joemichaud.com

Howard Owens posted a very appropriate told-you-so blog entry the other day — “Cheap camera video journalism going mainstream“   Howard has been beating the drum on the topic of newspaper reporters shooting lots of good-enough video clips with cheap cameras — very much against the institutional tide. Sounds like the good-enough crowd is winning, and hurray for that. Experimentation and volume — and cheap failure — are the only ways to figure out what’s going to work.

Meanwhile I’ve been developing an article for the next Classified Intelligence Reports on similar work in video advertising, and I have something startling to report: there ain’t any.

There ain’t any on mainstream media sites, that is.  There’s lots of interesting work being done in online video advertising. It’s just not happening where you might expect it. I was shocked at the number of sites with aggressive editorial video efforts, and no — repeat no — effort to figure out how to create a satisfying advertising environment around it. The real shockers are local TV sites, where you’ll see lots of clips from broadcast  but no — repeat no — effort to deliver advertising, aside from traditional sitewide banners.

I hope I’m wrong. Maybe I just happened to troll through the sites that aren’t fully engaged in the video business.  I did find a very few, and I’d be delighted to see more, so comment away.

What’s that? You’re a reporter or photographer or videographer,  and you find advertising a necessry evil? Please, find another job and free up your spot for someone who cares.  If you’re in the local media business, advertising pays your salary. You have to get involved in figuring out how to bring local advertisers into your site, and video could be perfect for many.

The scary thing in most local media businesses — both broadcast and print — is that the people who are just now “getting” video, thanks to people like Howard,  are the farthest away from the ad side. Worse, the traditional media culture prevents them from engaging with the ad side, even if they wanted to. As a result, you’ll find some good video ad models on media sites, like  walk-throughs of homes for sale –  but they’re safely sequestered in pure-advertising sections like classifieds.

Here’s the challenge for the creatives in local media: create engaging “editorial” video content that also includes engaging advertising. The folks in TV and radio managed to do it a whole generation ago. Were they that much smarter than you?

Arianna Huffington offers a thought-provoking analogy to help rethink the endless debate between new and old media. I don’t usually just slap quotes up as blog posts, but I thought this one was worth sharing (thanks to Bev Crandon for flagging it):

The shifting dynamic between the forces of print and online reminds me of the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T-101 in the Terminator movies. At first, the visitor from the future (digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

(OK, now your turn. What does the liquid-metal-cop-guy represent?)

At the New England Newspaper Ad Executives Association conference in Newport, RI, last week, I attended presentations by two major advertisers: General Motors Planworks and Target.

Each came at the topic in an entirely different way: GM is looking for efficiency and accountability. Target is looking for creative ways to push its hugely successful brand (Target now claims to be the most recognized brand on the planet.) I’m way oversimplifying, but point is, they couldn’t have been more different.

But some themes tied them together:

• Newspapers (heck, anyone selling local advertising) must be the experts in their local marketplace. They must continually grow and share that expertise with their customers. That’s not “added value” anymore. It’s core.
• Better get serious about audience measurement, both print and online. Because advertisers are getting serious, and they’ll come looking for refunds if numbers fall.
• Customer service is critical. Make it a priority. Treat all customers well, but don’t be afraid to treat your top customers like royalty.
• Print matters. A lot. Target was playing my song (see my blog entry about all that paper in the mailbox) about the importance of flopping a Sunday flyer onto the coffee table. I wonder if most ad execs get that. Yes, we’re all about digital, but the scarcity of attention span means that getting an offer in front of somebody’s eyeballs is going to get harder and harder. Why on earth would a publisher try to “save money” by putting that flyer online? And why isn’t home delivery much more of a priority at any cost?

Most of all, listening to advertisers has got to be job 1. Any ad exec in that audience who didn’t come away with an altered viewpoint … just wasn’t paying attention.

The news is out. I’m connecting up with the AIM Group and Classified Intelligence as a senior consultant. The  news release is here.  I’ll be involved in consulting projects with their team, and  helping relaunch the group’s website around useful online-focused news and information. Plus I’ll write  the centerpiece for the biweekly Classified Intelligence Report.

