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Hard to tell if the irony is intentional or not, but the Artist Currently Known as Prince has declared the Internet fad pretty much over. For good measure, he’s providing copies of his new CD in several British newspapers (the paper version, naturally). One of the papers not invited to the party, the Globe and Mail, provides  an appropriately snarky report.

Reminds me of a mini-trend maybe 10 years ago, when some newspapers decided the best strategy for meeting the challenge of the Internet was to provide each day’s paper on a shiny new CD-ROM. Maybe get newspaper readers to just pop in a disk and ignore that Internet thing.

Prince (and newspapers) are certainly free to dictate how and when people can consume their output. But as they say: it’s wiser to fish where the fish are.

People interested in news and music are online. Certainly fans of a particular newspaper, or a particular musical artist, will go out of their way to feed their passion…. But what about all the other fish?

Nielsen has a new report on teen TV watching, and I’m not sure I agree with one of the findings.

Nielsen finds teens are watching a lot more video on laptops and phones, than regular TV (aka the “first screen”).

“12-24 year olds are more connected, more tech savvy, and more likely to use personal devices such as smartphones, laptops and other gadgets for video viewing. They are also less likely to watch traditional television.”

OK, that  makes sense. (Maybe even: Well, duh!) But check out the next sentence:

“But much of this is driven by economic necessity and lifestyle choices, and is likely to change as the younger becomes the older generation.”

Nielsen makes this prediction based on data showing that teens in the past turned into heavier TV watchers as they aged, as shown in this table:

While the research about the past seems solid, I have to wonder about the prediction for the future. As people’s attention spans grow shorter, and as they get more habitual in their usage of portable tablets, laptops and  phones — doesn’t it seem  like a whole lot more is changing than just age?

It seems to me we’re seeing a fundamental shift in media consumption, one that defies comparisons to behaviors of only a few years ago.

In the chart above, the starting year is 2001. 2001! Facebook didn’t exist. Google was just one of several popular search engines. There was no YouTube.

What’s startling  isn’t just the huge leaps in technology, but the dramatic changes in how people spend their time: YouTubing, Googling, Facebooking.

If you spend any time at all with teens and 20-somethings, try picturing them in 10 years vegging on the couch with the remote. I can’t.

Robert Niles posted  a provocative piece today called What to cut when ad revenue doesn’t cover your expenses?

His main point is that some editors are looking at user-generated content as a way to substitute for, in his example, a movie reviewer. And of course, Niles is correct that the “community” by itself is a poor substitute for a trained beat writer.  Too often, the “community” isn’t self-policing, or even self-correcting, and it needs some professional guidance and moderation.

But the larger, and harder,  question is: in times of reduced revenue, where should newspapers focus their  skilled, trained staff?

Pick up any local newspaper and you’ll see example after example of mystifying choices in coverage by local staff: pro sports in a distant city, columnizing about national issues, press conferences covered just because, press releases spun into  bylined stories.

Editors’ hardest questions come after the relatively easy ones of movie reviews and CD reviews.

• Are we covering the community  in ways that meet readers’ interests?
• What criteria drive daily coverage decisions?
• And who’s making those decisions?
• Why is this event being covered?
• Why do we assign a reporter to this beat?
• Do we even have the right beats?
• Is every reporter contributing high-impact coverage to page 1 and section fronts? If not, what’s standing in the way?

Point is: when you can’t sustain business as usual, everything must justify itself, from the movie reviewer to the courthouse beat. Editors need to shape a vision of the new newspaper, encourage  information-gathering to make decisions, and then support decisions that move toward the vision.

Q: What’s a  tougher challenge for newspapers than their business model?

A: A culture that can’t change fast enough.

A  friend recently shared this slideshow from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. It’s not that hard to find, actually. It’s posted on the Netflix jobs page.

Nothing remarkable about a presentation by the CEO on a company’s jobs page, right? Except this one says things like: “Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.”

And this:

• As we grow, minimize rules
• Inhibit chaos with ever more high performance people
• Flexibility is more important than efficiency in the long term

Click through the presentation (it’s 128 slides but it goes quickly). One grim observation: almost all the elements Netflix rejects are  standard within newspaper cultures: valuing rules and structure, rewarding longevity, encouraging employees to move up the ladder, you name it. Check out slides 49 and 50 for Hastings’ prediction of the outcome of a culture like that.

So:  Is Netflix able to behave this way because it’s still a startup? Or can it behave this way because it chooses to?

Hastings clearly believes the latter: that Netflix can maintain its culture even as it grows and matures.  Which leads to the obvious question: What would a newspaper operation look like if it hired and managed people like Netflix does?

Still in an officially pre-launch stage, but it’s live: ConcertRat.com

The idea is that you can create a diary of concerts you’ve attended, and display your  notes, reviews, photos, images of tickets, setlists. It’s connected to Facebook, so you’ll see who else was there among your friends.

The Bigger Idea is that as people add their material, Concert Rat can become a wiki-like compilation of all concerts, present and past. Upcoming is, well,  upcoming.

