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Mon. Mar 26, 2007

The Plight of Newspapers

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about the plight of newspapers in general, brought about in part by troubles at the San Francisco Chronicle. Tim O’Reilly writes: “Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent ‘emergency meeting’ that the news business is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.’ (‘And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.’) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.”

Our local newspaper is going through “the change” as well, as detailed in this Memo to Atlanta Journal-Constitution staffers. They’ve made buyout offers to employees who are over 55 years old (because at that age they can’t possibly understand the Internet, I suppose), and have some super-duper plan about which they say: “Online, we will show that we know Atlanta best, providing superlative news and information and becoming the preferred medium for connecting local communities.”

This, from a web site whose home page is a glaring mess (and at times, 404 – File Not Found), and whose article pages have a effective lifetime of about two weeks.

When I visit the AJC.com home page, first I wait for it to load fully. This takes a moment, as that home page is currently a full half a megabyte (about a 4 second load over DSL, close to two minutes over a 56k modem). The actual text you read is 21 KB out of that 500 KB total. Then there’s 233 KB of images, and 245 KB of scripts, objects, and style sheets. Content ratio? 4.2% text you actually read, 95.8% presentation, ads, and other stuff.

Once the page finally loads, I zap it. Please, do yourself a favor, go to that page and drag that bookmarklet to your browser bar. There are so many news sites where that is the first thing I do, simply in order to make the page readable. The zap bookmarklet eliminates flashing dancing graphics that are a usability nightmare to anyone trying to read content, cancels scripts like the annoying 3-section content dance at the top of the AJC home page, as well as placing the content as black text on a white page.

You know, in case anyone wanted to actually read it.

It’s not just the AJC, I’d estimate I use the zap bookmarklet at 90% of the news sites I visit. I do it out of self-defense, not because I hate ads. It’s almost as if, in an industry that depends on eyes reading text, they want to make that simple task as difficult as possible.

But as you look deeper into the AJC home page, it’s obvious there are individual people working there who care and are trying their hardest. The XHTML/CSS code for the home page is mostly very clean, and clearly done by a person or persons who know what they are doing. But you can build a structurally sound house for owners who will then fill it with their ugly unsound crap.

The problems at the AJC, and in the newspaper business in general, come from further up the chain. In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet and its related technology has been massively disruptive in a multitude of industries. In many if not most of these industries, for a long time The Powers That Be have tried to convince themselves that nothing has really changed and resist any adaptation to new realities. To the point that some of these industries are now nearing collapse, or can see it on the horizon … and suddenly are willing to change to survive.

The question becomes … is it too late? Are these “Powers That Be” nimble enough to bring about effective change after resisting it for so long? Tim O’Reilly asks, “If your local newspaper were to go out of business, would you miss it? What kinds of jobs that current newspapers do would go undone?”

And in my opinion that question also bring focus to what newspapers need to do to survive. Like the 6:30pm network news, your local paper once had to be everything. It was what there was. No longer. We can get news from thousands of sources, 24 hours a day. Newspapers need to refocus on what they can offer that others don’t.

A little over ten years ago, I used to buy and read the AJC every day. It was one of my two primary news sources, the other being TV news. Today, I have over a dozen “primary news sources,” and I no longer buy the paper. I visit their web site.

And by the time I get there, I already know what’s going on in Iraq. And Washington, DC. I will therefore skip right by every national or international story, especially since they are mostly wire service reports, not reporting original to the AJC. I’m looking for what’s going on in Atlanta and Georgia.

And that is the first difficult realization newspapers should accept and act upon. They should no longer waste an ounce of their resources or a drop of their ink on national and international stories … unless they have a local angle. Those “World-In-Brief” columns that have five stories about a world event described in two to three paragraphs are a sad satire of the concept of “news.” They are a waste of ink and resources.

Meanwhile, the AJC has done an admirable job of embedding with and reporting on Georgia National Guard units that have deployed to Iraq. That’s how they should cover Iraq. Showdown in Congress over executive privilege? If you can’t do a story that reports what Georgia’s Senators and Representatives have to say about it, you don’t have a story. You’ve got a wire report I can get anywhere.

