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The Star Tribune Hears a Who
Saving journalism wonkfestapaloozas are bumping up against each other in our calendars. Can’t attend each and every one?; take in its webcast, live or archived! As Salon CEO Richard Gingras has sagely suggested: "The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news".
More »Last Man Standing? NYT and WSJ Move on Metro Markets
It's hard to gauge the impact of New York Times and Wall Street Journal moves into metro markets. They could be simple, print retention strategies aimed, at holding on to valuable print readers -- the magnets for still-lucrative print advertising -- for as long as possible.
Longer-term, it could be a Last Man Standing strategy, figuring that newspaper readers may well scale back their daily reading to a single paper, as they increasingly go digital. Or, it could be toehold, for an expanded digital strategy, adding local options to their national and global products.
So far, all indications are that the simplest explanation -- print retention, small amount of growth -- is the driving purpose. That makes sense: 85% of the overall revenues of these companies is still tied up in print. Give the readers another reason to pay a lot of money for the print sub, and you can hold on to more of them. The regional editions -- the Times in the Bay Area and Chicago and the Journal's announced one in San Francisco (and L.A. and Chicago, perhaps, as well) -- also give the papers better regional ad targeting, especially in categories like finance, technology and luxury.
More »Nine Questions: Glossy Chron, the Dow Jones Upsell, Chic in Chico and a Week Without the Tribune?
So the newspaper industry is taking a page from indie film ("A Day Without a Mexican"), dailies are hiring execs from the alternative press, and we're seeing new, almost-daily, mating rituals between older and newer news media.
What's going on? Nine questions to start:
More »New Circ Numbers Prove Newspaper Proposition: Less is Less
We knew that USA Today's early word of a circulation plunge -- 17%, announced by Gannett two weeks ago -- would probably be a sick canary in a dark coal mine.
Today's semi-annual circulation FAS-FAX numbers for U.S. dailies, though, are still breathtaking. On average, 10.6% down daily and 7.4% Sunday. That's on average, and largely twice as bad as the declines have been over the past four-plus years. Look at some of the individual results, and you understand why the New York Times just announced that it is taking another 100 jobs out of its newsroom and why other newsroom (and, of course, wider) cuts may increase -- not decrease -- as Wall Street indicates that an overall economic recovery will be a 2010 reality.
Daily, these losses, as examples:
More »NY Times Ups the Ante with SF Edition
Tired of playing defense and readying itself for offense, the New York Times’ formal announcement of its San Francisco “edition” this week shows us how a world is moving and how the Times and Wall Street Journal (which also will offer an SF edition soon) are taking their battle to a city near you.
More »Bay Area Online News Renaissance: 7 Pointers On the New Business of News
The Bay Area's online news scene is now popping, waking up from a prolonged period of somnolence, and pointing a way toward an online news renaissance across the country.
Friday, we got the official news that financier Warren Hellman's long-planned independent online news operation would get off the ground soon, with $5 million in initial funding, and partnerships with local public radio powerhouse KQED and the New York Times. Hellman says he'll be hiring "dozens of journalists." That news followed the huge success of California Watch's maiden voyage. California Watch, an initiative of the Oakland-based Center for Investigative Reporting. It saw more than two dozen news outlets -- including the state's top papers -- pick up its first big story on dubious homeland security spending, reaching almost two million readers in print and many more online.
Such activities mark a wakening of online journalism in the Bay Area, and I think hold many portents for what we will see in 2010. Certainly, what's happening here has parallels in other cities, but the rapidity of the announcements suggests that we're moving into a serious shift in who produces the news and how it gets to readers. Too early, to re-hang the News 2.0 shingle out -- that's been tried numerous times, but failed to stick -- but clearly something's happening here, and what it is is increasingly clear.
Before we look at seven pointers coming out of the announcements, let's recall the Bay Area context.
The San Francisco Bay Area's short online news history has been an odd one. We out here near the capital of the Left Coast like our reading and like our news. It's a highly educated place, and one that's a traditional great newspaper market, with income levels leading other metro areas. At one point, the San Jose Mercury News boasted the fattest classifieds sections in the country, and those profits helped launched Mercury Center, the first online news site in 1993.
Now more than 15 years later, the online news landscape in the Bay Area is a strange place.
Mercury Center, once a pioneer in the online technology coverage and other areas, is a humdrum newspaper site, with numbers to match. In September, 2009, users averaged 4 minutes, 42 seconds a month on the MercuryNews.com site.
SFGate, too, one was early out of the gate. Long independent of the paper San Francisco Chronicle, its found an audience, too, but not a huge one. In September, it averaged 7 minutes, 1 second per user.
Craigslist, Yelp, Yahoo, Google, Open Table and a host of others have gotten earlier and deeper traction in the Bay Area, inflicting deeper pain on those two newspapers' print editions and their websites than that experienced by peers across the nation. Meanwhile, their parent companies have been scrambling. Hearst has lost more than a quarter of a billion dollars on the Chronicle since it bought it in 2000, and MediaNews, which bought the Merc and put together the expanded Bay Area Newspaper Group in 2006, has narrowly averted default on the financing it used to grow the company.
Both companies have shed lots of expenses -- including hundreds of newsroom staffers -- over the last several years. In a recent Sunday front-page plea to readers for ideas on how to save the Merc, columnist Mike Cassidy reminded readers that the once-proud Merc had housed 400 journalists as recently as 2000, but is humbled to a staff of 125.
Twin the backdrop of failing metro dailies and these two start-ups, and we can see many strands of the soon-unfolding news tapestry. Here are seven for starters:
It's astounding how quickly the California Watch journalism attained legitimacy.
It's as if the journalism system that we knew has had a heart attack. It survives, but we're seeing new distribution vessels forming to replace those that withered.
Similarly, look, finally, for rapid change in the traditional wire services over the next couple of years. Parsing the value of the New York Times News Service in this shaken and stirring news marketplace, for instance, is a lot harder than it used to be.
There are tens of thousands of journalism students across the country. Appropriately paired with experienced journalists, think what they may be able to produce.