If you count Web traffic, newspapers are actually more popular than ever.
Many readers feel they no longer want to get their hands dirty reading the newspaper, but they are still viewing them online. But this raises the question, how many are uniques, and how many are duplicate readers who also check out the print edition?
Speaking for myself, if I have a print edition of a publication, I seek out the online version only if I'm going to blog about it (and thus want to indulge in some "fair use" snippets).
Still, the newspaper publishers aren't sure what to do about it.
"The harsh reality is, these advertisers are not necessarily looking for total coverage," he adds. "They have a demographic target. That's where the innovation is going to take place and that's where the hard work is."
Take The San Diego Union-Tribune. Using total audience, it reaches 66.3% of San Diego's designated market area. "We have discussed it," says Chris Jennewein, Internet operations director of SignOnSanDiego.com, referring to the total-audience metric. "But at this point, we list both circulation and readership on the print side and page views and unique users on the Internet side." The paper maintains separate sales staffs for print and online.
Although he's in favor of papers trying to combine their Web and print numbers, Jennewein says there are two different markets for print and online: "For most advertisers, it's too cutting-edge. I don't think the parameters have been established yet."
Even papers that have been compiling data to show total audience encounter problems when presenting this data to advertisers. Often, agencies and their clients aren't equipped to manage Web and print buys at the same time.
"The agency structure and the budget process is set up to look at each media individually," says Jason Klein, president and CEO of the Newspaper National Network (NNN). "By and large, this is a case where the sellers are out in front of the buyers."
What it seems like to me is that newspapers may have to go with web advertising strategies that are more like Adsense and less like their own ad sales departments. It's not so much that the sellers are out in front of the buyers as the technology is way ahead of the market. I also suspect that there's some snob-induced blindness going on that prevents the "old media" from seeing and understanding what the "new media" have been doing for some years now. (And it's not just in revenue models: the Cluetrain-less thinking extends to most newspaper websites as well.)
But for me, the real question is not whether the increasingly centralized newspaper industry is going to figure out how to maximize their cash flows -- after all, even with all this suffering, they're averaging some 20% in annual profit. That's a heckuva lot better than even most pharmaceutical conglomerates. What's more important is how the publishing corporations are squeezing their editorial departments, laying off workers and closing news departments even while making money hand over fist. As Michael Massing reports in the New York Review of Books:
It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when most papers went public, they had little trouble maintaining such levels. Many enjoyed a monopoly in their markets, and realtors, car dealers, and local stores had no choice except to advertise in them. The introduction of new printing technology helped to reduce labor costs and to shift power away from unions and toward management. But papers have since faced successive waves of new competition— first from TV, then from cable, and now from the Internet. Yet Wall Street continues to demand the same high profits.
In other words, while the newspapers will tell you that their problems are related to declining circulation, the real story -- the one they will not want to tell you -- is that they are still confused by the online world, and that they're being squeezed not by the bottom line but rather by the lofty profit desires of board executives.
Maybe it's not news that green visors and blue pencils don't mix well. But given the rather sad state of news publishing today, one hopes that someone will figure out how make it work. Because while independent media organizations continue to grow, nobody has the resources for in-depth reporting like the teams of experienced journalists and editors employed by the quality papers. And if the media executives continue to march their dinosaurs into the tar pits of unrealistic profit expectations, it could be a long while before there's anything like a viable "fourth estate" again in this country.
]]>If you count Web traffic, newspapers are actually more popular than ever.
Many readers feel they no longer want to get their hands dirty reading the newspaper, but they are still viewing them online. But this raises the question, how many are uniques, and how many are duplicate readers who also check out the print edition?
Speaking for myself, if I have a print edition of a publication, I seek out the online version only if I'm going to blog about it (and thus want to indulge in some "fair use" snippets).
Still, the newspaper publishers aren't sure what to do about it.
"The harsh reality is, these advertisers are not necessarily looking for total coverage," he adds. "They have a demographic target. That's where the innovation is going to take place and that's where the hard work is."
Take The San Diego Union-Tribune. Using total audience, it reaches 66.3% of San Diego's designated market area. "We have discussed it," says Chris Jennewein, Internet operations director of SignOnSanDiego.com, referring to the total-audience metric. "But at this point, we list both circulation and readership on the print side and page views and unique users on the Internet side." The paper maintains separate sales staffs for print and online.
Although he's in favor of papers trying to combine their Web and print numbers, Jennewein says there are two different markets for print and online: "For most advertisers, it's too cutting-edge. I don't think the parameters have been established yet."
Even papers that have been compiling data to show total audience encounter problems when presenting this data to advertisers. Often, agencies and their clients aren't equipped to manage Web and print buys at the same time.
"The agency structure and the budget process is set up to look at each media individually," says Jason Klein, president and CEO of the Newspaper National Network (NNN). "By and large, this is a case where the sellers are out in front of the buyers."
What it seems like to me is that newspapers may have to go with web advertising strategies that are more like Adsense and less like their own ad sales departments. It's not so much that the sellers are out in front of the buyers as the technology is way ahead of the market. I also suspect that there's some snob-induced blindness going on that prevents the "old media" from seeing and understanding what the "new media" have been doing for some years now. (And it's not just in revenue models: the Cluetrain-less thinking extends to most newspaper websites as well.)
But for me, the real question is not whether the increasingly centralized newspaper industry is going to figure out how to maximize their cash flows -- after all, even with all this suffering, they're averaging some 20% in annual profit. That's a heckuva lot better than even most pharmaceutical conglomerates. What's more important is how the publishing corporations are squeezing their editorial departments, laying off workers and closing news departments even while making money hand over fist. As Michael Massing reports in the New York Review of Books:
It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when most papers went public, they had little trouble maintaining such levels. Many enjoyed a monopoly in their markets, and realtors, car dealers, and local stores had no choice except to advertise in them. The introduction of new printing technology helped to reduce labor costs and to shift power away from unions and toward management. But papers have since faced successive waves of new competition— first from TV, then from cable, and now from the Internet. Yet Wall Street continues to demand the same high profits.
In other words, while the newspapers will tell you that their problems are related to declining circulation, the real story -- the one they will not want to tell you -- is that they are still confused by the online world, and that they're being squeezed not by the bottom line but rather by the lofty profit desires of board executives.
Maybe it's not news that green visors and blue pencils don't mix well. But given the rather sad state of news publishing today, one hopes that someone will figure out how make it work. Because while independent media organizations continue to grow, nobody has the resources for in-depth reporting like the teams of experienced journalists and editors employed by the quality papers. And if the media executives continue to march their dinosaurs into the tar pits of unrealistic profit expectations, it could be a long while before there's anything like a viable "fourth estate" again in this country.
]]>