The single essential failure

"If the automakers' difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2008

There's been a lot of ire in the journalism world about Jeff Jarvis blaming journalists for their current fate. But I have to agree with him. Newspapers' difficulties today can be chalked up to the same essential failure as the carmakers': The belief they could avoid change.

The difference, mainstream journalists will argue, is that journalism was producing a quality product. Unlike Detroit, which kept producing gas guzzlers when the tide was turning toward more fuel efficient vehicles, the mainstream media kept producing important, democracy-foundational journalism.

I will argue that the difference is not so great.

Both have continued to produce products that customers increasingly don't want. In journalism's case, the mainstream media may continue to be producing "important news," but it's not in the form readers want. The same way Detroit continues to produce "transportation," but not in the form drivers want. So this is the point: It doesn't matter how "valuable" your product is. If your customers don't want it, your future is limited. To survive, you have to evolve.

This is how the traditional media failed. They believed they didn't have to change, because their product was so valuable. They were wrong. The world does need what they produce. But we need it in the form in which we'll consume it.

Photo courtesy of Ikhlasul Amal. Creative Commons license.

The need to move from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance

I recently interviewed techPresident.com and Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Andrew Rasiej for a story on how new media turbo charged coverage of the 2008 presidential election. He made an important observation in that conversations: Many newspapers operate online with a scarcity mindset, when they really should have one of abundance.

For example, on Nov. 5, the day after the historic presidential election, the NY Times posted only a handful of photographs from the previous day—when they very well could have posted a slew.
I remember noticing that as well. I’d been in Oakland on election night. The next day I went looking for photographs of celebrations around the country. I wanted to see if they had been as wild as Oakland’s. (In fact, as I soon learned, many were much more wild.) I remember subconsciously being surprised at how few pictures the NY Times had up on its site. If ever there were a day to just throw out pictures galore, this was it.

This is the scarcity mindset. When you only have a certain number of physical newspaper pages, there are only a certain amount of photographs you can publish. So you get in the habit of choosing only the best and running with those.
But on the Web, bandwidth is limitless. So not only can you post a gazillion photos, should you choose to do so, but—and this is important—your readers actually expect you to—just as I expected the NY Times to.

Moving into the abundance mindset, and posting as much content as possible,* will help ensure the future of news organizations for two reasons.

-- It generates revenue. Think about how many more ad impressions the NY Times would have gotten from me—and people like me, hungry for images from that transformational day—had they posted a slew of photographs.

-- It allows you to meet your readers' expectations. Not making more content available, on the other hand, violates expectations, and that’s a very bad thing to do. It irritates people, decreases their loyalty, and reduces the chance they’ll keep coming back.

* A quick note on what I mean by “more” content. I don’t mean more stories necessarily. That’s unsustainable in these days of slashed staffs. “More” content doesn’t have to be about creating a lot of new work. Rather, it’s about using as much as possible of what you already have—photographs, interview transcripts, even interview audio turned into podcasts, plus all those little observations, behind-the-scenes happenings, and little nuggets that would never make it into a formal “story”, much less merit a story of their own, but that nevertheless could conceivably be of interest to someone, and therefore is worth throwing up on the Web as a standalone item.

Photo courtesy of Somerslea. Creative Commons license.

The importance of getting inside your reader's head

A recent study of negotiating strategy showed that dealmakers who can see the world through the eyes of the person they are negotiating with are more likely to arrive at a mutually acceptable deal that people who don't.

The focus of the study was to figure out whether it was more important for negotiators to focus on the head or the heart. The answer was the head. Specifically, the study revealed the importance of understanding exactly why your opposite number is at the table and what they really want out of the deal.

The study holds important implications for people trying to figure out journalism's way forward.

In any deal, there's a buyer and a seller. Same thing in journalism. We journalists--or, rather, the organizations we work for--are the sellers. Our readers are our buyers. The deal we are negotiating is: "Give us your eyeballs" (so we can sell them to advertisers). The products we're selling are our stories. The currency our readers pay with is their time. According to the new study, the better we understand why our readers might want to give us their time, and consequently their eyeballs, the more likely we are to get them.