It’s a great team to be part of. I’ve known Peter Zollman, the founding principal, for years. And of course Shannon Kinney, director of sales and marketing, was part of the 1990s MaineToday team before moving on to a very successful career with Cars.com, Knight Ridder Digital and Boston.com.    Jim Townsend, editorial director, is someone I’ll be working closely with on the writing and website, and  Bruce Annan is the managing director and chief cat-herder. I met them both at a recent C.I. meetup in Toronto, along with Peter and Shannon, and everyone made me feel like part of the team. Each of them brings unique strengths for client work, and it’s a powerful combination. I also met Bev Crandon, who is launching a call-center optimization practice with C.I., and Scott Annan, whose company will be developing the new C.I. site, and became even more impressed with the range of skills associated with this team.

It’s a virtual organization that has representatives worldwide, and no real “home office.”  Big change for me in the daily work and communications, which I find both fascinating and challenging — in a positive way.

I’ll continue blogging here, and the Local Interactive Strategies consultancy continues. Those will simply  complement my work with the AIM/C.I. team and programs. Exciting times ahead!

Well, today (April 30) is my last day at MaineToday. To be honest, Dan Dinsmore has been running the show since March 3, and I’ve been just helping in the background. But today I turn in my badge.

I’ve been thinking of what to write here on this day. It occurs to me that the best thing I can do is record for posterity the cool things that the people at MaineToday did over the years, things that are fairly common now but at the time were “out there.” We didn’t intend to be “out there” — they just seemed like the right things to do. I’m happy to say that MaineToday is still, and will continue to be, out there. So consider this simply taking stock up till now.

I’m not going to attach individuals’ names to these things, because if you know my “circle of life” drawing, you know that we’re all in it together. On the other hand, comments are open on this blog, and I hope current and former MTers will feel free to take or give credit, or to add items I forgot about.

This is going to sound like bragging, but it’s not. I’m the longest-serving person here, so I feel an obligation to write this down before it’s all forgotten.

So here goes.

It starts with the whole idea of (what later became called) MaineToday.com in 1995, which really was a couple of questions: “What does this community need? and What could a website be if it had the assets of a newspaper to start with?” Those assets being, for example: a wide range of content, superb photography, connections to the community, an existing wide readership, a broad advertiser base, creative people, and more. The answer was a site that started with some newspaper content, but aimed beyond. In 1995, and well into the next century, most newspaper companies focused on getting better at “putting the newspaper online.” The folks at MaineToday.com did that, but mostly focused on what else people might want or need. We didn’t invent anything unique (that I’m aware of) but we often tried to find examples to work from, and instead found ourselves making it up as we went. Some examples:

• What now are called “citizen media” and blogs: We started a niche site in 1995 called “BayNet” later renamed “Casco Bay Online” that was almost entirely content contributed by ordinary people. My favorite piece was “A Day on The Bay,” a brief item written by various captains on the Casco Bay island ferries, capturing some event or observation of that day. He’d write it on paper, fax it over to us, and someone would type it onto the site every day. I’ll never forget the item describing a clear sunset, and in the distance, a deer swimming toward the mainland. That kind of outreach became standard across the MaineToday network, whether in Business, Sports, reader comments on news, and of course it’s now common on sites around the country.
• Multimedia, video, audio: We had a lot of fun trying out different types of media early on. In Casco Bay Online, we had video of Portland Head Light from the air, underwater fish in the Gulf of Maine, and historic footage of a boat race. Elsewhere, I recall a story about a gospel singer, written for the Maine Sunday Telegram in 1997, and the reporter had the foresight to take a tape recorder. The resulting package showed me a new way of storytelling.
• Ad formats: It’s almost funny to say now, but early on, it was controversial to put ads on web pages, as an offense to the “web community.” But we experimented anyway, and first came up with a “tile” ad, the dimensions of which I believe we copied from the Houston Chronicle site. (Those units are all standardized now) Before long, we came up with “web margins” which everyone now calls skyscrapers, and discovered the power of a large space to tell an ad story. One very cool tool was a way for an advertiser to update the text of their ad easily and immediately, from a form on a web page. That was a breakthrough.
• High School Sports: The idea of capturing results from every game, in every sport, with every player, at every high school in Maine, was pretty outrageous. But we gave it a shot in 1999, and it became one of the biggest traffic drivers on the site. The system is still in use today, and now powers both the printed newspapers and the websites.
• Events calendars: OK, this one we invented. Newspapers run events calendars for their communities, and they’ve always been simply long strips of text, both in the way they are input, how they are saved in the publishing system, and how they are output for print. Which didn’t work very well online. We had the crazy idea of capturing the events in a structured database — as they were input — so they’d be easily searchable and sortable online, but also easier to edit and output for print. In 1996 there was no such thing, so we built it. The system is still in use today to produce the calendars for the printed Press Herald, as well as the online searchable calendars.
• Low-cost ad programs: There’s always been a challenge meeting the needs of small advertisers, those who can’t afford and don’t need a skyscraper. Hey, we developed microsites, a yellow-pages product, ecommerce, real-estate agent pages, text ads, who knows what else. All gone now, but not without a good try. The good news is all that learning is informing the next generation of products like the new MaineYellowPages.com.
• Classified “verticals”: This was radical at the time, but in 1998 we split the online “classifieds” into four sections for autos, homes, jobs, and “other stuff.” It immediately became clear that this approach spoke more clearly to both consumers and advertisers, and allowed us to develop content and technology to serve each category’s unique needs. This didn’t solve the real problems in these challenging categories, of course, but simply acknowledging them as unique categories was an important first step.

I’m going to stop at that and let others add more in the comments below. Or maybe I’ll think of more and add some.  I tend not to look back much, so I probably forgot something.

I said I wouldn’t attach names, but I’m going to mention three anyway, who deserve recognition and my personal thanks:

Jim Shaffer was CEO of Guy Gannett Communications, a traditional media company with newspapers and TV stations, when he had the vision in 1994 to start trying to figure out what was coming, and how to respond. Few in his position even suspected something was coming, let alone dedicating resources to try figuring it out. Jim’s leadership led to the creation of the “skunkworks” division that became MaineToday.com, and it would not have happened otherwise.

Lou Ureneck was executive editor of the Portland Press Herald, where I was city editor at the time, when in 1995 he decided the newsroom needed to get involved in the initiative that Jim Shaffer had set in motion. Things were already in motion, and let’s just say it was a bumpy transition. But the direction would have been much different had Lou not injected the newsroom — and me along with it — into the mix.

Chuck Cochrane took over as CEO when the Seattle Times Company bought Guy Gannett in 1998 and created Blethen Maine Newspapers. Chuck was new in town, and didn’t know me except by reputation. It took a big leap of faith to put the title of “president” on a guy who had no real business background, and I can only hope Chuck hasn’t regretted that decision.

Lots of other people deserve my thanks, all the current and former employees of MaineToday and Blethen Maine Newspapers that I’ve worked with — hundreds probably, if you include all my peers around the country who I’ve leaned on and learned from other the years. If you’re one of those, thank you.

My friend Steve Outing is part of a new initiative called Reinventing Classifieds, which aims to “revive newspaper classifieds by finding a new business model that’s relevant in the Internet age.” Sounds like a noble cause, and it has some new technology behind it, and we can always use some new thinking, so it’s worth checking out.

Steve’s kickoff blog post is titled “Can newspaper classifieds really be saved?” — which sure sounds like a dare to me, so here goes.

“Classifieds” is one of those funny words that we all understand to mean a whole lot of things. It’s like a big tangle of string, and you can’t tell where it starts or ends, or how many pieces are really in there.

Is it somebody selling their couch, like in the local Penny Saver?  or on Craigslist? Is it a car dealer who buys a full-page newspaper ad because his competitor did, and he can’t risk being second fiddle? Is it a real-estate agent buying a newspaper ad because the seller demands it? Is it a hospital offering a bounty to employees who recruit a new nurse? Is it cars.com? Is it eBay?

