Local as an operating principle
Howard Owens has written a well-researched, well-thought and well-written piece called The Imperative of Localism and Local News that’s worth bookmarking and reading when you have time to digest it.
His main point is that daily newspapers abandoned true local coverage decades ago, and they need to get back to the true roots of localism if they want to reclaim relevance.
It’s not often discussed in newsrooms, but readership declines started at least fifty years before the introduction of Mosaic. Readership peaked in the late 1940s, more than a decade after radio became a commercial force, and years before television reached popular saturation.
And while U.S. newspapers are not alone in facing competition from new technology or changes in social habits, the readership slide is greater in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation, with American papers now ranking low on readership 1,000 adults.
Part of Howard’s argument is that daily newspaper journalists lost touch with the needs and interests of most people in the communities they cover.
In the decades preceding the current “hyperlocal” fad, professional journalists, and the people who manage them, didn’t seem to realize is that “local” is what newspapers did before the “professionals” took over and decided the local flower show was nothing more than a calendar item and real news mean combing over every council member’s campaign contributions.
The theme is reminiscent of a debate I recall from the 1980s: had reporters and editors become too much of a professional class, out of touch with the needs and interests of “ordinary people”? Part of the debate in the ’80s was about pay scales. In the 1950s, the typical reporter in the 1950s made wages on par with a store clerk, but by the late 1980s, the pay of a reporter at many dailies was similar to an entry-level lawyer.
While no one would begrudge anyone upward mobility, was there an unintended consequence? Had journalists lost touch with the public whose interests they supposedly represent? Could a reporter or editor living in the suburbs be expected to understand and cover the lives of those in an inner city?
But that’s a sidetrack off Howard’s argument. His point is that “local” is a concept worth striving for, if you’re a journalist who cares about a community. That’s why he launched The Batavian, an ambitious — yet practical — approach to creating a local online community/journalism resource. His goal is to create a resource that both informs and engages local people about the things they care about.
Sadly, its probably too late to save newspapers, and it’s too late for newspapers to save their communities.
The Web won’t save newspapers. The mere transference of newspaper journalism onto digital devices is a doomed business model.
But the Web can save and revitalize local communities.
If you’re someone who cares about local, please take the time to read Howard’s inspiring essay.
Picard nails it
Noted media economist Robert Picard expresses the same frustration I’ve been feeling lately over the recent “coverage” of the financial difficulties of U.S. newspapers. His recent blog post “The Dead and the Dying” sums up the journalists’ hysteria nicely:
Nickle and dime-ing readers like the airlines? Special treatment from the government? Relying on professors to tell us what’s going on? Have journalists gone mad?
In some ways they have. They are panicking at problems in big city media and ignoring the fact that most newspapers are relatively stable and reasonably healthy. The only newspapers experiencing serious competitive difficulties are those in the top 25 markets (about 1 percent of the total) and these are joined in suffering by corporate newspaper companies whose executives have made serious managerial mistakes.
It’s simply mass hysteria.
I don’t know how else to explain the universal underlying assumption in coverage by reporters at all levels, in all media, that newspapers are fatally broken, that the business model doesn’t work, and that the solution is somehow more complicated than this:
Make your product relevant, and necessary, to the lives of local people and advertisers, and adjust your expenses to the realities of the new advertising landscape.
That’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, either.
Facebook Connect: comments breakthrough?
Facebook recently launched a new service that enables any site to plug in Facebook’s commenting functionality, and connect comments to a user’s profile.
I wonder if this could be a breakthrough for local media sites — especially newspapers — that have struggled with nasty comments. And as two additional bonuses, this new tool provides sophisticated technology for free, and could expose a whole new population to a site’s content.
First, on the comments struggle. It’s not just about the unpleasant comments that invariably show up; it’s about the time and energy it takes to deal with them. Every questionable comment becomes the trigger for second-guessing. The internal and external debates are nothing but time-sucks.
Because Facebook is mostly made up of actual profiles of people, their comments tend to be friendly. If you’re on Facebook at all, you’ve probably noticed: Hey, no flames!
Here’s a posting from the Facebook Developers blog that explains how it’s done.
