Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Is the media reinventing influence?
Darren Burden and Catherine Lumby discuss the changing nature of news delivery and its impact on journalism.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
News culture eats strategy for breakfast
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is one of those throwaway lines loved by PowerPoint jockeys and business motivational speakers (with apologies to Peter Drucker). But in the case of newspaper organizations it has a particular resonance.
A recent survey by the US based Project for Excellence in Journalism has shown what many in the digital side of publishing have known for years, namely that newspaper executives deserve the blame for not changing the culture of their newsrooms. The failure to find a successful business model in the transition to digital is really a failure of leadership.
"The core cultural issue, executives told the PEJ researchers is the tension between the old ways and the new ways — and some of that stems from newspaper leadership that came of age in the days of monopoly newspapers and 20% profit margins.
“'We haven’t needed innovative people,' explained one executive. 'So you get what you need. The kind of people that came into this industry were more operationally focused, executors instead of innovator risk takers.'"
One daily newspaper the researchers looked at with a circulation of less than 50,000 struggled with the change to a web-first organization because, although its managers acknowledged the importance of the new medium, they didn't reinforce that desire through their reward and accountability systems. "Print revenue and circulation remained the benchmarks of success, not digital revenue or pageviews. As a result, newsroom staff struggled to develop the kind of online content needed to expand the web audience."
This same attitude, driven by either short term revenue fears (swapping print dollars for digital cents) or ignorance, or both, has played out across Australian news organizations over the last ten years. There is an Us and Them divide between print and digital staff which is only just beginning to close in some of the more enlightened newsrooms. But still, digital people are being "grinfucked" (as an old boss of mine used to say) by print staffers and seeing their skills and contribution being undervalued as print "news talent" moves into newly created digital specialist positions.
As the print iceberg melts, or the deck burns, the refugees looking to jump aboard the digital lifeboats has increased. And just like an overloaded metaphor, the digital lifeboat is at risk of sinking.
News organisations finally lost their early mover digital advantage in terms of raw audience some time over the last 18-24 months. While Facebook and Twitter saw exponential growth, and Google was experimenting with Wave, Buzz and Plus, news publishers dithered. They waged hopelessly naive campaigns against Google and debated endlessly whether a paywall strategy was the right direction. Meanwhile, they stopped any broadly meaningful digital product innovation choosing to put all their chips on iPad apps, which at best have been a qualified success.
All in all, it has not been a period of distinction for the industry. And once again, the inertia and lack of energy reveals a problem with the leadership.
Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company has admitted some of these failures. When asked recently by Vanity Fair if there was anything he wished he had done differently, looking back over his life at the Post, he said that he “replays” the mid-90s when the Post was first starting its web operation “all the time".
"We knocked it out of the park. We were in the help-wanted business three years ahead of anybody else. We started it with great editors and exceptional sales and marketing people, and we had good I.T. people, but we should have tripled up on that. We should have understood that this wasn’t a matter of presenting the news in another format. But I think every company in the news business would tell you the same thing."
There is certainly a consistent pattern.
One of those patterns is the ever recurring question: what is the future of print? As a medium news print may survive in a form analogous to classic music, or specifically opera. In other words, as a museum piece for a certain class of cultural animal. Frankly, it's the wrong question. A better question is: how do we ensure the viability of energetic journalism?
Some news organisations are addressing this question seriously, and attempting to resolve the crippling issues that continue to prevent them from wholesale cultural reinvention. There is a new crop of younger media CEOs now, not all with ink in their veins.
It's a good start. But is it too late to prevent news publishers experiencing their own Kodak moments?
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
State of the News Media 2012
New devices and platforms spur more news consumption ... but at the end of the day it's all about mobile.
The Pew Centre's latest report on American journalism.
The Pew Centre's latest report on American journalism.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Guardian's Three Little Pigs
Just caught up with this brilliant piece of brand advertising from The Guardian.
Friday, February 03, 2012
A senior editor
John Clarke and Bryan Dawe's sketch from last night's 7.30 Report. "Instead of analysing the news, and encouraging people to think deeply about what's going on in their world, we are going to try and put people more in touch with the way they feel ..."
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
What's in the digital store for 2012?
It’s been a horror couple of years for media businesses in the ANZ markets, and on the revenue side things don’t look like getting much better any time soon.
Despite some optimistic predictions by analysts pre-Christmas, early new year indicators from the retail sector are that there is little if any growth to count on in 2012. So display advertising is likely to remain soft.
The car industry is struggling, real estate prices are flatlining, and whilst employment rates are still holding up relatively well job ads are stagnant at best.