This is a tough question for us journalists. Traditionally, we've assumed that readers open up the newspaper "because they want to be informed." I would suggest that's not necessarily the case. There are myriad reasons why readers used to open the newspaper:

• To feel "in control," presumably by learning everything that had happened in the last 24 hours
• To avoid looking foolish when current events discussions come up
• To feel the thrill of seeing your team do well, or the agony of their defeat
• To feel "in control" by reviewing the latest stock prices and getting feedback confirming that their stock strategy was on track
• To laugh, by reading the comics
• To experience the excitement of learning about exotic countries far, far away
• And so on....

I don't know what the actual answer is. But news organizations need understand exactly what it is readers hope to get in return for the time they give us. That way, we can shape our offerings--our products--so that readers get what it is they want.

One caveat: When I start talking like this, friends who've never left the world of traditional journalism respond as if I'm suggesting this means we should consider selling all kinds of stories that aren't "proper" news. I'm not. I'm suggesting that we understand our readers' motivations and then shape our stories so that our readers get out of them what they're looking for. You can still report on town council meetings. But perhaps we'll learn to shape those stories in ways that are more enticing to readers than the formulaic and--let's be honest with ourselves here--often drearily boring approach we've used to report on civic life in the past.

Photo courtesy of frankblacknoir. Creative Commons license.

Who's your competition? (Part 1)

One of the core ideas in free market economics is that businesses succeed when they deliver a better product or service than their competition. OK, fine. So then the question becomes: Who's your competition?

Newspapers have traditionally thought of their competition as other newspapers. Maybe also TV news. But essentially, other purveyors of news. Because, after all, everyone reads or watches the news. So you'll get the most readers if you have the best news. Right?

Not anymore.

Newspapers' competition today is not other news organizations. It's anything else someone might do with their free time, other than reading the news. YouTube, MySpace, blogs, Epicurious, World of Warcraft, MarketWatch.com, Second Life, and so on.

Staying on top of the news is no longer a priority for many Americans. It's possible it never was. It's possible many people read the newspaper for other reasons: Habit, entertainment, the desire to feel connected to other human beings, the desire to feel a part of a community.

Let's take those last three for a moment: entertainment, the desire to feel connected, the desire to feel part of a community. Today, thanks to the Internet and other forms of digital entertainment, it's possible to satisfy those needs without ever touching a newspaper or any other news entity.

So as the news business tries to find its way forward, as it tries to preserve and grow its audience, it needs to be asking itself not just: How can we deliver the best possible news, better than anyone else who might be delivering news? But: How can we deliver an experience so great that the average person will choose spend time with us, rather than doodling around on Facebook, trying to up their score on "Madden NFL," or catching up on old episodes of "Desperate Housewives."

It's an odd thought, of course. And by no means am I suggesting that newspapers have to develop Desperate Housewives-type serials in order to attract readers. Instead, the idea is this: Newspapers have to ask themselves: How can we make the experience of reading the news as enjoyable as catching up on an old episode of DH. Or playing Madden NFL. Or updating your profile on Facebook.

Photo courtesy of Auburnxc. Creative Commons license.

What we can learn from NBA.com

Fast Company is always a great source of ideas on innovation and adaptation to changing conditions. The June 2006 issue (which I came across while culling my ever-growing stash of magazines) did not disappoint. There on page 97 was a story about how the NBA was using the web to hook a whole new generation of hoops fans. Their innovations sparked some interesting thoughts about things the news business could do online to similiarly attract and keep readers.

Here are a few things NBA.com did:

-- They realized that unlike TV watchers, Internet users weren't interested in watching a whole game over the Internet. So how to give them something they would want? Slice and dice game footage to give fans the ability to watch short snippets, especially snippets of the specific players or plays the fans were interested in.