With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.
Do read the rest of that blog, which includes a video. Setting this up is pretty simple.
Now, clearly there are tradeoffs.
Not everyone is on Facebook, or wants to be. Some people will never comment under their real names. You’re handing over your commenting to the Facebook system, with all that implies in terms of controlling what appears on your site. (I haven’t dug deeply enough into this to see how easily you could delete a comment or ban a commenter from appearing under your stories.)
On the plus side, you’d see what happens when people do use their real names. You’d be tapping a huge base of users who already are comfortable posting comments using the FB system. You don’t have to handle registration or admin or customer service. You don’t need to maintain the system.
But the biggest plus could be this: user bases on local media sites have flattened in recent years. Using FB comments would automatically turn each of your commenters into a viral marketing machine. Any comment made on your site by a FB user would show up on their FB page, exposing the comment — and your content — to all their FB friends.
Getting new users to try an existing site — after they’ve chosen repeatedly to pass it by — is a tremendous challenge. You can spend a whole lot of time and money trying to make it happen, and the odds are, even if you can being some new people in, most won’t stick. FB comments have the potential to create new loyal users. For free.
I think FB comments are worth a try. Consider adding them to one section of your site as a live test. Make sure to let people know it’s an experiment and you want feedback. Ripe areas could be high school sports, local entertainment, business. Be sure to assign one staff person to implement and monitor the experiment, and to communicate results.
If it doesn’t work, no harm. If it does, expand it.
Please let me know if you try FB comments, and what your experiences are. Post comments here or email me privately: joe [AT} joemichaud.com
What the inauguration says about local
One of the striking elements about yesterday’s inauguration was the physicality of it.
An estimated 2 million people traveled from all over the country just to be anywhere near the event.
All over the world, people gathered in front of TVs in their offices and schools, but more significantly, many made a point to go to venues set up just for watching the televised event.
What does this say?
It says that proximity matters. In a time when we can easily gather “virtually” with anyone we know, anywhere in the world, people will still get up off their couches and unplug their laptops, and they will go stand with friends and strangers to share an experience.
That speaks to a basic hardwiring of the human psyche that we in media need to keep remembering: Now that everyone knows how to use technology to share an experience virtually, there are times when we choose to gather. Now that it’s a daily routine for many to connect on Twitter and Facebook, they still go out and find each other. There’s a shared experience around the physical space we occupy.
And that brings us to the future of local media. I believe people’s actions yesterday — they were drawn to proximity with each other, around a shared event — reaffirms the idea that local media can be relevant. People identify with their geographic communities, and with their virtual communities.
The challenge for local media is to understand the innate needs of human beings who identify with a physical space. Local media must make itself indispensible to those who identify with the place, must make itself part of that community, and must make sure it’s always invited along when people gather.
Who knows, maybe take it a step further, and create a physical community space where people gather?
Opportunity in small-market classifieds
Also posted at www.AIMGroup.com
Recently I’ve reviewed a number of small newspapers’ websites and strategies, particularly around classifieds. As you might expect, there are a few common threads. They are not universal, by any means. Some sites need a lot of work, and some just need some tweaking.
Before I get into those areas for improvement, I should say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the openness of smaller newspapers to thinking differently, compared to larger papers. On the other hand, if you don’t have much auto advertising, I suppose you’re more likely to see that category as opportunity rather than risk.
So, a few recommendations for smaller papers to generate results:
1. Clear strategy for classifieds. Many papers still seem to define classifieds as “whatever comes in on the phone.” There’s big revenue opportunity in acting more intentionally about these categories. Why not decide to be the best resource in your region for buying a car, finding a home or getting a job? Why not be the best place for advertisers looking to find those consumers?
2. Classifieds as categories, rather than as a homogenous mass. Neither consumers nor advertisers think much about “classifieds.” They have a job to fill or a car to sell or a house to buy. Speak to those needs in product mix, in site navigation, in promotion.
3. Targeted products. Keep them simple, and focus each on consumer and advertiser needs in a category. The needs of a homebuyer are vastly different than those of a jobseeker.