Europe is either officially in recession or about to be, depending on who you read, and the only glimmer of hope for developed economies seems to be that the US might just pull a very small rabbit out of the hat and post some limited growth this year.
All of which will leave China wondering who it is going to sell to and trying to figure out how to manage a precariously balanced domestic economy as it grows by a forecast 8.3% this year.
With such challenging external factors media companies are looking to get their operational businesses streamlined and positioned for the next economic upturn, or at least refocused into new markets.
And any way you look at it the name of that game is digital.
Locals will watch with interest as News Ltd puts a price on The Australian’s paywall and starts to charge consumers in February some time, and then extends that to its other news properties. Will they follow a similar model to Slovakian media company Piano Media and introduce a unified paywall for all their sites and channels? Or will they price individually by product and brand?
Meanwhile, Fairfax has taken initial steps with AFR.com by bundling print and online subscriptions, where once there was a distinct price regime for each point of access. This has stimulated useage of AFR.com and provided some good initial data which will no doubt feed into the next iteration of the AFR’s digital strategy.
Other publishers are starting to use detailed information about patterns of useage to feed into cross-selling and build new value for clients.
And this, I think, is the key point for media in 2012: data. Data in all its forms can add enormous value for publishers: data about reader habits and preferences, data about customer needs, and data as a basis for new forms of journalism.
In 2012 innovative, consumer focused product development that takes advantage of all available data inputs for marketing and sales – and data output for editorial – will deliver much needed trial, purchase and loyalty as publishers look to grow valuable digital audiences.
The past ten years have shown us a lot, and one of the lessons is that audiences expect creativity and technical excellence in production values, as well as good content. “Quality” content on its own will not convince consumers to pay online. Quality – whatever that is – needs to be packaged cleverly, it needs to be easily accessible on all devices, searchable, filterable, and able to be interacted with.
In digital publishing terms we’re about to step into the interim stage of maturity as an industry. We’ve left infancy behind, but we’re not yet fully formed. The need for experimentation hasn’t passed, but at the same time expectations are vastly higher than they were five or six years ago and cost management is more critical than ever.
Just as the first phase of digital product development in media publishing was characterised by a serendipitous relationship between traditional journalism and the disciplines of software development, so the next phase of digital publishing needs to take advantage of other non-traditional media skills and expertise.
Some publishers have begun creating new roles in their newsrooms and marketing teams, whether it be social media managers or visual data journalists. This is a good step, but the challenge is to do more than simply retrain the smartest young reporters in the newsroom. Those smart young reporters have a lot to offer, but they won’t provide the solution on their own. So bringing in new skillsets, such as computer scientists, and training them as computational journalists is an example of the kind of direction publishers need to go.
Publishers have been on a set path for some years now, following the advent of new information and communication technologies. But for too long most didn’t really want to acknowledge this new reality. During 2010 and 2011 there was a belated recognition at the highest levels that digital really is the future. 2012 will be the year to act on that.
It’s going to take more careful planning, and in some instances a new culture of innovation and in others a whole of business transformation; it will take a fair degree of courage and even some luck, but the alternative is not pleasant to contemplate.
Despite some optimistic predictions by analysts pre-Christmas, early new year indicators from the retail sector are that there is little if any growth to count on in 2012. So display advertising is likely to remain soft.
The car industry is struggling, real estate prices are flatlining, and whilst employment rates are still holding up relatively well job ads are stagnant at best.
Europe is either officially in recession or about to be, depending on who you read, and the only glimmer of hope for developed economies seems to be that the US might just pull a very small rabbit out of the hat and post some limited growth this year.
All of which will leave China wondering who it is going to sell to and trying to figure out how to manage a precariously balanced domestic economy as it grows by a forecast 8.3% this year.
With such challenging external factors media companies are looking to get their operational businesses streamlined and positioned for the next economic upturn, or at least refocused into new markets.
And any way you look at it the name of that game is digital.
Locals will watch with interest as News Ltd puts a price on The Australian’s paywall and starts to charge consumers in February some time, and then extends that to its other news properties. Will they follow a similar model to Slovakian media company Piano Media and introduce a unified paywall for all their sites and channels? Or will they price individually by product and brand?
Meanwhile, Fairfax has taken initial steps with AFR.com by bundling print and online subscriptions, where once there was a distinct price regime for each point of access. This has stimulated useage of AFR.com and provided some good initial data which will no doubt feed into the next iteration of the AFR’s digital strategy.
