Media Is Thriving, Media Owners… Not So Much

“For all the apocalyptic news about newspapers, there’s a distinction worth making: Newspaper owners are far more endangered than the medium itself.”

via MediaWorks.

It’s important to realize that media is booming right now. What’s broken is the system where crusty old men take the piles of cash they already had and make more piles from printing and distributing media. Of course part of the fallout here is that most of the media that’s being made right now doesn’t make any money. That will change. Nobody said reinventing the wheel would be easy.

Aric Mayer has a good recap of the publishing crisis (here) where you can clearly see how the decision publishers made to put all their eggs in the advertising basket is now going to cost them dearly. After all those years of watering down their product to attract a more general audience, lowering the subscription rate to boost numbers and producing pathetic advertiser friendly content it seems that most magazines not only no longer have loyal readers but now the advertisers are gone too.

If that’s not enough, in what amounts to a perfect storm for publishing all these laid off editors, writers and photographers will be creating original content with their free time:
Web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists– Media Shift

The tide will be turning quickly for small, independent, efficient content producers. The first bit of good news comes from Advertising Age (here):

“In the past several months, there has been increasing evidence that the most easily measured metric on the web, the click, is not the right metric to use for many advertisers. And that’s good news for publishers struggling to monetize their content with online ads.”

With the news that San Francisco will soon be without a major daily newspaper (here) some see a smoldering crater, I see thousands of tiny saplings starting to take root.

NY Times Article Skimmer

This new article skimmer for the NY Times is pretty sweet (here). They could improve the thing 1000% if they just added original photography to each of the story excerpts. I don’t actually expect them to value photography above headlines and text (it’s still the NY Times after all), but someone out there will finally wake up and realize that photography is the fastest way to communicate online.

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Magazines Try To Save Newspapers

Time Magazine’s former managing editor, Walter Isaacson wrote a heroic hail-mary cover story a week or two ago (here) endorsing a system of micro payments for journalism in an attempt to bridge that fast approaching cliff.

I like a couple of the ideas he brings up, namely clicking buttons to make payments instead of entering credit card information and charging micro payments to access day, week, month, year and lifetime subscriptions to media organizations.

Eventually there will be a brilliant solution hammered out (hammered as in media organizations are going to endure a serious ass whupping first). This quote says it best: “driving revenue while trying to re-invent a business model is a difficult thing to do, it’s like changing the tires on a moving truck.” Found that in the comments of a foliomag.com story.

I have several thoughts to contribute:

1. The monopoly is over. The cost of delivering advertising to to consumers along with words and pictures is now nearly zero. Advertisers paid whatever you told them to pay because the delivery method was expensive and complicated. Nobody gives a rats ass if the billionaire owners go somewhere else. Turning journalism into a break even industry is perfectly fine with editors, writers and photographers. I could go on and on about the decisions that are made by owners that put advertising and attracting easy readers first. My reasons for not reading Time Magazine anymore is certainly tied to their attempts to attract more readers (to serve to advertisers) at the expense of the quality of the product.

2. The cost to deliver the exact same product electronically should be a fraction of the printed version (I’m thinking 1/10th). If you’d like to buy me a computer (or other hand held delivery device) and pay my ISP bill each month then I’ll agree to the normal cost. Otherwise pass the savings I just gave you back to me.

3. Get off your high fucking horse. You’re no longer in control of the flow of information. Your sources have blogs, your readers have tweets and stories don’t end once you hit the publish button. Participation is mandatory.

There’s plenty of good punditry to read as well:

By Mark Fitzgerald, Editor and Publisher:

… Time itself looks more in need of saving than even newspapers that symbolize the industry’s troubles, like the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times, both of which dropped pretty hefty packages on my doorstep Sunday.

By E&P’s count Time sold all of 14 pages of ads in the slim issue. Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design puts it nicely at his blog with a trenchant piece that is far more worthy to be at the center of industry debate than Isaacson’s sort of obvious observations: “But its ‘Modest Proposal’ is delivered in a form that is remarkably modest itself — its 56 pages are barely thick enough to shim a coffee table, let alone support an entire industry.”