-- NBA.com made it possible for fans to have specific snippets beamed directly to their handheld devices, based on preferences they had set for specific teams or players. Again, slice and dice and serve up specifics, rather than the whole 2 1/2 hour game.

-- They started to monetize the services by embedding short ads in the clips. And again, though the article didn't go into it, I'm guessing those weren't simply repurposed 15- or 30-second spots from TV. I'm guessing the ads were specifically designed for the devices (Internet or handheld) to achieve the advertisers' goal (brand impressions) without providing a bad experience for the user (like forcing them to watch a 15-second ad in order to watch a 15-second clip).

-- At the time of the article, NBA.com was also toying with the idea of sending text messages about specific developments, when a player had hit a certain number of points, for example. Clicking on the message would take the user straight to a live broadcast of the game. That way, the fan could tune in only if the game met certain conditions the fan considered interesting.

Newspapers could learn a lot from NBA.com.

The first thing is the whole mindset issue. The NBA didn't just look at the Web and say to themselves, "How can we use this thing to do the exact same thing here that were doing on TV?" (ie: broadcast games) They realized it was a different beast and that fans would want to use it differently.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg once told me that one of the problems some print editors have had in transitioning to the Web is that they look at the Web and see words and so they assume that a reader wants to interact with the content there in the exactly same way as they interact with a print newspaper. And that all the editors have to do to make the Web work for them is to convert their print stories into digital form. Some of them don't get that a reader approaching the Web is going to want to do different things than a reader approaching a piece of newsprint. The difference is subtle, Weisberg said, but it makes all the difference in whether an online site succeeds or fails.

Second, the NBA realized that the nature of the Web made it possible to deliver things that had never been possible to deliver via television. With TV, broadcasters can only send a single thing out to the entire audience. So they choose the thing most interesting to the majority: the entire game. In the digital world, however, it's possible to serve up different things to different members of the audience, based on what those individuals request. Had the NBA simply used the new medium to do the old thing (send a single thing to the entire audience), they would have missed the real opportunity on the Web (the ability to enable individuals within the audience to receive only those things most valuable to them).

Indeed, noted the Fast Company article in explaining how NBA.com was different from its peers: "The strategy at most entertainment companies looking to capitalize on the new networked gadgets is just to peddle out the same old stuff in new places." The NBA's key insight was that people wanted to do different things on the new devices.

Specifically,
* In the old TV world, the user desire was simply: "Show me what is going on now."
* In the new digital world, there were two new desires:
-- "Show me only those aspects of past events that I care about"
and
-- "Notify me if a certain event has taken place or a specific condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is important to me"

Understanding those new needs, NBA.com built on the old content (game footage) and on activities they were already doing (following games in real time) to create new types of content (player snippets, play snippets, event-driven text messages) to meet those new desires.

So, off the top of my head, what similar kinds of things could newspapers do to attract and keep readers?

-- What if readers could sign up to get news only about certain public figures or certain issues they cared about? In San Francisco, for example, if they wanted to get alerted every time there was a new item about supervisor Chris Daly? Or about parking regulations? Or about a business in a specific industry? Or even a specific restaurant?

The New York Times is already doing a version of this with its Keyword Alerts, which enable readers to tell nytimes.com to send them only those stories that include the readers specify (like "Afghanistan," "interest rate," or "Manolo Blahnik," for example). More newspapers should be doing this.

-- How else could the news be sliced and diced and delivered to readers in ways that make sense on handheld devices? It can't, of course, be a matter of just shoving an article or a blog post down the pipe. It would have to involve reshaping the content into a snippet that was useful to someone who's receiving it at work, while riding the bus home, or at a baseball game. I don't have the answer, but I'm sure it's there.

-- And how else could the news be provided to meet the desire "Notify me if a certain event has happened or a condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is meaningful to me"? Again, I haven't thought this one through, but I'm sure there's an answer. Or many.

Photo courtesy of spcoon. Creative Commons license.