Other publishers are starting to use detailed information about patterns of useage to feed into cross-selling and build new value for clients.
And this, I think, is the key point for media in 2012: data. Data in all its forms can add enormous value for publishers: data about reader habits and preferences, data about customer needs, and data as a basis for new forms of journalism.
In 2012 innovative, consumer focused product development that takes advantage of all available data inputs for marketing and sales – and data output for editorial – will deliver much needed trial, purchase and loyalty as publishers look to grow valuable digital audiences.
The past ten years have shown us a lot, and one of the lessons is that audiences expect creativity and technical excellence in production values, as well as good content. “Quality” content on its own will not convince consumers to pay online. Quality – whatever that is – needs to be packaged cleverly, it needs to be easily accessible on all devices, searchable, filterable, and able to be interacted with.
In digital publishing terms we’re about to step into the interim stage of maturity as an industry. We’ve left infancy behind, but we’re not yet fully formed. The need for experimentation hasn’t passed, but at the same time expectations are vastly higher than they were five or six years ago and cost management is more critical than ever.
Just as the first phase of digital product development in media publishing was characterised by a serendipitous relationship between traditional journalism and the disciplines of software development, so the next phase of digital publishing needs to take advantage of other non-traditional media skills and expertise.
Some publishers have begun creating new roles in their newsrooms and marketing teams, whether it be social media managers or visual data journalists. This is a good step, but the challenge is to do more than simply retrain the smartest young reporters in the newsroom. Those smart young reporters have a lot to offer, but they won’t provide the solution on their own. So bringing in new skillsets, such as computer scientists, and training them as computational journalists is an example of the kind of direction publishers need to go.
Publishers have been on a set path for some years now, following the advent of new information and communication technologies. But for too long most didn’t really want to acknowledge this new reality. During 2010 and 2011 there was a belated recognition at the highest levels that digital really is the future. 2012 will be the year to act on that.
It’s going to take more careful planning, and in some instances a new culture of innovation and in others a whole of business transformation; it will take a fair degree of courage and even some luck, but the alternative is not pleasant to contemplate.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Facebook apps: News brands beware
Facebook's "social news" strategy is just another way of sucking the remaining life out of news brands.
I posted some comments on the new Facebook apps recently. At the time these apps were so new there was no real data about useage.
Now there is some early stage information about take up and response.
Problem is, the data appears conflicting and the commentary is just plain confusing. Added to which Facebook users, when asked, say they don't like the apps. Yet effectively they are corralled into using them because of the way Facebook has deployed them.
The Next Web reports that The Guardian app has had 4 millions instals since its release. The article acknowledges that the app lets "Facebook’s 800m+ users read the guardian’s articles online without actually leaving the social network".
However, despite this the app generates "almost a million extra page impressions a day".
How does it do this if users don't leave Facebook?
The only way that I can see it does this is by promoting other Guardian Facebook fan pages alongside the ringfenced content within the app. So, it is possible to navigate from the app to, say, The Guardian Media fan page and from there to an article on theguardian.co.uk.
But that's an extra two clicks, and effectively another drag on user numbers heading off to the parent news site.
It's all enabled by Facebook's Open Graph framework, which is a clever way of connecting content with Facebook users and functionality through API's. It's a seamless user experience, but one that is actually encouraging news consumers to care less about the news brands they are engaging with.
So Facebook's claim of success here, on behalf of their news partners (Guardian, Washington Post, Yahoo!News, The Independent etc) is disengenuous.
It is a great success for Facebook, but it presents a serious dilemma for news publishers. In reality, Facebook's "social news" strategy is just another way of sucking the remaining life out of news brands.
Publishers should go there at their peril. And to my mind executives like Donald Graham (Chairman of Washington Post and board director at Facebook) have such a conflict of interest that they should remove themselves from any publishing decisions to do with Facebook.
Everybody else needs to get a lot smarter about how they manage their news partnerships with Facebook.
Right now Facebook is sending traffic to news sites, but after the feast comes the reckoning.
What would Facebook do with $10 billion cash?
That's the number being bandied around as its initial raising target as it mulls an IPO. The answer, I suppose, is anyone's guess right now.
So, what would be the chances of them buying up news media? Mark Zuckerberg has been upfront about his interest in, even need for, content. Would he spend some of that change on buying a content generating organisation? Would his Chairman, for example, offer up the Washington Post?
Or closer to home ... would Fairfax be of interest?
A cashed up Facebook might well consider making a play for the newsroom of a traditional media company (or two). They'd have little interest in the production and distribution mechanisms, so effectively it would mean junking those assets and stripping out the journalism.
