.  A place where people are worried about losing their jobs during the worst recession in 70 years with little hope of working again in their chosen profession is probably not the best environment in which to encourage risk-taking and innovation.

So let me ask you.  Who’s got the better response to the problem?

Which looks like the better place to invest - an online media company that is led by Internet veterans and is growing and innovating, or one that is cutting, retrenching and retreating behind a pay wall?

Where would you want to advertise - an online media company that is focused on creating ROI through quality, community or engagement created by vertical sites or one that still bundles content for the masses and relies on the declining click-through rates of banner ads to provide results?

If you were a talented, passionate journalist, marketer, ad sales person or product manager, where would you rather work - a media company that is growing, hiring, innovating and encouraging risk taking or one that is shrinking, fearful and stuck?

It’s obvious.

Newspaper executives aren’t stupid, in fact quite the opposite.  So why are they not doing what needs to be done?

I think the real question is why are they not allowing their companies to do what needs to be done?

I can only imagine that it is the very unpleasant reality that to affect the real change that will enable media companies to survive, there must be a massive power shift. 

From old guard, to new guard.  From print publisher to digital leader.  From editor-in-chief to product developer.

Ouch.

There's Something Interesting Going on in Maine. Yes, Maine.

Yesterday, I met (okay, by phone) Richard Anderson, founder of the Village Soup sites.  Village Soup currently consists of 4 community sites serving Knox County, Waldo County, Bar Harbor and Augusta along with two community newspapers (unusually, Richard built the sites first, the newspapers second).

Each “soup” consists of professional journalists, amateur content providers and advertisers sharing a common platform and creating a community site.  Together. 

Village Soup sites don’t have readers and advertisers - they have members.  What’s really different is that the members pay to be a participating part of the community. 

That’s right, anyone can read the content on the site, but only paying members may participate.

Sounds crazy?  It’s not.

As Village Soup members, businesses and organizations get the enhanced listings pages, display ads and appearance in search results offered by most local sites.  What’s different is that they can also publish blog posts and special offers to the site.  (Before you dismiss the notion of advertisers providing content, check out a recent post by Eastern Tire and Auto Service on what to pack in a winter emergency.)

True, a lot of the posts are just ads in disguise, but some are quite interesting and they are in a widget that is easily identifiable as advertising content so users know what they’re getting.  The special offers are even more valuable to users as the site is almost functioning as an electronic flyer for the community. 

Advertisers pay around $20/week and organizations pay around  $10/week for their memberships.

Readers pay about $4 to $9 per month.  That’s the subscription rate for the newspaper, a reverse-published, printed version of the site to be delivered to their door once or twice a week.  The catch is that users must be subscribers to participate on the paper’s affiliated website. 

I’m not a fan of forcing readers to subscribe in order to participate in a site, but for Richard, doing so has solved a key issue.  He says the quality of contributions from readers is increasing the quality of the site and reducing the need for moderation.  It’s hard to argue with that, though this strategy will cost them younger readers and may not be sustainable in the long-run.

In addition to the amateur content, there’s lots of professional journalism, including articles about crime, education and government.  The site’s “about” page lists an editorial staff of 20.

The formula seems to be working.  The sites feel alive.  The users and advertisers are fully participating.  Blog posts and special offers are current, not stale.  Of the 100 or so Dining Offers on the Knox site, all were updated in the past 3 days and 25 of them were updated today. 

They have developed some significant traffic given the small size of the markets served (totaling 150,000 UV’s/month and 2.5 million PV’s/month) and 20% of the business’s revenue comes from online.

What I love about Village Soup is that Richard Anderson and his team are at least as committed to providing ROI to their advertisers as they are to providing great journalism to the communities they serve.  I know from my own experience, and through talking with several other hyper-local sites and networks that true advertiser value and therefore loyalty is by far the largest determinant of a site’s ultimate success and the most difficult thing to create.

The model isn’t perfect.  The fact that only print subscribers can participate will ultimately prevent them from becoming true centres for discussion and debate for their communities, and while the site structure is (mostly) fine, I think the design, even on the newer Augusta site could use a bit of an update.

That said, it’s very exciting to see a small publishing company doing so many things right.  Don’t you think?

A Perfect Storm. Where are the Skillful Sailors?