What journalism can learn from a handwashing campaign in Ghana

Last Sunday's New York Times had a really interesting article about how public health workers in Ghana solved the problem of getting more people to wash their hands (and therefore reduce the incidence of child-killing diseases caused by dirt). Tellingly, the article wasn't in the international section. It was in Business. Even more interesting, the article held important insights for those of us in the news business who understand that the average American's lack of interest in the news is largely what is killing newspapers.

First the background.

The problem: Illnesses due to dirty hands, like diarrhea, kill a child somewhere in the world every 15 seconds. The solution is simple: Get people to wash their hands more frequently. The difficulty in that: Public health workers could not for the life of them get people in countries like Ghana to take up the habit. "We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn't change behaviors," Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine told the Times.

Then a lightbulb went off: Companies like Proctor & Gamble and Unilever have mastered the art of creating habits in American consumers (exhibit A: Febreze fabric cleaner: Who knew fabric freshner was a critical part of everyday life? Apparently no one, until P&G decided they needed to sell it.) If anyone could figure out how to sell the habit of hand-washing to Ghanaians, the public health folks decided, these guys could.

And they did.

First, they conducted a series of surveys to understand how and when Ghanaians perceived the need to wash hands. Talking about diarrhea and other diseases apparently had no effect, since, in the minds of Ghanaian mothers, those were just normal part of childhood, not dramatic calamities they were desperate to avoid. Next, they discovered that, when people did wash hands, their decision to do so was prompted by a feeling of disgust. They felt their hands were dirty--after cooking with oil, for example, or traveling through the city. Feeling their hands were dirty, they soaped them up and washed them clean. Now here's the interesting part: many Ghanaians didn't feel disgust after using the toilet. Hunh? You might say. That makes no sense to us. Exactly. But here's the thing: beautiful porcelain toilets had replaced latrine pits. In the minds of Ghanaians, then, toilets were actually associated with cleanliness.

With the marketers' help, the public health advocates figured out a new strategy. Forget about preaching about germs. Instead, cultivate a sense of disgust about using the toilet. "The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn't really sell soap use," the Times wrote. "Rather, they sold disgust. [emphasis mine]"

And apparently the campaign is working: Soap use after using the toilet has gone up 13 percent. And soap use before eating has gone up 41 percent!

So what do this have to do with journalism, you might ask. Very simple. Just about every single conversation among journalists about the demise of newspapers focuses on how bad this is for the country. News is important, the argument goes. Newspapers should be saved because of the "critical democratic function" they perform. (For the latest culprit, see Eric Alterman's piece in the upcoming issue of The Nation.)

What the Ghana handwashing story tells us, however, is you can't make people pick up a habit if they don't see the value in it, even if the value is objectively there. To us, avoiding germs is a perfectly valuable thing to do. To the Ghanaians, it wasn't. And no matter how much the public health workers tried to bang it over the Ghanians head that they needed to avoid germs, it didn't have any impact on their habits. It wasn't until the public health folks took the time to understand how the Ghanians saw the world, what was important to them, and what was effective in triggering certain behaviors, that they were able to craft messages that generated the behaviors the public health folks were gunning for.

The same goes for journalism in the States. We journalists can talk until we're blue in our faces about the importance of journalism. But if the average reader doesn't perceive that importance,* that argument isn't going to move any mountains. We will be more likely to succeed if we can appeal to something that does matter to the average American reader. I don't know what that is. But I ask you: What value can you think of that would be effective in "selling" the news-reading habit to the average American? What does the average American care about, that would get them in the habit of reading the news?

Tip: Think outside your journalism mindset box. Really. Think beyond everything you were taught in newsrooms and j-school. That's our mindset, our germs-should-be-avoided belief system, as it were, that the average American doesn't share. Instead, what is their mindset?

--------------------------------------------
* And after the lead-up to the Iraq War, who can really blame them? We subscribe to our mythology, that we provide a valuable public service. But there are many non-journalists out there who have every reason to be skeptical of that claim. But that's a whole different topic.

Photo courtesy of asplosh. Creative Commons license.