It's an unpleasant thought, but one that could conceivably happen.
All the more reason for news publishers to value their brands more effectively in their relationships with Facebook.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
APN: Can closing papers be offset by digital?
The closure of APN regional papers in NSW and SE Qld comes as no surprise.
Nevertheless, it is a sad indication of the ongoing shrinkage of regional media choices. The fact is, that current indicators suggest digital will not save APN's regional news franchises.
APN announced yesterday that it would close the Gold Coast Mail and Robina Mail, and reduce the Tweed Daily News to a Saturday paid print edition only and the Coffs Coast Advocate to a twice weekly freesheet.
It's worth mentioning that the Robina Mail only launched this year.
APN Regional Media CEO Warren Bright told the SMH yesterday "We will probably improve our focus on news because we will be breaking it online and will provide people with strong weekly newspapers, and we'll be relaunching weekend editions.
In an official statement Bright said, “We also have strong digital audiences in each market so it makes sense to combine a constantly updated digital news service with this modified print offering.”
That is either a triumph of optimism, or a cynical piece of corporate spin.
Here's what I know:
The Tweed Daily news has been losing money for years. In 2009 APN considered selling or closing it down. The only likely buyer was News Ltd and the view at the time was they might pay $5. Closing the paper meant taking a write-down hit that then CEO Martin Simons wasn't willing to take. So they "relaunched" it, effectively kicking the can down the road.
The TDN web site (mydailynews.com.au) gets something in the vicinity of 30-40,000 UBs per month, average page duration of 45 seconds, time on site of about 3.5 minutes. In online news terms that is not a commercial amount of traffic, and without a newspaper to promote the web site the audience is unlikely to grow. So on it's own it is not the solution.
Meanwhile, the Gold Coast Bulletin is rubbing its hands in glee. They can expect to pick up, not only the few readers who were still buying the Tweed Daily News but the real estate advertisers and what is left of retail, auto and jobs in the Tweed market.
Free kick to News Ltd.
Further south in Coffs Harbour The Coffs Coast Advocate has been free two days a week for some time, whilst paid the other three, but will now only be available twice weekly. This is probably where most of the job cuts will come from as the Tweed office has been gutted already. All APN offices run on a shoe string, but Coffs had been able to maintain some strength due to its recent success against the Fairfax owned Independent and the relative size of the Coffs area footprint.
Still, that hasn't been enough to save it.
Can the Advocate web site rescue things? Again, it has a similar problem as Tweed.
The http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au averages 40-50,000 UBs per month, with an average page duration of 41 seconds and time on site of 3.3 minutes. These numbers will not deliver much in the way of advertising revenue on their own. And note, only about half these number will be local readers. In other words about half this audience is of any value to local advertisers. the same is true of most of APN regional news sites.
Taken in isolation, the future of APN's Tweed and Coffs businesses is bleak. The next round of closure - my guess probably some time in the middle of next year - will be final.
The question has to be asked: How does a previously profitable business running multiple monopoly franchises across some of the country's strongest regional centres get to this point? And we can be sure it's not over yet, the Warwick Daily News will be at risk, and certainly the Sunshine Coast Daily is in a very precarious situation.
In 2006 APN regional newspapers had revenue in the order of $125m. In 2010 it was something like $55m. That's a helluva drop in four years. Some of it has been explained by the GFC, some by extreme weather events and the effects on tourism and agriculture. But at the heart of this company's problems is a failure of management.
At the beginning of this year a new CEO took over at the APN Group level, and in turn appointed a new CEO to the regional newspaper business. Both men were touted as being digital immigrants, at least.
The digital structure these men inherited in Qld was significant. In the previous four years APN had invested substantially (and appropriately) in building a web platform and an infrastructure of expertise to drive training, sales and distribution at both a local and national level.
For some reason this does not seem to have been leveraged effectively.
Meanwhile, print circ and revenue is still dropping and the only mitigation strategy seems to be cost reduction.
APN is often described as the biggest (Australian) media company no one has ever heard of. For years that anonymity served it well as it went about its work as a serious cash generator shipping substantial amounts of that revenue offshore to the O'Reilly's and INM News & Media. Since the O'Reilly's reduced their holding in 2009, and then a flurry of shareholder activism generated some media attention around the AGM in 2010, APN's inner workings have become more exposed.
Still, it's a story that hasn't yet been fully told. As a diverse media holding, the APN group had enormous promise in the late nineties and early noughties. Since then, and despite commendable efforts from some corners of the operation, it has failed to live up to that potential.