Newark mayor Cory Booker Tweeted an African proverb last week: “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.” 

Brilliant.   And, disturbingly applicable to the current state of the newspaper industry.

One has to wonder: how could floating along on margins of 20%, 25% even 30% and higher for the past couple of decades have created executives capable of fighting through a swell or two much less the perfect storm of recession, competition and structural change crashing down on them in 2009?

Case in point, check out the Live Blog and supporting materials from the API’s recent summit on their news media economic action plan where you will find a complete lack of actual business discussion.

Oh, there was lots of discussion about the various ways newspapers are thinking of charging for content, but no discussion at all about readers and potential readers, their needs, what they value and what kinds of things they might be willing to pay for. 

The session included the presentation of survey data complied by industry consultants Greg Swanson and Greg Harmon, which show a dismal perception gap between news execs and readers.  When asked how difficult it would be to replace newspaper sites, 52% of visitors think it would be easy while only 31% of news providers believe so.  When asked what would replace newspaper websites, the gap grows larger as 75% of news providers think it would be their print edition while only 30% of visitors agree.

News execs still aren’t looking to understand their users or to seek gaps in the marketplace, but instead they are trying to do the same old thing only now get paid for what has become free.  It’s all about existing products (i.e. news and features), nothing new.  What about data?  What about helping users to make or save time or money?  What about niche content that is rare or specialized enough to command payment?

As usual, newspapers are showing their complete lack of innovation.

I’m not talking about newsrooms.  Innovation has always been encouraged and valued in newsrooms.  Ask any old-timer (if you can find one) or new-comer for that matter (if you can find one) and you will be regaled with tales of brilliant journalists and the innovative techniques invented to get the story, get the quote, confirm that key fact, get the photo that proves everything…

No, I’m talking about the business side.  Why is that same innovation not encouraged and valued there?

Smooth seas.

Smooth seas allowed poor business decisions, counter productive structures and lackluster talent to be rewarded, fooling managers into thinking that they were better than they were.  How could they not be talented with all that money rolling in?

There are 4 P’s of marketing.  Product, Promotion, Place and Price.  The folks at the API summit just want to talk about price.  That’s because they’re not thinking of their websites as products.

The problem has been exacerbated over the years by the belief that only editors and publishers can be trusted with the integrity of the brand.  This simply isn’t true.  A good product person keeps a long-term perspective and knows that the key to success is the integrity, credibility and power of their brands even if that means saying “no” to advertisers from time to time (actually, a great product manager focuses on how they can say “yes” to an advertiser while maintaining editorial integrity instead of when to say “no”).

It’s time to break the cult of the editor and publisher and bring in product development expertise.  Not just someone from advertising or editorial or a committee of cross-departmental managers, but honest to goodness professional product people.  Product people who will examine the market data, study the demographics, lifestyles, challenges and habits of potential readers and then bring together editorial, advertising, technology and marketing to create digital products that serve users and advertisers and do so profitably.

Make sure they are digital experts.  Give them their own division.  And please, hire them from outside the organization.  We need some skillful sailors.

 

The Newspaper Reinvention Kit: 4 Easy Steps to Becoming the New News Organization

See my paidcontent.org post on how newspapers can become the new news organization here.

Here's a Little Something for the Day After Labour Day Blues

I've been discovering many advantages to being unemployed over the past few weeks (house is clean, more time for the gym, blood pressure is almost undetectable) and a big one is not having to go to work today, the day after labour day, the first day of school and the (un)official end of summer.

So, to cheer up all you poor working stiffs, I give you the Phonographantasmascope.  Enjoy!

Norway's VG - Not Integrated, Very Profitable. Hmmmmmm.....

Earlier this week, I was thrilled to receive an email from Torry Pedersen, CEO of VG, Norway’s biggest newspaper and Chairman of VG.no, Norway’s biggest online service. 

I became obsessed with Scandinavian newspapers earlier this decade as one after another, they migrated from broadsheets to tabloids.  I used to annoy my coworkers with my love of saying their names – Aftenposten, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter….. 

But my favourite was VG.   Though its name is not nearly as fun to pronounce, everything I learned about its editorial and management strategies revealed that their teams certainly knew that a newspaper should reflect, affect and connect a city and the people who live there. 