I don’t know, but all those behaviors and products and technologies are wound up in that tangle of string, and only a few of us call that tangle “classifieds.”

Allow me to reach in and tug at a thread. Hospitals are having a horrible time hiring enough doctors and nurses. What are some possible solutions, and how many of those solutions can the newspaper help with? Can the newspaper really make much of a difference by making their “classifieds” the best they can possibly be, in print, online, on mobile? Probably not: those solutions will only reach the nurses and doctors who are in the market for a new job, and that’s not the problem. OK, so what is the newspaper able and willing to help with? This is where creative folks need to get involved, climb outside the box that says “classifieds,” talk to the hospital about what works and what doesn’t, and invent some solutions. I expect the ideas would push a lot of boundaries, and some would pose ethical issues. Sadly, many wouldn’t fly because of newspaper cultural issues, not ethics.

All of which is a long way around to Steve’s question “Can newspaper classifieds really be saved?” My fear is that by defining the challenge as “saving classifieds” rather than “figuring out how to help employers/realtors/auto dealers solve problems” we could be missing opportunities to redefine newspapers’ role of bringing people together to do business.

Which is what we used to call “classifieds.”

A few recent events reinforce a theory I’ve been noodling over for a couple of years: the new reality for anyone trying to build a business in the digital world is that the entry-level price for customers is now zero.

Media companies need to pay attention, and maybe discover some new opportunities.

Two examples from outside the media world:

• On Thursday, Adobe launched a free version of its powerful and pricey Photoshop, called Photoshop Express. According to the trade press, the Photoshop brand was at risk of becoming irrelevant to young users who have access to lots of free tools.
• Yesterday I was looking for a system for creating invoices and keeping books for my consulting business. I checked out a few systems, including QuickBooks Pro ($180) but discovered that QuickBooks Simple Start (free) is perfect for my needs right now. Thus ended my search for an accounting program. And when my needs grow, I can already see what I’ll upgrade to.

Closer to home, this week at MaineToday, we were developing pricing models for our upcoming MaineYellowPages.com directory program. Guess what: the biggest discussion was how to pump enough advertiser value into the free level. Big change from the days when we tiptoed around the idea that classified advertisers wouldn’t buy newspaper ads if we gave away something free online.

Point is: Craig didn’t invent “free” — classifieds or otherwise. The “free” train has been flying down the tracks of the Internet since ‘95.

But for years, anyone with a digital-disruptable business model studiously avoided hearing the whistle. They instead focused on how to keep current customers paying, not how to attract new customers with a free entry level. Their theory was that giving away something for free devalues the paid product. (That was the paid vs free content debate. Seems so 20th Century now.) Meanwhile new entrepreneurs, with nothing to lose, got creative about exploring free.

For a local media company, the issue of free advertising is critical and isn’t going away. Local businesses are discovering all kinds of new ways to find customers, including strategies that cost them little or nothing out-of-pocket. Most of these businesses are probably not even your current customers. When they’ve become successful with their free strategies and they’re ready to pay for something more sophisticated, where will they spend that money?

The challenge is to create programs that expose local advertisers to your local audience, with a tiered value level that starts at free and moves up from there. When free is the assumed entry level, the competition is for those entry-level customers’ time, not their money. So there needs to be a good ROI for even the free advertiser’s time. The revenue challenge is to make sure there is enough value at the higher tiers so the financial ROI works for paying advertisers. And then overall, there needs to be careful management of technology, cost-of-sales and workflow to ensure the entire program returns a decent profit.

This isn’t simple, of course. But a first simple step is to change the conversation in your media company. Try this as a starter: “There are big new opportunities in free advertising. How can we take advantage of that?”

Traditionally, media companies pay a lot of attention to who’s in their audience. It’s how you sell advertising, right? Because what you’re really selling is your audience. The better you can describe your audience, the better you can speak to an advertiser’s needs.

What’s harder to think about is: who is NOT in your audience, and what are their needs? Those needs could point to new opportunities.

A recent report from ComScore describes the habits of print and online news consumers and makes some important observations. (Let’s leave aside for a moment that they’re obviously measuring usage of world/national/entertainment “news,” not the tougher category of local news.)

