yelvington.com

Newspapers face three different, but interrelated, economic challenges.

One is the technology-driven restructuring of the news business, in which the Internet is a major force that is disintegrating the traditional product model. That's a very real long-term process. It's not the biggest immediate source of trouble, but it's a factor.

Two is an acute cyclical global economic crisis, brought about by widespread criminal practices in the U.S. mortgage-banking industry, which has knocked the legs out from under the traditional sources of advertising revenue: car dealers, real estate agents, businesses seeking to hire employees, and retailers seeking foot traffic in local stores. When your customers hurt, so do you.

Three is an ownership crisis that combines with the first two to set us up for disaster in 2009. Owners -- corporations, entrepreneurs -- borrowed heavily back in the days when banks were passing out cash like candy at a Christmas parade. They borrowed not to build toward an Internet future (which they should have done), but rather to grab more of the past by taking over other newspaper companies. And they borrowed against assumptions of obese profit margins that have been snatched away by points one and two.

If you don't understand the ownership crisis, Alan Mutter has a detailed explanation in the form of an analysis of Lee Enterprises, which is the poster child for this particular form of woe.

He writes:

While Lee is in a distinctly unpleasant position with respect to its shareholders and lenders, it is important to note that the business generated $207.2 million in operating profits last year on sales of a bit more than $1 billion. Its operating margin of 20.1% surpasses that of Exxon Mobil Corp., which generated a 19.1% margin in the last 12 months. And Lee’s profitability positively blows away Wal-Mart, the largest Fortune 500 company, whose margins were only 7.4% in the prior 12 months.

What? Lee Enterprises is profitable? Yes, it is -- until you count repayments of the $1.4 billion in debt it has on its books, much of it from buying the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at precisely the wrong moment in history. Read the ugly details.

Jeff Jarvis has started a good conversation with a post titled "Bad news, good news" at Buzzmachine. In response to a comment that "The problem with the Good News is that newspapers can’t translate an equal online readership into the same revenue as in print," I posted the note below, which cites the frequency-of-usage failure that I've mentioned on many previous occasions. Once again, I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem.

I have to differ with Dan Thornton. There is no equivalency in the online readership.

If there were, we might actually see equivalency in revenue.

The unique-user number is inflated BS calculated from counting cookies from a wandering global audience. It’s primarily useful for spreading fog at senior management meetings and issuing chest-beating and ultimately misleading press releases about how newspapers are extending their audience reach online.

It should never be compared to in-market commercially relevant print readership data.

The true number of in-market users who consume pages with enough frequency to be affected by an advertising campaign is distressingly low.

At the core, it’s not an advertising problem. Local businesses still need to reach potential local customers, and they’re willing (although certainly not eager) to pay for results.

It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience that’s breaking the newspaper business model.

That points the arrow back at the people who create the content. The 20th century content model isn’t working any more, regardless of whether it’s in print or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex by a modified laser beam.

If I were looking for good news, I’d be looking at the transition that many companies are making from single-product strategy to a portfolio/aggregation strategy. I’d be looking at the newspapers that are beginning to figure out behavioral targeting in a network context. I’d be looking for new newsrooms that are beginning to really grasp the breadth of their roles outside the simple 24×7 breaking-news concept.

I’d be looking for great examples of facilitating and leading productive conversations. I’d be looking for great examples of online resources and local-life tools built around actual needs (as opposed to technologies or existing info resources).

Every nine months or so, some mossback proclaims -- in print -- that newspapers would be just fine if they'd stop giving away their content on the Internet.

The latest is Stanford University journalism professor Joel Brinkley, who dishes out a mixture of bad reporting and wishful thinking in a Sunday op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, one of America's great failing newspapers.

Examples:

"Web advertising generally pays 10 cents for every $1 earned from print ads."

It's true that many (poorly performing) newspapers bring in 10 times as much revenue from print, but that completely misses what's actually happening in local marketplaces. Pure-play Internet companies are walking away with the local markets of poorly performing newspapers. Charging for access would destroy any chance a newspaper might have of competing with those pure plays. All the growth is in digital media.

"When the sites were regarded as technology curiosities, there was no thought of charging people to use them. By the time papers realized that they should be charging, it was too late."

False. The first online initiatives mounted by U.S. newspapers were all based on pay-for-access systems.

When the Web arrived, the first major response of the U.S. newspaper industry was to plan a unified pay-access online consortium. The original visionOne early vision for the New Century Network was for each participating newspaper to charge for access, and bundle into the deal a sort of library card system that would let you get news from every other participating newspaper as well.

Some newspapers even tried bundling newspaper content access with Internet access.

It didn't work. In science, this is called empirical data. When data contradicts your theory, guess which one wins?

"Several papers tried charging, but most backed off."

This is a non sequitur to the previous claim that "there was no thought of charging," but hey, everybody needs an editor.

It's true that several papers did try charging for access, and in nearly every case it's proved to be a bad idea. The single clear exception is the Wall Street Journal, whose subscription fees are nearly always covered as business expenses.