The demand is not plummeting; it was never there

Howell Raines' mildly interesting piece on Jim Romenesko in the current issue of Portfolio is probably not worth the 15 minutes it takes to read it, but it does have a couple of nuggets worth reflecting on. I bring them to you here.

The first is Raines' observation that "it's not technology per se that's killing newspapers; it's plummeting demand for quality information."

I would propose that the demand for quality information is not plummeting. Rather, that it never was there to begin with. Technology has made it possible for readers to go elsewhere for the things they actually were seeking in newspapers. That is the phenomenon that is being revealed here.

We don't really believe that readers bought newspapers because they wanted the latest news from city hall, do we? If we're honest with ourselves, we'd admit that readers bought newspapers for the sports scores, the stock quotes, the TV and movie listings, maybe even the comics. The news? No. The news was simply a freebie thrown in with the other stuff customers were actually buying.

Readers were also buying newspapers--and reading the news--for other reasons that had nothing to do with the content itself, nothing to do with any desire to consume "quality information. Reasons like:

-- The desire to feel connected to the community

-- The desire to feel on top of what's going on in the community

-- The desire not to look stupid at the next cocktail party

In the design world, we call these "affective" attributes, the word "affect" being a stand-in for "emotional." Affective attributes are those that generate specific emotions or feelings in a person using a product. Not everyone who bought an iPhone did so because they thought it was the most useful and beautiful cell phone out there. Some bought it because they wanted to look cool, hip, down with the latest. Some bought it because they wanted to feel like they were on the cutting edge. Some bought it because they were afraid of missing out on something special.

Many purchase decisions are driven by these kinds of factors, rather than the practical value of the object in question. Exhibit A: Killer muscle cars that don't actually run all that well. The "quality" in the information? That's like the medicine in the cough syrup. No child who ever agreed to slurp down cough syrup did it for the medicine. They did it for the cherry flavor.

This might sound depressing, but it should be encouraging. Because it offers the key to the solution: Figure out what your readers really want from you--whether it's the sports scores or the desire to feel connected, or both, probably--and then figure out how to deliver the news so that the reader gets those things they're actually looking for.

And accept that there never was, and probably never will be, any meaningful demand for quality information. Except among a tiny minority of news junkies, and those of us in the business. Sure, when something like the domestic wire-tapping story or the Walter Reed scandal come to light, people are interested. But on a day-to-day basis? Really, they're more interested in the sports scores. And the stock quotes.

Photo courtesy of Yogi. Creative Commons license.

On the Web, your readers are users

"In print, your customers, the people who buy your newspaper, are readers. But when they consume your content online, they become users."

This from Khoi Vinh, the New York Times website's Design Director, who spoke at the most recent Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

It's an important concept. It's easy to look at the Web, see words and pictures, and assume that the people who visit your news website are looking for the exact same experience they have when they read your newspaper. Ie: "Tell me, newspaper people, what's going on in the world." In fact, however, they're not. The difference in the user's expectations is based on the tool.

Pick up a piece of paper, and your brain tells you: "This is a piece of paper. There are a few things you can do with this. You can read what it says. You can make notes on it (and share those notes with anyone to whom you physically hand the paper). If you really want to, you can fold this up into a paper airplane." But that's it.

Approach a computer, however, and your brain tells you, "You can use this to do a jillion things. Play a game. Give it information and get information back (eg: Orbitz). Post information for anyone in the world to see. Create a map. Etc... Oh, yeah, and you can read stuff too."

So when a reader approaches your news site, their brain is a priori telling them they should expect to have some control over the stuff on the screen, and they should be able to participate in what's happening there. A fundamental principle of design (any design: the design of buildings, tools, doorknobs, as well as computer interfaces) is: "If your user has certain expectations about how things will work, and you don't meet those expectations, you will lose your user."

Which means newspeople need to think differently about the stuff they put on their websites than the way they think about the stuff they put in their hard-copy newspapers. As I wrote previously, on the Web, content is not enough. You need to give your user control and ways to participate.

