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Written by John Duncan
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Thursday, 30 April 2009 11:22 |
You know that old story where a guy stops his car on a London street and asks for directions from a stranger. “How do I get to Big Ben,” he says. The stranger pauses for a couple of seconds, purses his lips, takes a deep breath and tells the driver. “Well, mate,” he says. “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”
That is the problem of newsroom convergence.
In all honesty almost no newsroom I have worked with was well advised to be starting from where they were. But like the London driver, they don’t really have any choice.
So what pitfalls should a newsroom convergence operation seek to avoid?
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How ESPNChicago sticks another nail in the newspaper coffin |
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Written by John Duncan
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Up to this point one potential area for online competition for local newspapers remained the local stuff. The theory went something like this. Your local metro has more resource and more access to news and people than your local blogger can ever have and more depth of coverage and access to local advertising than a national brand could hope to muster so if they focus on that, they can own it. If they maintain a depth of local coverage unavailable elsewhere then maybe they can hold on to audience and even potentially hit the mother lode and actually charge for what they do.
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:30 |
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Depending on whether you are a half full or half empty kind of person, the idea that 85% of US newspapers will be dead in two years can be scary (85% is a lot of dead newspapers) or encouraging (15% is a lot more surviving newspapers than many people think will make it). So who will this 15% be? (First of all a huge great health warning. There are massive assumptions inherent in this article and some gargantuan generalisations. I’m not making a concrete prediction here, I’m painting what I hope is a plausible picture of what the online newspaper landscape might look like in two years. I welcome challenges to it and I welcome a spotlight on omissions or miscalculations. This is a work in progress.) I believe that those who survive to run our industry will have five qualities.
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Newspapers and the internet: Web metrics and the false impression of the power of online |
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Written by John Duncan
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 08:26 |
I was chatting to a friend of mine who works in advertising about the web metrics piece I did yesterday. He suggested that I could also look at the amount of time spent with a website as a relative measure of their value to advertisers.
A Pew report last year suggests that US audiences spend 15 minutes on average reading a newspaper and six minutes reading news online. So you could take that to suggest that if the reach of online was 30% of the print product, the amount of exposure to an advert is 6/15 of that or 12%. That number reinforces what a Deutsche Bank researcher told Pew for State of the Media 2007: that each online reader is worth 10-15% of the print reader.
Maybe I was too generous yesterday.
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The long slow death march of the US newspapers |
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Written by John Duncan
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Sunday, 09 December 2007 00:00 |
The news on advertising revenue is very very grim. If you haven't already poured yourself a large one, please do so and have a look at the latest figures on US ad revenue in newspapers. We're looking at 15-20% annual declines in revenue in cars, homes, jobs and classified. Ad revenue for newspapers online up about $100m and slowing in growth. Ad revenue in print down about $1,000m and gathering pace.. Please don't tell me any more how online revenue is going to save the newspaper business ever. If you believe that you are about to kill your newspaper.
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Big audio dynamite: How newspapers can kill the radio star (or how to read your newspaper while driving to work) |
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Written by John Duncan
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Tuesday, 07 August 2007 00:00 |
The reason for the recent silence of this blog is nothing to do with the Murdoch takeover of the WSJ. I just give the guy a sofa to sleep on when he's in South West Florida, that's it..
In fact it's the fault of a much more interesting client of mine, whose offices are a two-hour drive from my home. This means that I have been spending four hours a day in my car, which really cuts into my alone time with my keyboard.
The good news is that it's given me a new optimism about the future of the newspaper. Now I can see how we get some of our revenue and readers back. We get them to read their newspapers in the car.
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8% of our revenue: 100% of our innovation effort: Why print people need to get to grip with the shocking numbers at the heart of the online newspaper con |
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Written by John Duncan
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Friday, 13 July 2007 00:00 |
I thought I was going to hate Jon Fine's Business Week piece about which newspaper would be the first to go all digital. I know that the blogging tradition dictates I'm obliged to get very angry and attack the guy because I completely disagree with the proposition he is exploring, but in the end I think Fine's piece was articulate, thought provoking and useful. Everything a column should be.
More importantly, he's started the conversation about what is probably going to be the central question of the next stage of newspapers on the internet and that's a good thing too.
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Written by John Duncan
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Sunday, 10 June 2007 08:46 |
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In 1958 one of the TV networks placed a two-page ad in TV Guide to warn the American public of a new danger. "Free television as we know it cannot survive alongside pay television," it said. No laughing at the back, NBC. Okay, so they were wrong.
Network profits grew and grew in the face of cable, even when audiences started wobbling. In fact throughout a period of rapid change and innovation, they faced up to cable, VCRs, DVRs and the internet. And they're still standing. Is there anything to learn from that?
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Written by John Duncan
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Saturday, 10 March 2007 00:00 |
I had lunch in Tampa with my friend Mario Garcia jr of Garcia Media yesterday. Mario is the best newspaper website designer I have ever met largely because he is as passionate about newspapers as he is about websites. It's in his blood I guess.