Torry had read my post on the 10 lies newspaper execs are telling themselves and wanted to share an article he wrote for the Tinius Trust 2008 Annual Report.  You can see it here, it starts on page 27.

VG.no is profitable.  In fact, 40% of their media house’s ad revenues and almost 38% of total profit now come from their digital business. 

Fantastic results by any standard.  Interestingly, Torry doesn’t believe that news organizations should be integrated (Lie #1).  From his article:

“According to a survey by Zogby International, an overwhelming majority of the world’s editors – 86 percent – are convinced of the blessings of integrated newsrooms.  Staffed by journalists so effortlessly versatile that they will manage to produce high-quality material for both the online and print editions day in, day out.  Miraculous powers are attributed to integrated newsrooms.  They are expected to secure the future of newspapers.  They are the holy grail of editors – and managing directors.  Personally, I dissent”

Why?

He later goes on to explain that:

“All content produced for the print media is periodic.  Either daily, weekly or monthly.  The Internet is an environment that is suitable for continuous journalistic production.  At its best, this is often done in dialogue with readers.  Their presence and experiences become an integrated part of the final journalistic product.  These are two ways of working that obviously require different specialist skills”

How does this tie to revenue?

“The online business model – which relies almost entirely on advertising for revenues – means that the market leader receives a disproportionate share of the revenues.”

“…newspapers with a joint organization for their online and print editions are unlikely to make much money online.  It is impossible to capture the valuable number one position with that kind of organizational structure.”

Amen.

So why is Torry so smart?  Before he was CEO, he used to run VG’s online business, which is a separate company.  I've often thought that the first newspaper that will win on the web will be the one that puts a digital person in charge of the whole organization.

When I asked him why North American newspapers have been so afraid of the separate online organization, he replied that “My observation from Scandinavia – and I have to underline it is distanced – is that the papers in North America focus more on cost savings then really mastering the transformation everyone know will take place – from analogue to digital.”

Yup.

Incidentally, I also received an email from Luis Alberto Ferre Rangel, editor/owner of El Nuevo Dia who seems to be making the case for the integrated newsroom.  He and I may disagree on this point, but I like the way Luis made his case:

“We (the org and the newsroom) are disrupting from the inside and managing the transition from the industrial to the digital model. It’s ugly and it’s nasty. We will stumble and make mistakes. But we will get it done, through outsourcing, new hiring, training, investing, and a powerful vision that guides us.  We are creating a new company. Period.”

I’m going to stay in touch with Luis as he transforms his organization.  Something tells me that both VG and El Nuevo Dia will still be around when the dust settles.

Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves

My favourite word at the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year was “Omphaloskepesis”: the act of looking at one’s navel.  It’s a great word for what’s going on in the newspaper industry right now. 

The choices are so frightening, the solutions so radical, no one wants to face up to the reality of what needs to be done.  So they retreat away from reality.  They are lying to themselves and it will only serve to speed their demise.

Here are the Top 10 lies as I see them.  I’ve saved the biggest, fattest one for last. 

Lie #1: We can manage this disruption from within an integrated organization.

No you can’t. 

Economic pressures over the past few years have led many newspaper execs to convince themselves that the integrated organization is the best option. 

This will not work because the disrupted cannot manage their own disruption.  Most newspaper employees are not qualified to do the strategic thinking required to manage disruption let alone create it in the form of new products that may challenge the core because they still see themselves as print newspaper employees.  Just stating that you are a “news” company instead of a “newspaper” company doesn’t make it true.

I couldn’t agree more with Howard Owens analysis.  The only way newspapers can ensure the survival of their brands and the journalistic principles they hold so dearly is to separate the web organization completely from the newspaper. 

Clay Christensen talks about the “sucking sound of the core”.  That’s exactly what is happening at news organizations around the world.  The print product will always win because it still makes the most money, has the most people and cost associated with it and is where everyone feels comfortable. 

It would be very difficult to sit at a boardroom table and convince the room that the focus should be on the thing that makes little money, has unlimited competitors and a very unclear future or path to profitability.  Michael Nielsen gives a nice explanation of this here.  The sensible manager will focus on managing the core even if it is in decline and that’s why the two operations cannot co-exist.

Lie #2: Print advertising reps can sell online ads too

Actually, most often the phrasing is “print reps should be able to sell online ads”.