Rupert Murdoch, who can count money much more accurately than your typical journalist or journalism professor, has looked closely and declared WSJ's model pretty much a wash. It might make about the same money by dropping its user fees and opening up the site. Or not, depending on economic winds. Either way, it demonstrates that even if you have amazingly great content that readers can con their employers into paying for, the model just isn't a slam-dunk.

"Over the years, the Justice Department has issued numerous antitrust exemptions allowing two newspapers in a community to combine their business operations so both newsrooms could survive."

No, it was Congress that enabled the numerous exemptions, through the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. How's that working out for you? Not so well. I worked for one of those preserved-but-dead newspapers, so I know that from personal experience.

"Now, here's my idea: The newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. ... if most papers in a region - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example - began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe."

And if we put a tooth under our pillows, we'll raise enough money to bail the San Francisco Chronicle out of its million-dollar-a-week hole. This conclusion is based on what market research, exactly?

The truth about newspapers is that news is not, and never was, the real reason for home-delivered subscriptions. The real reason was entertainment. Even the act of reading the news was primarily an entertainment-seeking behavior. Gee, let's just go around and cut everybody's cable lines. And wrap the houses with tinfoil to keep out the radio signals. That'd save newspapers for sure.

A lot of journalists have suddenly discovered Twitter, which figured prominently in some coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks. And many are baffled. Here's my simple explanation of Twitter:

It's like a big caffeine party. Everybody's talking at once. Really fast.

But you have magic ears.

You only hear the people you want to listen to, and the people who are saying something directly to you. This gives you a great deal of control over the quality of what you hear. If someone is irritating and trivial, just quit listening to them.

There's more to the technology, of course, and there are nifty features like SMS interaction and hashtags and search. But the important thing is to focus on people and what they say. It's who you know, who you listen to, who listens to you, and what you talk about.

Another service, Pownce, arguably had better technology, and it failed. I've had a Pownce account for quite awhile. Never interacted with anybody. Ever. Again, it's about people and what they say.

If you're a reporter, then people and what they say can be a pretty valuable resource -- if they're the right people saying things you find useful on your beat. If not, Twitter won't do a thing for you (except maybe provide a distraction).

Why do people use Twitter in the first place? That's simple: Humans are genetically programmed to thrive on conversation. Even humans of the male variety. But each of us only wants to engage in conversation that we personally find useful or interesting. That's why those magic ears are so important.

When the Mumbai attacks began, people I know and follow started talking about it. Often they linked to search.twitter.com, a tool that makes it possible to follow topics by looking for key words. So I began listening for anything about Mumbai, and amid the chatter, speculation and outright noise, I also found eyewitness accounts and links to photos being uploaded to Flickr. So Twitter became a news source.

That doesn't mean Twitter replaces the thing we know as journalism. It's just another enrichment of the media landscape.

A lot of news organizations are beginning to figure out how to use Twitter both in gathering and disseminating information. So far, I haven't seen any blowhard print columnists ranting about tweeters in pajamas. Let's keep it that way.

(By the way, you can follow me as @yelvington).

When I mentioned the other day that our site management system has more than 30 content types, you might have reacted in one of two ways:

1. Why on earth so many content types?
2. What's a content type?

Let's take the second question first, for clarity's sake.

In the beginning of the Web, there was only one content type, and it was the document. Typically coded by hand, it was without predictable form and structure. You can't build and maintain big websites with hand-tooled HTML, so very quickly we moved to publishing tools. These tools combined content with standard layouts (templates).

If you've posted anything on a blog, you've done something like this:

Blog posts represent a very simple content type. Other purposes require more complex structures -- additional fields -- and different templates for displaying the result.

Drupal has something called the Content Construction Kit. It's actually a family consisting of a little core functionality and quite a few contributed modules that let you create new content types and add all sorts of interesting fields such as validated date fields, embedded media objects, et cetera.

OK, so the technology supports multiple content types. Back to the first question: Why on earth so many content types?

It's easy to see good reasons for news items to be structurally more complex than a simple blog post.

But we also have some types of content you probably wouldn't think about at first.

Wire stories are an interesting case. We're not loading an AP Online feed into Drupal. We already have a system in place to support AP, and it's not so broken that it needs fixing. But we do need to manage and display AP components in the Drupal environment. So we have Drupal's FeedAPI RSS aggregator pulling in headlines and summaries. If you click on an AP headline in Drupal, you're sent directly to the AP server. This required a special content type and a bit of template work.

Promos are another. Every news site manager struggles with competing demands for promotional slots on the homepage for special projects and services, advertising sections, contests, et cetera. So we created a special content type to manage that problem. We made it simple to attach an image that is automatically resized. All the promos go into a library, so they can be temporarily removed and reused later. On Jacksonville.com the promos are displayed in a Javascript-driven carousel throughout the site.

Other content includes special types for various video players, feeds from other technology and content partners, items aggregated from websites in the community, podcasts, cartoons, Soundslides shows, and Tweets. We pull in Twitter postings from @jaxdotcom.

Drupal also creates content types for internal purposes, such as representing user groups, webforms, etc.

Now, what about that editorial content type makes it so special? I'll go into that in my next post in this series.