Image courtesy of b_d_solis. Creative Commons License

On the Web, content is not enough

MediaBistro's FishBowl NY blog recently teased former MTV head honcho Michael Wolf about a YouTube video entitled "Help Me Find a Job." But in doing so, they missed some of the more interesting things he had to say.

Specifically:

"Traditional media companies don't understand that, on the Web, content is not enough, that it's about tools and applications, and it's about functionality that you can give the user, versus just content."

I recently interviewed the editor of RunnersWorld.com, dubbed this year's best online magazine by the American Society of Magazine Editors. He told me that the areas of the site that get the most traffic were the discussion forums (not surprising) and the Training Log. The what? The Training Log. A simple application where users can track each run taken, distance, time, even the specific pair of shoes they wore. Runners are data nuts, he told me. They loved the tool because it offered them an easy way to track their performance.

So the main traffic driver was not some six-piece investigative report on doping practices by elite runners. Or a comparison of the best running gear. Or even a heart-warming profile of a runner who had overcome some great adversity.* It was a tool, a fairly simple one to build at that, that was useful to readers on a daily or weekly basis.

In Silicon Valley, we call this "build once, sell to many." You build a software product and then sell it to millons of people. That's how you make money. In the case of the Training Log, you're actually "selling" to the same reader over and over, since it's something they return to continually. (And, of course, "selling" here means "enticing to return." The actual selling is to advertisers--the selling of all those ad impressions generated by return visits.)

Individual stories are more like custom projects. You build once and sell once, since few readers will return to a story they've already read.

I'm not saying, of course, that newspapers shouldn't run stories. That, after all, is the purpose of the news business. But to make money, newspeople need to think beyond only doing stories. It's a new way of thinking, maybe one that's hard for some newspeople to wrap their minds around. It was never something on journalism's radar screen before, because it wasn't something the old technology--ie: paper--could do. But the new technology--the digital world--can. So now, savvy newspeople will be the ones who think in terms of tools in addition to stories. Who create useful tools readers will come back to again and again. Traffic, after all, drives revenue. And revenue is the key to survival.

* I'm making these up.

Howard Kurtz doesn't get it

Howard Kurtz's column today bemoans the recent round of Washington Post buyouts. What he gets right is that it's painful to watch talented reporters like Tom Ricks and Sue Schmidt walk out the door. But what he gets wrong is what the future is about.

Specifically, he says:

"I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip."

OK, he's right about the future being digital. But he's wrong about contrasting the Web as hip and newspapers as less than hip. It's not about being hip. It's about delivering information to readers in forms they enjoy and find useful. It's not that readers don't want to learn about "Jack Abramoff's dirty dealings" (as Kurtz describes Schmidt's investigative findings) or follow the Middle East that another Washington Post departee, Robin Wright, covered for a quarter century. It's that they don't want to consume the information in the way that newspapers are dishing it out.

Why should this be so surprising? We don't wear the same clothes we did 25 years ago. Our cars have features (cup holders, CD changers) that they didn't have 25 years ago. We don't make phone calls the same way we did 25 years ago. Know anyone who's thinks a landline only is just dandy? So why should we expect that news readers would be satisfied with inverted pyramids and text only?

It's easy to look at online news and dismiss it as nothing but "gossip" and "fast-moving video." Because, sure, among online-only news sites, that's the vast majority of what's out there. Today. And that's key: today. It's like that today, but it won't always be. The reporters of tomorrow are the ones who will look at all those tools and gizmos and realize, "Hey, I could use that to report and tell my story better."

Here's an exercise: Take the Washington Post's two-year investigation of Jack Abramoff. Read the Post's Ombudsman's column about how it was done. Now, imagine how you might report that investigation today using all the digital tools available to you. Start at the beginning: Imagine how you might use blogs and crowd-sourcing to assist your investigation, long before you have anything meaningful to report. (Tip: Take a look at how Josh Marshall and TalkingPointsMemo.com did just that to uncover the US Attorneys scandal. And then consider this: He won a Polk Award for that story. Some might say that means he knows a thing or two about how to use the digital world to do important reporting.)