Maybe they should.  But they can’t.

Asking print reps to sell online advertising simply doesn’t work.  I’ve had my own personal experience with this and have had numerous conversations with others who have tried to make it work.

Don’t take my word for it, over the past few years Borrell and Associates have used stronger and stronger language around about the need to keep print and digital sales forces separate.

In a 2008 report for the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project, they stated “The logical next step – and really the only next step – is to separate the sales operations”. 

They state this because they have proven numerically that combining the sales forces almost always dampens sales results.

Why? Because most print reps at most newspapers have not been sales people at all.  They have been order takers.  I remember several years ago hearing of the executive who quipped that his reps “aggressively answer the phone”.

Further, most print reps have been selling lines and columns for decades.  Online sales are far more complex and more time consuming than print sales.  The rep may have to explain how online advertising works to the client, something they themselves are probably still not comfortable with.  Then there’s the monitoring and optimizing and reporting.  It’s a lot of work for a fraction of the revenue.

Then there’s the question of compensation.  Just paying commission won’t work on such small numbers.  A VP of Advertising once asked me how he could justify paying 25% of his bonus budget on 4% of his revenue budget.  He definitely had a point.

My experience has been that an online-only sales team is always better.  They tend to be like their agency counter-parts, young, dynamic, aggressive and ambitious.

But newspaper execs hate, hate, hate to deal with this fact.  After all, “print reps should be able to sell online too”.  A senior exec at a very large newspaper company (not the Star) tried to convince me that his integrated sales force was working because while his total revenue was down this year, he had gained share. 

Nope, you’re lying to yourself.  In an economic downturn, the largest newspaper always gains share.

Repeat after me: Separate sales forces are the only way to ensure that the full value of the website is being monetized.

Lie #3:  Aggregators are killing my business

No they’re not.

This one drives me nuts.  Don’t blame Arianna, Tina, Larry and Sergey or all those Tweeple out there.  If anyone killed the newspaper business as we knew it, it was Craig Newmark.

People making this argument always forget that newspapers can be aggregators too.  As I asked earlier this week, why is there no HuffPo equivalent in the UK?

You don’t even need humans to do the aggregation.  Daylife, Evri, Inform et al will do it for you and in the case of Daylife in particular, brilliantly.

I won’t repeat my points from my post on the talk of changing copyright laws and fair use doctrine.  You can read them here.

Lie #4: We can re-create scarcity by putting up pay walls

No you can’t until you actually figure out what’s scarce and what’s abundant.

Most newspaper information just isn’t that scarce.  Nor is it of particularly high quality.  Why do we need to publish the entire printed product online?  The web is increasingly becoming verticalized.  Figure out what is truly scarce information to your readers.  Then, maybe you can charge for it.

I like Nic Brisbourne’s post on this topic.  See my post on the new economics of media for more on scarcity and abundance.

I believe that a large percentage of online readers are content to read someone else’s analysis of the news rather than the news itself.  A pay wall encourages users to find commentary on the news rather than the story itself.  Thus conversations about a particular news story will occur all over the web, but not on the originating site.

The first of the “95 Theses” in the Cluetrain Manifesto is that “Markets are Conversations”.  Allowing others to own your conversations is allowing others to own your market too.

Lie #5: Our readers paid for news in the past, they will again

Did they?  And will they?

I don’t know if we can make the definitive case that most newspaper purchasers were actually paying for news.  They were paying for a bundle of utility that included news, but where was the real perceived value in the minds of readers (i.e. which parts of the bundle did they feel they needed to pay for) and how much did monopoly or near monopoly play into the equation?

Newspapers used to play a role in the most important moments in our lives.  Our first job, car, rental apartment and purchased home were likely found in the classifieds section.  We used the paper to help us shop every week (coupons and flyers, travel, living and food sections) and decide what movie to see at what time and where.

Now the utility bundle is broken.  How much of the value of the newspaper was derived from news and how much was derived from all these other things?  After all, news has always been free on TV and radio.

Lie #6: There will never be enough online revenue to support our newsroom

Actually, this one is kind of true.  There may never be enough online revenue to support your newsroom as it is right now.  Where they are lying to themselves is in the assumption that the newsroom must continue to do all the things it does now.