Where is the newspaper bold enough to say this? “We know you get your news from many places today. We’re not going to duplicate that. Our newspaper may get smaller as a result. But we are going to give you stories about your area you can’t get anywhere else. And that’s all we’re going to do.”

Serve only the niche that no one else can. That would be an admittedly stark position for a newspaper to take. But it’s the ground they have left. And sadly, it’s only half the battle. And the other half of the battle is the second half of what we currently call this “thing”; a “newspaper.”

The industry has to face what I’m sure they consider a horrible fact; delivering timely news via ink placed on paper is a doomed technology. It is simply a matter of time. Their subscription rates already show that. It may be fifteen years, it may be twenty five, but there will come a time when news printed on paper will be looked upon in the way we now look at music placed on round petroleum byproducts (vinyl records), or images recorded on a complex chemical structure layered on rolled acetate (35mm film); a quaint anachronism from an earlier more primitive time.

Sure, in the future we may read our news on some form of “electronic paper,” that changes text on command, and is newly downloaded as it is updated. But it will be delivered electronically over the Internet. It will, in effect, be a web site rendered in a more portable form.

Might as well get started on the future today. And the problem there is that most newspapers don’t really seem to understand the web, if you judge by their archiving habits. The vast majority of web pages that newspapers put on their site are “live” at that URL for a matter of seven to twenty one days. Then, they disappear, as if they’d never existed.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago, with regards to the New York Times: “like it or not, if you don’t exist in Google, you might as well not exist on the web. Not if you want to be a Big Boy. If you can’t be easily linked, you’re not on the web. If you close your doors to all but subscribers, you’re not just killing trees any more, you’re killing electrons.”

If you put a page on the web, and either someone links it, or a visitor bookmarks it, they expect it to remain there. It’s the way the web works. It’s the way people find things on the web. Like your newspaper. And the fact is that those pages I mentioned that simply “disappear” from the web often do still exist. Behind a paid firewall, where previous links or bookmarks generate a page asking for money to view the content.

Which brought me to my second article about the New York Times, in which I asked, “But I have a more basic question: doesn’t a newspaper create value with news? The present, not the past? What is the value of month old news? What is the point in trying to sell it?”

In other words, those newspapers who want to use a subscription model on the web need to completely invert their current process. Sell the news, not the olds. Right now I can have paginated dead trees delivered to my front door seven days a week by the AJC for $120 per year. Save your pulp, save your ink, save your gas on delivery, and charge me $49.95 per year for a digital subscription.

Offer me enough compelling content about Atlanta and Georgia, and I’ll pay it gladly, as I did a decade or more ago for your paper product. But, Reid, you might ask, how will you know they actually have this compelling content worthy of your money if their daily output is behind that paid firewall?

Make your front page your demo. Today is March 26. If I go to the AJC site, I should see the full news and freely linked articles for … March 19. And at the top, a big bold text ad that says “Tired of week old news? Become a subscriber today!“

People come to your site and see your full content … for one week ago. Google and other search engine spiders come to your home page, and index that week old content that you’ve just released from behind your paid firewall. And if you were really smart, you released the same URL at which it existed behind the firewall, or offer a permanent redirect, so that your paid subscribers who link or bookmark that page know that it will always be there.

Want one example of why? Let’s take the biggest news story in Atlanta in the past six months, the shooting of an elderly woman by Atlanta narcotics officers. If you search her name, Kathryn Johnston, the AJC is nowhere to be found. Heck, my own measly site has a return on page 4. The AJC? They simply don’t exist on that story, not according to Google.

That’s not how you become a part of the web, that’s how you directly avoid it by your own actions. Instead, you should place scads of compelling and unique content online, and keep it there so people can find it via specific searches. You place ads on those pages and make money from them. Forever. Not just seven to twenty one days.

You forget the old ways that no longer work due to that Darn Disruptive Internet. And instead of fighting it, you learn how to ride it.

Or die.