4. Simple pricing. Figure out what price points make sense for advertisers in each vertical category in your market. Pick no more than 3-5 and be prepared to shift based on feedback.
5. Clearer site navigation to classifieds. Many sites make it unnecessarily difficult to find that car for sale. Highlight the classifieds categories in sitewide navigation, on every page.
6. Show off your assets. Top Jobs is an excellent model for all classifieds categories. Why? Because it takes advantage of something newspaper sites have, that no vertical site has: drive-by traffic. Find ways to pull classifieds content onto every page, not just jobs, and not just on the home page.
7. Cleaner branding. Sure, I’m a believer in creating a new brand that says “Hey, our homes site is much, much more than simply the newspaper classifieds.” But if it isn’t, do you really want to put the time and effort into promoting MontanasBestRealEstateForYouOutofTownSuckers.com? Better to keep it simple, and leverage your marketing dollars more efficiently.
8. SEO’d site structure. Why make a site look smaller than it has to be? Many small newspapers have a small news site and a small auto site and a small homes site, all under different URLs. Google happily sees them all as separate small sites, and ranks them accordingly. Yet simple URL changes could make the collection look like a medium-sized site, and earn it the higher rankings it deserves in all categories.
9. Better use of space. Encourage your web designers to think in terms of “static” and “dynamic” content. Dynamic means story headlines that change regularly, and ads that change regularly. Static means logos, navigation, lists that don’t change, basically things your users will quickly learn to ignore. The first screen of every page — from home page to classifieds verticals — should be heavily weighted with dynamic content. That first screen is prime real estate. Be ruthless. Every pixel should be there for a reason.
10. Less clutter. Somewhat related, but mostly about ads. Cut down on the number of display ad positions. Tiny rectangles aren’t effective for advertisers. If you have small advertisers who need a low-priced solution, find one. Reserve your display ad inventory for those who need, and can pay for, high visibility.
11. Reposition as a partner. Newspapers in small markets have an opportunity that their large-metro brethren have long since lost: They can be a real partner to local merchants, employers, realtors and auto dealers as these businesses seek customers online. Done right, this opportunity represents real growth for small-market newspapers.
Taken together, these points mean smaller papers are leaving significant money on the table in classifieds categories, and the amount is probably just a function of their market’s economics and demographics. The good news is, those smaller publishers seem much more willing to make the changes required to go get it.
Bluffton: The experiment is over
(also posted at AimGroup.com)
Some truly sad news in the past week: Bluffton Today, the start-from-scratch, let’s-try-a-new-model newspaper in Bluffton, S.C., is going to start charging for home delivery of its daily newspaper, srtarting Dec. 1. For three years, Bluffton Today has been delivered to every household, free. The announcement is here.
Much of the attention on Bluffton Today, of course, has been its heavy focus on developing a voice for the citizenry of Bluffton. By opening up blogs, photos and other contributions to local residents, BlufftonToday.com became the center of local dialogue. One of the more powerful learnings of this model was the emergence of a community of local moms in Bluffton, a learning that led directly to the launch of local moms’ sites by newspapers across the U.S. in the past two years.
And the online-print loop was also innovative. The website is almost entirely community-driven, while the printed newspaper is a combination of professional journalism and community voices.
Still, it was the saturation-home-delivery concept that I personally found intriguing. Bluffton had the potential to test a game-changing story for advertisers: in a time of increasing fragmentation of both media and attention spans, we’re going to guarantee that your message gets into every home in this attractive area, every day. Since advertising pays the bills at any newspaper, local advertisers’ perception of value is key. The model of saturation delivery is relatively widespread among weeklies; it’s rare among dailies. With Bluffton being a high-demographic area attractive to advertisers, and combined with the intense community focus of the publication, it could be the perfect test case for the concept. Alas, it won’t be.
But the saddest thing of all is this: not only will the newspaper start charging for printed copies, it also will begin charging for access to parts of BlufftonToday.com. The community’s response is predictably harsh, as seen in this exchange on the site between the editor and readers. Note the people who feel they’ve helped build this community resource through their contributions of content, and now they’ll be charged just to use it.
So the experiment is over, and Bluffton Today will become like other newspapers, including its struggle to survive.