[Disclosure: I was GM of APN Online from 2007-2010]
Nevertheless, it is a sad indication of the ongoing shrinkage of regional media choices. The fact is, that current indicators suggest digital will not save APN's regional news franchises.
APN announced yesterday that it would close the Gold Coast Mail and Robina Mail, and reduce the Tweed Daily News to a Saturday paid print edition only and the Coffs Coast Advocate to a twice weekly freesheet.
It's worth mentioning that the Robina Mail only launched this year.
APN Regional Media CEO Warren Bright told the SMH yesterday "We will probably improve our focus on news because we will be breaking it online and will provide people with strong weekly newspapers, and we'll be relaunching weekend editions.
In an official statement Bright said, “We also have strong digital audiences in each market so it makes sense to combine a constantly updated digital news service with this modified print offering.”
That is either a triumph of optimism, or a cynical piece of corporate spin.
Here's what I know:
The Tweed Daily news has been losing money for years. In 2009 APN considered selling or closing it down. The only likely buyer was News Ltd and the view at the time was they might pay $5. Closing the paper meant taking a write-down hit that then CEO Martin Simons wasn't willing to take. So they "relaunched" it, effectively kicking the can down the road.
The TDN web site (mydailynews.com.au) gets something in the vicinity of 30-40,000 UBs per month, average page duration of 45 seconds, time on site of about 3.5 minutes. In online news terms that is not a commercial amount of traffic, and without a newspaper to promote the web site the audience is unlikely to grow. So on it's own it is not the solution.
One of the original printing presses in the office at the Tweed Daily News
Meanwhile, the Gold Coast Bulletin is rubbing its hands in glee. They can expect to pick up, not only the few readers who were still buying the Tweed Daily News but the real estate advertisers and what is left of retail, auto and jobs in the Tweed market.
Free kick to News Ltd.
Further south in Coffs Harbour The Coffs Coast Advocate has been free two days a week for some time, whilst paid the other three, but will now only be available twice weekly. This is probably where most of the job cuts will come from as the Tweed office has been gutted already. All APN offices run on a shoe string, but Coffs had been able to maintain some strength due to its recent success against the Fairfax owned Independent and the relative size of the Coffs area footprint.
Still, that hasn't been enough to save it.
Can the Advocate web site rescue things? Again, it has a similar problem as Tweed.
The http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au averages 40-50,000 UBs per month, with an average page duration of 41 seconds and time on site of 3.3 minutes. These numbers will not deliver much in the way of advertising revenue on their own. And note, only about half these number will be local readers. In other words about half this audience is of any value to local advertisers. the same is true of most of APN regional news sites.
Taken in isolation, the future of APN's Tweed and Coffs businesses is bleak. The next round of closure - my guess probably some time in the middle of next year - will be final.
The question has to be asked: How does a previously profitable business running multiple monopoly franchises across some of the country's strongest regional centres get to this point? And we can be sure it's not over yet, the Warwick Daily News will be at risk, and certainly the Sunshine Coast Daily is in a very precarious situation.
In 2006 APN regional newspapers had revenue in the order of $125m. In 2010 it was something like $55m. That's a helluva drop in four years. Some of it has been explained by the GFC, some by extreme weather events and the effects on tourism and agriculture. But at the heart of this company's problems is a failure of management.
At the beginning of this year a new CEO took over at the APN Group level, and in turn appointed a new CEO to the regional newspaper business. Both men were touted as being digital immigrants, at least.
The digital structure these men inherited in Qld was significant. In the previous four years APN had invested substantially (and appropriately) in building a web platform and an infrastructure of expertise to drive training, sales and distribution at both a local and national level.
For some reason this does not seem to have been leveraged effectively.
Meanwhile, print circ and revenue is still dropping and the only mitigation strategy seems to be cost reduction.
APN is often described as the biggest (Australian) media company no one has ever heard of. For years that anonymity served it well as it went about its work as a serious cash generator shipping substantial amounts of that revenue offshore to the O'Reilly's and INM News & Media. Since the O'Reilly's reduced their holding in 2009, and then a flurry of shareholder activism generated some media attention around the AGM in 2010, APN's inner workings have become more exposed.
Still, it's a story that hasn't yet been fully told. As a diverse media holding, the APN group had enormous promise in the late nineties and early noughties. Since then, and despite commendable efforts from some corners of the operation, it has failed to live up to that potential.
[Disclosure: I was GM of APN Online from 2007-2010]
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