If Newspapers Cease to Be, There Will be Two Causes of Death

Last month, there was all kinds of excitement about the recovery of American newspapers.  Share prices were up and both the Atlantic and the Economist wrote fluffy, happy pieces about the state of the industry and its future.

But print executives know otherwise.  They know because in Q1 they were still looking at a 10% decline in advertising revenue as the rest of the media are showing rosy Q1 improvements of 6% to 10% and more.  As Alan Mutter put it in a recent Newsosaur post: “Make no mistake: Newspapers are still in trouble.”

I often suspect that there is a creeping defeatism among news executives – almost an acceptance of the inevitability of the end of their industry.  How else could one explain their refusal to focus on the real factors that will make or break their businesses?

It’s not about bloggers vs. journalists, websites vs. apps, advertising revenue vs. pay walls, Google News vs. copyright laws.  Those issues are merely distractions and continued focus on them is preventing the real issues from being addressed.

If news organizations cease to be, there will be two causes of death:

Cause of Death #1: Failure to recognize the necessity of Community

Ask someone under 30 what websites they visit first thing in the morning.  They’ll list a number of social networking and aggregation sites.  Most of them don’t actually visit media sites at all.  Rather, they’ve come to know that “If the news is important, it will find me”.  And, they’re unlikely to outgrow this behaviour.  That’s why according to Compete, Facebook now beats Google as a referral site to large portals such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

Social media is a media site’s new best friend.  In fact, a recent Hitwise study revealed that over 75% of Facebook referrals will return to print and broadcast media sites in the same week.  Twitter is the fastest growing video referrer and it’s users watch a stream for 63% longer than a Google user.

65 million Facebook users “like” something everyday.  Typepad bloggers who installed the Facebook “like” button have experienced a 50% increase in referral traffic.  (Just installed mine, I’ll let you know how it goes)

Why is social media so powerful?

Two reasons.  Trust: we don’t send our friends crap to read.  Relevance: we’re more likely to have common interests with our social network and therefore our links are more likely to be relevant.

Ah, trust and relevance.  Sound familiar? 

If a newspaper’s job is to reflect, affect and connect the community it serves, trust and relevance are what get the job done.  It’s amazing to me how at this time, with more tools available than ever to fulfill these objectives, newspapers are turning away from what made them great brands in the first place.  By refusing to listen to and engage their readers by ignoring social media, limiting comments and erecting pay walls, they are destroying trust and hastening their irrelevance.  

They are destroying the core, not protecting it.

It’s time to embrace the community.

Every section, every beat and every neighbourhood should have a community manager.  That’s a real human being, not an RSS Twitter feed with headlines.

Washington DC’s much anticipated and soon-to-launch local news site TBD.com already has 6 busy community managers.  That’s more than 10% of the total editorial team.

Media companies need to do three things: listen, listen, listen.   Who’s out there? What Facebook groups, Flickr groups, blogs and Twitter accounts already exist?  What are people saying?  Who’s leading the discussion?  What are their concerns and passions?

Listening has never been easier.  Start a TweetDeck to find all Tweets relevant to specific areas of interest.  RetweetRank will help determine the impact of existing Twitter feeds.  Twitrratr will reveal if events, people or topics are being mentioned negatively or positively.  Backtweets will help find who’s linking to the main site.

Community managers can quickly become community leaders if they engage bloggers, commenters, tweeters and Facebookers.  They need to follow influencers and people who frequently tweet on a particular topic, retweet them and then provide them with a rich mix of links (from the main site and from around the web), updates and commentary.

The Guardian isn’t wasting time worrying about whether or not bloggers are journalists or if they’re stealing content.  They’re making full text articles available to them.  That’s right, full text.  The genius bit is that the articles have ads embedded in them.  The Guardian is harnessing the power of social media to extend its reach for advertisers.

Besides distributing content, users can be drawn back to the main site with links, comments, graphics, photo galleries, polls, contests and invitations for user submissions.  Smart and frequent commenters can be invited to write an editorial.  Flickr galleries can be created for each neighbourhood and event.

Users should be encouraged to suggest stories and investigations and reporters should be assigned.  This is the philosophy behind Toronto start-up Openfile.

And for God sake, when users talk to them, community managers need to talk back!

That’s how to become relevant.  That’s how to build trust.  Hell, it might even improve the core product.

And here’s the best part.  Community drives engagement.  Engagement drives ROI for advertisers.

Which brings me to Cause of Death #2: Failure to focus on ROI.  I’ll cover that in my next post.

Comments

[Stevebuttry]

Excellent analysis of the challenge (and opportunity) facing news organizations, Judy. And thanks for the flattering mention of TBD.