As newspapers have flailed around in recent years, Bluffton Today was a source of inspiration and hope. So the end of this experiment is not just an isolated incident. I fear it could be a significant setback to those who continue to experiment within newspapers, not only adding to their own doubts, but also undermining what little support they get from their sponsor organizations.
To them, all we can say is: Please don’t give up.
Stop the presses? Dumb ideas refuse to die.
So it looks like this will be an annual thing. Every year around this time I will repeat my counter-intuitive statement that newspapers are making a tremendous mistake when they talk about dropping print and going online-only. Here’s last year’s rant.
Why this time of year? Because of what’s been arriving in your mailbox lately. Catalogs. Literally tons of expensive-to-produce, expensive-to-deliver catalogs. The idiots in the mail-order industry haven’t figured out that they could save all that money and put those things online!
But of course they’re not idiots. They spend millions of dollars on printing and delivery and millions on slick websites. Why? Because you, Mr. or Ms. Consumer, don’t have the time or interest to go fire up your “browser” (how much browsing have you done lately?) and buy their stuff.
They know you’ll buy their stuff if you happen to flip through their catalog on the way from the mailbox, see something you can’t live without, and THEN you’ll head to the browser. They know this because they pay attention to customer behavior.
Which is what newspapers don’t do very much: Pay attention. To customer behavior.
If they did, they’d discover that their advertisers care — a lot – about:
- The subscriber who sees their ad at home flipped open on the coffee table.
- The passerby who sees their ad on the lunch counter
- The subway rider who sees their ad on the folded-over paper being read by a straphanger.
- The patient in the waiting room who happens to pick up the paper.
The challenge for the printed newspaper is simple: be compelling enough for some people to want it delivered to their home, and for others to at least make the effort to pick it up and flip through it. This isn’t about a broken business model, it’s about a broken mechanism for understanding customers’ needs.
Advertisers, like catalog companies, will pay a lot of money to get their message in front of your busy eyeballs when you’re probably thinking about something else.
Newspapers, like catalog companies, are in a terrific position to create publications that work great in print, and entirely different products that work great online.
The problem is that for years newspapers treated online like another print product, and now they’re thinking about treating their print product like it’s an unnecessary expense. (Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog takes a shot at the economics of that argument. For more comments, see Lost Remote’s take)
Newsrooms must take the lead on this. Newspaper newsrooms haven’t focused nearly enough energy on discovering what local consumers want in a print product, and what local consumers want in an online product.
If newsrooms want journalism to survive, they must accept full responsibility for understanding these needs and being accountable for attracting audiences advertisers want.
If newsrooms can create must-pick-up print products, they’ll be able to maintain and justify the premium pricing that newspaper print ads command. If they can create compelling online products, they’ll attract the breadth and depth and scale of audience that will allow multiple tiers of revenue from low-cost to premium.
But first, they must accept full responsibility for giving people more of what they want and less of what newsrooms think they need.
UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor announced yesterday it’s dropping print, but that’s a very unusual newspaper. And it has few, if any, of the local advertising dynamics outlined here.
Two angles on “local” as a strategy
Also posted at the AIM Group blog.
Howard Owens posted a very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, blog item arguing that “local” as a media strategy will make even more sense in the future because of societal changes that are drawing people toward smaller geographic communities. He’s talking about the reasons behind Gatehouse’s new site The Batavian, (which was covered in this blog a couple of weeks ago) but he could be talking about any community:
The beauty of the web for local news is not only does it give us a new chance to refocus on true local news, but it makes it easier to enable the strong civic engagement that only comes when people talk with each other. Through comments and blogs and UGC video, we have a chance to pull people away from “American Idol” and into a real dialogue about the issues that matter most to their home towns.