In a comment yesterday, Ed Kohler raised some questions about timely vs. "stale news" that I thought I'd address by turning back to my theme of basic assumptions and assertions behind our site management system. Timeliness is right at the top of the list.

I've known all along that the online journalism has to be conducted in a world of "continuous now." The "continuous news desk" function was an assumption back in 1994 when we were building the first online services at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

Yet I still see a lot of systems built around antiquated concepts like "editions."

We're not going down that road at all. Continuous updating and instant publication have been a primary goal of this project since we started.

But there are barriers. Our newspaper newsrooms still rely on antiquated, print-centric systems for internal workflow as written copy passes through various stages of editing.

When it's ready for publication, a story can be immediately released to the Web -- but you have to be a bit patient, because it then passes through a bucket brigade of software and systems. Eventually it'll show up on the Web, but you'd better not hold your breath.

This sort of thing drives a lot of newsrooms to "fix" the problem by using blog software.

But that creates a silo of timely content that's never integrated back into the topical collections on the main site. At some newspapers, there's not even branding and ad positions on fresh news items.

In the course of this project, we've shortened and tightened and accelerated that path from the antique world to the Internet, but it's still a problem.

So here's a solution: you don't have to do it that way.

Since Drupal began its life as bloglike software, "post it right now" is a built-in feature. All you need is an account and the right permissions.

In our model, some content will still flow from the legacy system, but every reporter is expected to know how to post directly on the Web. This means stories can be filed immediately from anywhere, so long as you have a laptop (or a netbook) and an Internet connection.

Using Drupal's contributed family of Content Construction Kit modules, we've created more than 30 specialty content types for specific purposes. The basic "editorial node" is just one of those types, but it's a central and important one. (I'll talk about some of the others in a future post.)

Creating creating a story isn't much harder than simple blogging. Yet the "editorial node" type is a rich one, and when we run internal training sessions we can easily spend half an hour talking about its many possibilities.

We accommodate multiple photos, which are automatically displayed in a dynamic widget. Videos (we use Brightcove) are properly sized and embedded. If you indicate that the story is about a company with a stock symbol, the system embeds a little block linking to live ticker info. Are there related stories? Start typing the headline of one, and an Ajax-enhanced tool will dynamically look it up and create a bidirectional link. And so on.

But you don't have to do those things. Breaking news can be posted immediately in its simplest form, then updated, freshened, expanded and enhanced throughout the day. Since the system is database-driven and dynamic, updated items can be flagged (as you can see here in the top image).

Ultimately, technology isn't enough. Breaking news requires human beings to discover and tell the story. The best we can do with tools is make sure we've removed the barriers.

I've previously mentioned some of the assumptions and assertions behind the site management toolkit we're developing at Morris. One key assumption is that editors should be able to determine page layouts -- something that's just not possible with a lot of template-driven content management systems. Here's how we're making that work.

Editors begin by seeing the site pretty much as everyone else would.

But if you look closely -- and if you have the permissions that comes with an editor's role -- you see a series of tabs across the top of the main content area on the homepage.

When you click on the content tab, you get a layout dummy. This is accomplished using the Drupal contributed Panels module, written by Earl Miles.

Elements can be added, temporarily disabled (notice the ones that are darkened), dragged and dropped from cell to cell, and so forth. This makes it possible to easily relocate or replace components.

But it's not something that you should have to do in order to update and maintain a site throughout the workday. The actual components displayed on the page are dynamic blocks. Their are determined by applying business rules to the underlying data (stories, images, blog posts, etc.)

For example, one block might list half a dozen of the most recent AP national news stories, while another might feature a picture and headline from the story currently top-ranked by editors. When fresh content is available, the site can automatically change without human intervention.

These blocks are all defined and generated using another Drupal contributed module, Views. It's also written by Earl Miles, recently honored as Drupal MVP. Web producers can learn Views, but it's not something I'd want to have to teach to the copy desk.

A lot of the work that's been going on in Jacksonville over the last month or so has been the development of a library of these Views components and corresponding HTML template work to tailor their output.

This combination of Views, Blocks and Panels is used to manage not only the home page, but also major section fronts such as Sports, News and Interact.

But editors -- not Web geeks, but journalists -- also can create such pages from scratch. It's a straightforward process. You start out by selecting a layout grid from a library.

If you don't like any of the choices, you can also create a custom layout by specifying the number of rows, then the number of columns in each row, and the widths (in pixels or percentages). It's just a matter of filling out a form and no HTML is required.

The resulting grid then can be populated with blocks from the library, or arbitrary content blocks. If you create arbitrary content blocks, you're beginning to get into a requirement that you understand some HTML, but you're still insulated from the complexity of the complete page.

The page is automatically wrapped in the site's standard design, including the required advertising positions, navigation, and branding.

This makes it possible to quickly create topics pages or special presentations for complex major news stories.

Existing pages can be copied, reworked in a "private" mode until they're finished, and then swapped into the live positions. This makes it possible to have a really special homepage when it's time to publish a really special project.

I'll have some more detail on these tools in coming days.