We were talking about newspapers online and I was telling him my doubts as to whether newspapers should be throwing all their eggs in that basket so enthusiastically. He put the $4.2 billion question to me. "So if you were a newspaper publisher who had to manage a print and an online product at the same time what would you do?" This is where the conversation went.
"The first thing I'd do," I said, "is get a piece of paper and write down what is great about my newspaper, why readers love it, what skills it takes to produce it, what assets it has, what we do badly, what we could do better and what our readers and non-readers, particularly younger ones, think of us. I'd write down how I make money and why people buy what I sell, readers and advertisers. Who are my competition now and in the future? Then I'd put that piece of paper over here. [just next to a half eaten plate of Chinese food]"
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Written by John Duncan
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:34 |
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Now I hear what you’re saying. Having spent the past couple of posts predicting doom and misery how is it possible to simultaneously suggest that print will survive and thrive in any form. I think two factors come into play. 1. The print audience was never the problem. We tend to forget that it has been ad revenue and not circulation that is killing newspapers. In fact for the past few years the readership of newspapers is guilty of not growing quickly enough rather than falling off a cliff.
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Written by John Duncan
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Monday, 23 March 2009 17:20 |
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It pains me to say this because it wasn’t inevitable as recently as two years ago. But it is now. The math and the market pretty much guarantee it. The math first. If we assume that about 15% of newspaper revenue comes from online and that 50% of costs are tied up in printing and distribution then that leaves an 85% revenue reduction to pay for a 50% cost reduction. Who believes that this adds up to a successful future? Most businesses are simply not able to economically switch to an internet-only model as their newsprint products become cashflow negative. They have to choose between print and death. That will delay the inevitable but it won’t make it evitable. The math is simple (though obviously relies on some hefty assumptions). Take Tampa, only because it’s my doorstep. The current monthly online audience of the Tampa Tribune’s TBO.com is 11.6 million. At a randomly selected rate of $10 per 1000 impressions, that means revenue of $116,000 each month or $1.4 million a year. So let’s play fantasy online newspapers.
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Webster's Dictionary of Audience Exaggeration: How internet metrics promote the myth of the dying newspaper. |
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Written by John Duncan
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 08:00 |
First published 6/20/2007 3:01 PM
I'm researching a piece for tomorrow's blog about the death of the internet (oh come on, can't you people take a joke!) and if you want to understand just how messed up and deceptive internet audience statistics are then I strongly recommend you try and do an exercise like this for your own newspaper.
I'll give you the conclusion at the beginning so you can decide whether to follow the tortuous mathematical route I had to take to get there.
Internet metrics substantially exaggerate the importance of the newspaper web audience. Would you be so keen to abandon print to its fate if you knew that despite 10 years of growth, your web site may only have 30% of the reach of your printed newspaper in the market where you can attract advertisers. And that at current rates of growth and decline it could be 2020 or 2030 before the two are even level with each other?
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Core blimey: How to make US newspapers unstoppable |
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Written by John Duncan
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Wednesday, 08 August 2007 00:00 |
I'm still doing the two-hour drive three days a week so I've been exploring a few other podcasts to check whether
the spoken written word is out there yet, and whether current media providers are typically seeing the podcast opportunity as a chance to take radio formats online.
It isn't. They are.
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The price is wrong: Why newspapers have to learn how to get more from readers for what they do |
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Written by John Duncan
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Tuesday, 24 July 2007 00:00 |
You will I'm sure have heard about Media General's terrible numbers. Profit down by 28.7%, ad revenues down by 11% on 2006. This is meltdown territory.
I'll spare you another run through the reasons why the internet cannot be our only future. (Media General's 8% interactive division is pleased by 61% growth though its revenue only just covers interest payments on two new TV stations the company acquired).
But let's be clear: there's no positive spin to be spun on these numbers.
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Picture perfect Perez: What would the CEO of Kodak do with US newspapers? |
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Written by John Duncan
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Monday, 09 July 2007 00:00 |
Having concluded a couple of weeks back that Kodak's experience with digital disruption didn't have a huge number of lessons for newspapers, I was forced to think again by a blog post by Kodak CEO Antonio Perez, which I found on AllThingsD, via Amy Gahran on Poynter.
Perez is talking about the circumstances in which disruptive innovations tend to occur (and also taking the opportunity to plug Kodak's inkjet technology). He picks out something he calls the "notorious decadence" of an industry as the key ingredient in industries that are ripe for disruption. He says..
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Newspapers on the web: Why daily metrics don't answer online measurement's biggest question. |
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Written by John Duncan
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Friday, 08 June 2007 00:00 |
Thanks to journalism.co.uk for sending me to this story from last week about how the online news site metric is set to change to the one I chose to use to compare print to online last week. As you can see, Insksniffer plainly has the online community on the run, armed only with an abacus and a copy of "Statistics for Dummies". Join in if you like: bring your own typewriter.
I still think there are problems with the system. Firstly there still isn't an explanation for why metrics that gather data from devices (ABCe) are so wildly different from that gathered by reputable large-scale panels (Nielsen). One of them is wrong and I still can't be sure which one it is. Until that one is answered I'm keeping my logarithm tables handy.
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