Meanwhile, another site is taking that very tack, this time more of a grassroots approach. The West Seattle Blog covers that neighborhood like a small community newsletter, except it uses video, crisp writing, and instant coverage. This morning, for example, I’m reading coverage of a neighborhood association meeting, and it was posted about midnight last night — with video. According to coverage in TechNewsWorld.com, founder Tracy Record was an assistant news director for the local Fox affiliate, and left in December to focus fulltime on her neighborhood blog. She has since been joined by her son, and her husband, selling ads. “We say that we’re sustainable,” she said. “We decided on a leap of faith to live on this job last year. We had a 401k, we were living off savings for a while. We’re not drawing on that anymore.” Record is now able to pay freelancers, and she hopes to hire an additional staffer by the end of the year.
Two models approaching local as an opportunity: one from a media company looking for new growth, one from a citizen looking to meet a need in her neighborhood.
A lot of this stuff runs under the radar of typical industry coverage because it’s so small. And that’s too bad, because taken in the aggregate, it’s big. There’s a lot happening at the community level that adds up to significant experimentation — and possibly, oppportunity.
Full circle: a newspaper-y blog skin
Another sign of the maturing of blog technology as a solid publishing medium. (Anybody remember the 365 Days’ War over what was or wasn’t a blog?)
Now here’s a WordPress blog layout that looks more like a newspaper or magazine than a blog.
As a format within a local media site, this has potential. The all-important first screen displays
multiple entries, stories, or photos. Comments are on a continuation page, keeping the home page compact.
A lot of blog layouts serve up one post in the first screen, which is fine for a solo blogger, but it’s limiting if you have multiple entries per day, or even per hour.
I haven’t spent any time poking at this to see advantages over the many other excellent WordPress skins, but it’s is worth checking out if you’re running a site with multiple entries. If you try it out, please share reactions in comments below.
Beta in Batavia
(I’ve also posted this on the AIM Group’s new site, where I’m also blogging. I’ll be cross-posting some items as appropriate, and will note when that’s the case.)
Gatehouse Media has a fascinating experiment going on in Batavia, N.Y., to see what an online-only local news service might look like.
So far it looks like a blog, where each article is a blog entry, and people can add comments, and the whole thing is a long scrolling page. But The Batavian has a lot more going on. There are links to headlines from other local media, job postings, for-sale listings, photo galleries. There are many postings every day. There’s a two-person staff dedicated to the site, one for news and one for sports. Howard Owens, a Gatehouse exec who also is a prolific blogger (when the spam doesn’t wear him down) is acting as the site’s publisher. Philip Anselmo is news editor and Brian Hillabush is sports editor.
Gatehouse’s newspapers all have websites, and some are very advanced in both audience strategies and business strategies. This is Gatehouse’s first freestanding site, and it’s going up against the existing paper in Batavia, The Daily News.
Hillabush’s first day on the job was yesterday. He’s eager to get the community engaged in helping shape the site. “The really innovative thing we’re doing (with sports) is getting the coaches involved in writing their own blogs,” he said by phone today. “You kind of lose something when a coach calls the newspaper after a game and a reporter writes the story… I really think this is going to take off.”
The new guy knows what he’s talking about. He was a sports writer at The Daily News for eight years and in local radio in Batavia before that. He knows every coach in the area. He plans cover 3-4 games a week, writing stories and shooting photos and video. Plus recruiting those coaches.
Why jump from the daily newspaper to a startup like The Batavian? “Howard’s a big reason why I took this job,” Hillabush said.
Owens is a vocal (and controversial) proponent of just-do-it news video and community engagement. And The Batavian gives him a live testbed. Owens covered two fires with simple video cameras, one in Corfu and a fatal fire in Batavia. Heck, just today (9/11/08), he posted five news items.
“We picked Batavia because it’s a neat, vibrant town,” Owens says in his blog. “It’s close to our home office; and the daily newspaper there was doing nothing on the web.” Note: “doing nothing on the web” these days often is code for “not doing much on the web.” Here the phrase is literal. The Daily News site is more like a postcard than a brochure, and the copyright says 2003. Which will make Batavia all the more interesting to watch. Will the Daily News step up? Will The Batavian draw its audience? Or create a new audience?
For all The Batavian’s ambition, there isn’t much sense of an equally ambitious business model, no doubt a combination of the current bloggish design and the priority to build a viable audience. That could be an even tougher experiment: if there’s a new model for engaging a community’s residents, could there also be a new model for engaging its businesses?
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