Due to scale, competition and measurability, online advertising will likely never reach the dollar values of print advertising.  The businesses will be smaller.  Newsrooms must become smaller too. Use the Jeff Jarvis principle: Do what you do best and link to the rest.

Smaller newsrooms are not simply an economic requirement.  Readers demand more focused content as well.  They already know how to find the generic, commoditized stuff.  They want you to provide real value. 

Figure out what your online revenue potential is and build a newsroom of appropriate size.

Lie #7: No one will ever cover crime/health/city hall the way we do

Sure they will.

Most prolific crime blogger in Chicago is a 16-year-old kid with a police scanner.

Here’s a horrible little Catch 22 given Lie #6:  As more journalists are laid-off, the more potential expert bloggers there are and the greater the potential for small, focused local news sites to flourish using former newspaper journalists as freelancers and editors.  The more cuts made, the more newspapers are guaranteeing their own demise.

Lie #8: Our readers can’t be trusted/they are idiots/they are assholes

No they’re not.

When you get out of the way and let a real community develop, when you encourage and nurture that community, your readers will self-govern that community.

You are no longer the sole voice in the relationship.  You cannot continue to hold them at arms length. 

You can read about the great stuff Businessweek.com is doing to encourage community here.

Lie #9 Democracy will collapse without us

No, it probably won’t. 

People will find the information they need.  The vacuum will be filled.

If you haven’t read Shirky or Johnson on this topic, do so now.

And now, the biggest, fattest lie of them all!

Lie #10: I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.  

No you can’t. 

Until you have a blog, a Twitter feed and a Facebook account and until you are reading most of your news online and commenting on what you read, until you are all over Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, iGoogle, Netvibes and the like, until you can actually explain to me how online CPM-based advertising works, until you can explain how SEO and SEM work, until you know what “pwnd” means, until you know the significance of the 3 Wolf Moon or 3 Cat Keyboard t-shirt, you don’t know what you don’t know.

You are competing with the very people who created the Internet.  Increasingly, you are competing with the generation who grew up online.   How can you possibly be so arrogant that you think you can compete in that world without becoming a part of it?

Stop that navel gazing and look around.  You are outmatched. 

Why is There No HuffPo Equivalent in the UK?

On a recent trip to London to meet with media execs, I was struck by the lack of pure play media sites in the UK. 

It seems the England is the perfect place for a smart, edited blogging network and news aggregation site.  There are lots of high-quality news sites to aggregate.  There is a highly engaged (and often outraged) readership.  There is a growing and increasingly respected blogging community.  Isn’t this a huge gaping hole in the media landscape?

As I met with folks at the Guardian, WSJ Europe, Sky, Northcliffe Media someone formerly at News International and more recently the BBC, I asked why this was the case.  Surprisingly, none of them had ever even considered the possibility of such a site launching.  

When pressed, my interviewees came up with a few theories, none particularly satisfying:

1.  The marketplace is already too cluttered.  Ten paid dailies, two (or three? I can’t keep track) freebies, BBC, Sky.  A new site wouldn’t be able to cut through the clutter and build enough traffic to be profitable

There is clutter for sure, but couldn’t an aggregator find a niche – say football, cricket, fashion, travel, gardening, DIY, film, music, theatre and aggregate content from the other news sites to create the ultimate vertical thus garnering higher CPM’s?  How many staffers would you really need?

2.  Another take on traffic - Britain isn’t big enough for these sites to achieve scale to build enough traffic to be profitable.

Maybe, but again, costs could be very low, especially if someone went the vertical route.  And isn’t at population of 59 million enough to create scale?  Not to mention the worldwide traffic British news sites attract.

3.  British ad agencies are very focused on MSM, a new site wouldn’t be able to sell ads.

I don’t buy it.  What about ad networks?  Don’t tell me there’s no ad networks in the UK either?

4.  British media still very much falls under “the cult of the editor”.  It just hasn’t occurred to anyone that it is possible to create a site not affiliated with a major news organization.

Somehow, I suspect the last theory is the closest to the truth.   Of course London is still deep in recession so it is highly unlikely that anyone will start such a site anytime soon.  Though I wonder if we’ll see something in a year or two. 

Come on Brits!  There’s an opportunity here!

And I have one more question.  Why the hell do you all keep referring to Fleet Street when speaking about your industry, even though there are no newspapers there anymore?