Then imagine how you might use "fast-moving video" or slide shows or Google mashups or mobile-phone content to create engaging reports. Just because it's "serious" doesn't mean it has to be reported in 4,000-word, text-only formats. Take a look at the Post's timeline, for crying out loud. Please don't tell me you couldn't come up with something more interactive, more engaging, something that would make people actually want to play with it. Of course you could. And their follow-the-money graphics. Very pretty. But come on people... totally static. With databases up the ying-yang these days, you could easily hook this up so that the reader could slice and dice the data in any way they chose.

The point is, when MSM folks dismiss online technologies as nothing more than the purview of gossips and dilettantes, they are missing the point: The brave new digital world is not the scourge of journalism. It is the savior. Online tools offer journalists the opportunity to do better investigative reporting and find those important stories and then to tell those stories in ways that draw readers in, rather than turning them off.

Photo courtesy of Alejandro the Great

Begging people to subscribe is not the answer

Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz laid out the unpleasant truths in a graduation speech at the Columbia J-School last week:

"I know journalists are often math averse, but I will throw out some statistics: minus 3.9; minus 5.1; minus 3.6; minus 4.4."

He continued:

"What are these numbers, you may ask? Perhaps you instinctively know. These numbers represent the percentage declines in circulation over the last six months for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune."

His solution?

"Here is your first assignment. No matter where you next land, no matter what you do, please, please subscribe immediately to a newspaper!"

Really?

It's thinking like this that continually convinces me that folks from the mainstream media are not going to be the ones to figure out the future of news. As any businessperson knows, you cannot ensure the viability of your product by begging people who are otherwise uninterested to buy it. Even worse by telling them they should buy it, that it's the morally responsible thing to do. You have to make your customers want your product.

Did Apple create a blockbuster music business by telling people, "You really should buy and listen to your music our way?" No, of course not. First, they took a look at prevailing conditions within the music industry that either weren't working for customers or could be done a lot better. Like: In order to get that one song you really liked, you had to buy a CD of 11 other songs that very well could be crap. To take your music on vacation, you had to cart around a large CD player and a bunch of CDs. To buy music, you had to physically go to a store--or buy a CD online and wait a few days for it to arrive by mail.

So why did the iPod and iTunes become instant successes? Become something customers wanted and flocked to in droves? Because it made the whole experience of buying and listening to music better. Just want that one song? Buy only it. Don't have room for all that crap? Look how small this device is. Want it now? You got it.

If mainstream newsfolks want to find the future of their business, they're going to have to stop whining about those horrible people who won't buy what they're selling and start thinking about how they can create something people actually will want.


Photo courtesy of dan taylor

Who Reads Dead Trees Anymore?

Who still reads the print edition of a newspaper? That's what Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review asked his readers a couple of days ago. The unscientific response?
-- 35% said they read no print edition
-- 38% said they read one
-- 16% said they read two

To best gauge the meaning of those numbers, Niles also asked respondents how many print newspapers they read 10 years ago. The answer:
-- Only 15% read no print edition
-- 32% read one
-- 31% read two

These numbers tell us what we already know: No matter how many of your New York-based friends insist that there will always be space for a print edition because they "love to read the newspaper on the subway to work," the dead tree editions are actually on their way out. In this unscientific survey, the number of people not getting their news in paper form went up 100% in a decade. Whether that's the scientific number doesn't matter. It's a good enough proxy for the trend. And with the way change happens, the one thing we can count on is that rate of people ditching the paper version is only going to speed up.

So what does this mean? Newspapers say they can't ditch their print editions because that's where they're making their advertising dollars. Fair enough. Keeping the print edition is fine for a short-term strategy. Ten years max. Maybe more like five. As for long-term planning, these numbers should only increase that fire under newspapers' collective tushes to figure out the future business models that will make online news delivery a profitable enterprise.

Photo courtesy of dweinberger