I'll clarify one point, though. We chose to follow Civil Beat in using the term community "host," rather than "manager." The community doesn't need or want managing. But we believe it will respond well to someone hospitable who welcomes people, facilitates conversation and tends to the community's needs. We think that view of the community role will help us build and deliver greater trust and relevance.

[Howardowens]

Don't blame publishers. Blame newsrooms. When you can't even get reporters to read and respond to comments on their own stories, how do you expect newsrooms to embrace social media?

I've been advocating building community around news for a decade. I was just pissing in the wind. Newsroom people listened politely and then went right back to their "we report-you read" mindset.

The mindshift that needs to take place won't happen in today's newsrooms. It will only happen in start up orgs that are built from the ground up as hubs of community conversation.

In my experience, btw, publishers and executives (especially the bigger their area of responsibility) are acutely aware and clued into the kind of strategic changes that need to take place. They get blocked and frustrated by newsroom staffs.

[Stevebuttry]

Our experience differs, Howard. I see as much resistance at the executive level as I do in the newsroom. Journalists as individuals and newsrooms as organizations (and executives and broader orgs, for that matter) in my experience run the gamut covering all these attitudes (and probably more):
1. Embracing communities (and other changes) and making significant progress toward meaningful change.
2. Eager and trying hard to change but facing obstacles (and usually giving up too easily).
3. Willing but unsure what to do, lots of earnest spinning of wheels.
4. Curmudgeonly resistance.

[Judy Sims]

Thanks for your comments Howard and Steve. I've found that for the most part, neither editorial or executive staff even understand what it really means to engage a community. Their resistance is more in the form of willful ignorance.

[Stuart Thomson]

I found the tone and the substance of the Atlantic piece more convincing (which was less fluffy, happy and more of a battle cry, in my view).

There's a fundamental problem with relying on Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter as news sources or aggregation tools: they're not going to pay you AND they're closed systems. They are happy to let users contribute free content, but it's not going to go much farther than that. And ad clicks aren't paying the bills yet for most folks.

The Atlantic piece pins some hopes on Google because they understand the value of content and they rely on it to survive. It's important to point out that I can go down to the new stand and pick up a Financial Times for four bucks, the Sunday NY Times for six, The Citizen for a dollar or I can grab the free transit rag at the bus stop.

I'm fully aware of the value differential here. I pay six dollars to get a ton of amazing content from some amazing writers. For free, I get a sparse, ad-ridden amalgam of wire service stories. And there's options in between.

I hope the web will work the same way. As the browser becomes less relevant maybe people will be viewing news in a customized application that selects content based on the packages they subscribe to. I could pay for the "Ottawa" package which allows me access to the Ottawa Sun, the Citizen and some freebie stories from across Canada.

Or I could get the barebones "basic cable" package will allows me top stories for free. But if I want that in-depth Dexter Filkins piece from Afghanistan that will make me look like a smarty pants to my friends, well, I'll have to pay for it.

I don't think it should be an act of heresy to propose that we find a way to make purchasing content palatable to readers.

This is just one wild guess, and it's important to stress that there will be a million different attempts to monetize online content and many will fail. I imagine some content will stay free and some will cost money (just like how print works now).

But I'd love to see how "engage the community" is a business plan, and I hope that is covered in your next post. It's great that the Guardian has ads in blogs now, but is that going to cover even a tiny portion of their expenses?

Right now, I pay $90 every 3 months to subscribe to the Ottawa Citizen AND I still see loads of ads in the paper, along with a treesworth of fliers. Advertising folks are still stuck in limbo between the web and print so the money definitely isn't on the web to run a newsroom.

I love Openfile and I love the idea of engaging the community (and this should be the mission of ANY news organization, web-based or not), but I just don't know where the money will come from. I'm genuinely scared for a world where the New York Times, and others, can't afford to run a bureau in war zones. Or can't afford investigations that have a serious public interest.

I worry that this is being forgotten in the hyper-local proposals. Sure, I care about my community, but I also care about world news and the wars that Canadians are involved in.

Sorry to post a long screed on your blog, but I think this is a valuable conversation. Lots of voice, lots of ideas, can only be a good thing.

[Adrienne Connell]

Great post! Every media outlet should make Community a priority and assign Community Managers (or Hosts which I agree is a better term) to engage with their audiences across digital channels.

And considering tools like Radian6 or Sysomos make real-time conversation monitoring and community participation so smooth it's almost shameful that newspapers don't invest in these. Instead they likely continue to invest in less useful feedback tools like on-site surveys and focus groups. Who cares! That data is already old!