What we need right now is people to use it, and give feedback. The system is rock solid, thanks to ace programmer Paul Caiazzo, but we want to continually improve usability. And ideas for further development and features are very welcome. (What would you want in the iPhone app?)

So try it out and hit the big blue Feedback button.

”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.” Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder, as quoted by TechCrunch.

Marc Andreessen has some simple advice for newspapers and magazines: “Burn the boats.” Cortes supposedly  ordered his ships burned after arriving in Mexico in the 1500s to prevent his men from even thinking about heading home to Spain.

In this case, Andreessen means ending media’s fixation on the print model by shutting down print.

I happen to believe shutting down print would be insane, businesswise, since most of print media companies’ profits still come from print.

But I agree with his larger point: that smart, successful, innovative companies are looking forward, looking to where consumers are moving, and moving to meet them. Meanwhile, legacy media companies are essentially saying, in Andreessen’s words: “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.”

How does an existing media company begin operating like an innovative startup? Unfortunately, it doesn’t  happen easily or cheaply. As shown in Clayton Christensen’s  groundbreaking book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” the solution is to let the existing enterprise go its merry way, while spinning off  some of its profit to  create a skunkworks startup that probably will end up competing with the existing business. Yes, that sounds like what some newspaper  and magazine companies did in the 1990s, while they still had profits to spin off.

These days, the skunkworks are gone, replaced by  a laser-like focus on what Christensen would call “sustaining technology” like paywalls and iPads. Those aren’t bad efforts, of course, but they won’t stand a chance against competitors whose vision is only forward.

Given the economic realities of newspapers and magazines, the best we can hope for is some vision at the top, providing cover and resources for a few internal innovators to truly explore new territory and burn their own boats.

Just added a new post over at SustainableNews.Biz on the local merchant’s view of advertising.

Cross-posting since the new blog is so new.

That iPad is one cool thing, eh?

No question, it will change how people watch videos, listen to music, type stuff, look at photos, play games, and read books, magazines, and newspapers.

What it won’t do is change the economics for newspapers.

Newspapers’ economic problem is this:  their expense structure depends on advertising, and high advertising rates. Very little of their revenue comes from print subscriptions. So one would think that when a new delivery vehicle comes along, like the iPad, the question would be: how well does the ad model translate to this vehicle? Will advertisers pay a premium to appear alongside quality news content, as they do  in print?

But no, the question is “Will the iPad enable newspapers to charge people to read news?”

I guess the answer is yes, they’ll be able to charge.  But the real answer is that  nobody will buy, and now we have some evidence of that reality.

According to The Observer, only 35  people have signed up for Newsday’s subscription model after 6 months and $4 million of site development. This isn’t a prediction or debate anymore, it’s reality.

Back to the iPad’s potential impact on newspaper advertising:  from the photos and videos I’ve seen, the screen looks like it’s big enough to display ads and content simultaneously.

I expect the highest potential could  be a magazine-style presentation:  the tablet is held horizontally, with two facing pages. One page would be content, and the facing page would be a full-page ad. As the user flips pages, new ads appear.

Even so, that’s a big leap for newspapers to make in technology, layout, ad sales, ad production, etc. But at least it’s not as big a leap as expecting people to pay to read news.

I’ve set up another blog — SustainableNews.biz –  to focus  on the ecosystem of local news startups, and specifically on the solo journalist trying to get something off the ground.

Not much there yet, but stay tuned. Even better, if you come across anything along that topic, send it over.

Robert Niles hits a critical issue in local journalism with his post  “Doing journalism in 2010 is an act of community organizing“.

An incredible number of newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2008-09 (40,000  in 2009, and 21,000   in 2008 according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics), and many of these journalists are taking a shot at running their own local news website.  Writes Niles:

Many people who leave the paper for the blogosphere are running one-person shows. As such, they need to not forget about those other important roles within the newspaper business: editorial page advocacy, community leadership and, yes, ad sales. If you’re running a one-person shop, you can no more afford to abandon those roles as a newspaper could afford to dismiss everyone on its staff who fulfilled them.

Trouble is, the modern newspaper  is filled with highly specialized positions. And worse, people are discouraged from performing another professional’s duties, such as a reporter taking photographs, or a copy editor writing editorials. That’s not a  problem when  staffs are big, but those specialists are ill equipped when they’re on their own.

Niles focuses on the community-building challenges of solo journalism, and I totally agree.

I believe the toughest line to cross will be economic. Solo journalists must learn how to run a business and ask for money. And that’s something they have been specifically trained  to believe is antithetical to journalistic  ethics.

Fact is, journalists in the 19th century managed to drag a press  across the plains, set up shop, write news, sell ads and print the thing. Somehow journalism survived.

Today’s solo journalists can and will figure out how to do it again, but they’re up against some huge societal and cultural barriers, not to mention their own career experiences.

These newly solo journalists need to face those realities head-on, as they invent  new ways to do local journalism — before their severance runs out.