Here’s maybe an obvious observation:

Non-newspaper readers are likely to be younger, and they are actually heavier than average online news consumers. Meanwhile, heavy newspaper readers are more likely than average to engage with traditional print news brands online.

Here’s something less obvious:

TV news brands are also heavily visited by non-print newspaper readers, underscoring the importance of sight, sound and motion to the digital news experience. Non-readers were 29 percent more likely than the average Internet user to visit FoxNews.com and 15 percent more likely to visit CBS News Digital.

So if you’re running a newspaper brand, what are you doing to serve those people?

And here’s a question not asked in the comScore survey, but possibly as important: how  about internet users who don’t intentionally seek out news in any medium, let alone local news? What do they need that a newspaper brand could serve?

The New England Newspaper Association’s spring publishers’ conference was this week in Boston, and I was asked to put together some remarks. (The circumstances were very unfortunate, which I’ll explain at the end of this post)

As promised to the attendees, a PDF version of the presentation is attached here: NENA publishers 3/14/08 A bit of context for everyone else:

Newspaper publishers — and here I mean the individual at the top of the organization — are getting whipped around by a tsunami of information and opinion, often conflicting: from the trade magazines, from people in their own organizations (online, news, advertising, operations, IT), from their peers in the industry.

These publishers are fully consumed with navigating their newspapers through the here-and-now, let alone developing a vision for the near-and-far future.

So my point is that publishers can dedicate a small amount of resources and become much more comfortable and confident in leading their organizations forward. It takes a very a small amount of their own scarce time and a little of their organization’s resources to begin developing the unique vision for their market.

How small is that resource? As you’ll see on the last slide, I literally added it up, and for 2008 it turns out to be 1.2 FTE of existing staff time, 80 hrs of the publisher’s own time, and $16,260 cash.

Seems like a small price for a publisher to pay to reclaim his or her leadership role with confidence.

A note about the circumstances: I had planned to attend this conference mostly to hear John Fish speak. John was publisher at the papers in Topeka, Kans., and Naples, Fla., and in both places had a vision for online that included hiring Rob Curley. And in each case John and Rob made big things happen. I was looking forward to hearing John’s guidance to other publishers on thinking differently. Unfortunately, the day before John was to speak in Boston, he was hospitalized with a condition we all hope is minor and temporary. In pinch-hitting for John, I hope I served him well. Our thoughts and prayers are with John and his family.

There’s been plenty of attention lately about the Angry Journalist site, including a pretty good overview by Steve Outing on E&P.com. If you haven’t seen Angry Journalist, I suppose you should check it out before reading on, but the name pretty much tells you what you’re going to see. It’s sadly predictable. Better to just read Outing’s column and get some context.

Speaking as someone who has spent over half of my life proudly working with journalists, and sometimes labeled as one myself, I’d like to make a suggestion to the poor souls who count themselves among the Angry: Life’s too short to be spent so miserably.

If you’re an Angry Journalist and you’d like to be less so, please consider:

1. Journalism is a profession, not a priesthood. You’re not a journalist unless you’re working for someone else (who signs your paycheck). And you’re not much of a journalist unless you create something that an audience wants.
2. Ever heard this? “They still haven’t figured out how to make money online.” Tell that to Google. Draw an audience and you can make money. As a journalist, make it your business to draw a bigger audience. Become an expert at it. Need ideas? Read Howard Owens regularly.
3. Be a rebel. Go talk to an ad rep, or a marketing person, or customer service rep. (You know — somebody you’re not supposed to be talking to.) Ask what they’re hearing from customers, what they like and don’t like. Here’s the hard part: don’t shrug it off — act on it.
4. You’re not the victim of someone else’s screwup. Take responsibility for turning around the situation at your newspaper or TV station. In other words, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Literally.
5. Be humble. Starting today, decide you know nothing about what people want to read/know/watch. Make it your business to find out.

If all else fails and you’re still an Angry Journalist, please, go do something else. Free up that FTE for someone who’s not so, well, angry.