Bill Wyman on Hitsville:

But papers didn’t make money from subscriptions; the price basically covered the cost of getting multi-pounds of newsprint delivered to your door at 5 a.m.

… the more I think about it, the biggest problem the press has is that the evaporation of advertising has meant that the news it publishes has to stand on its own two feet.

Sure, back in the day there was some foreign news, some local reporting, some great reporters and editors sprinkled across the country. But let’s face it, most newspapers sucked in all sorts of ways, and one of the main ways was opting toward blandness and timidity wherever possible, as as not to offend the older folks subscribing to the papers.

Mark Hamilton on Notes From A Teacher:

So this is where my belief that micropayments offer at least a partial solution to the who-will-pay-for-the-news question runs up against cold reality. If you accept my idea of the three stumbling blocks, we need to devise a system that (1) allows for single registration for everything, (2) opens up the pot to everyone creating media with potential value, and (3) puts the user in control of establishing the value.

Mike Masnick on Tech Dirt:

… a piece by James Warren in The Atlantic, which you would hope would be a bit more intellectual — but instead makes the same old errors. Warren seems to imply that investigative journalism can only be done by newspaper reporters — apparently not realizing that the investigative reporting he’s talking about is a very new concept, rather than true “traditional journalism.”

Michael Turro, In Plain Sight:

newspapers cannot be saved. They are big bloated, convoluted corporate anachronisms that derive their strength and power from an economic model of news information that is in rapid and steep decline. These corporate entities were built and grew powerful in an age when new information was remote, precious, scarce, capital.

That age is over.

Today fresh information is immediate, cheap, abundant, available. News happens and is distributed in real time – worldwide – before lumbering outfits like the New York Times even have a chance to think up a catchy headline.

Finally Walter Isaacson on The Daily Show:

And finally the World Press Photo of the Year Award goes to Anthony Suau from a series of pictures he shot under contract for Time Magazine but they refused to print (story on PDN).

Rodale Publishes Nearly Up To Date Back Issues on Google

Looks like Rodale has some sort of partnership going with google or maybe they’re just giving in to the inevitable and allowing the scanning of all but the latest issues of the magazine. I found all these titles with the last 3 years of back issues available up to the November or December 2008 issue: Best Life, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Bicycling, Prevention, Organic Gardening, Mountain Bike Magazine, Running Times and Runners World.

It’s somewhat ironic that a company with a stable of magazines that rely on dispensing the same advice year after year (how to get 6 pack abs!) would be the first to enter that information into a permanent database where anyone can look up content.

I’m not sure how the rights are going to be handled with this if at all. Publishers are already barred from selling the content to online databases (according to this) without renegotiation of the rights so I guess giving it away is the only way it can be done without paying extra. So, why is Rodale doing this? My only guess would be, to snag potential readers who might stumble on the content and discover they like it, but would rather have it delivered in the usual format.

rodale-cover-view

best-life

Best Photobooks of 2008

Photo-eye has a cool interactive list where you can checkout top 10 lists from 17 different people (here) which I discovered on the blog MAO (Modern Art Obsession) and that’s where I discovered the best name I’ve ever seen for a book: “God Spoiled a Perfect Asshole When He Put Teeth in Yer Mouth.” by Dash Snow. Peres Projects.

Just Slap Something Between The Ads

“The daily newspaper was a centerpiece of the community; it was how community information was distributed.

Eventually the newspaper was sold. It was no longer a point of civic pride for its owners or a cohesive center point of happenings, involvement and community. It was now an investment.

Along with the other media outlets bought and sold through the years a thirty percent profit was a common mandate. As other sources for information became more popular the circulation began to decline and cuts where made.

The more cuts and consolidations made by the owners, the more the circulation dropped. New owners would offer false hope for their investments, but ultimately shareholders demanded the mandated profits. Reinvestment, other than the occasional redesign, was rare.

Local columns, features and news would be scaled back and replaced with homogenized, syndicated columns, features and entertainment. Circulation continued to drop.”

Read more at NewMediaPhotographer.com

Journalism Will Survive The Death Of Its Institutions

I got that headline from a MediaShift story written by Lisa Williams (here) and it was mentioned in the This Week in Media podcast I was listening to yesterday. It was a special edition of the show devoted entirely to journalism and some excellent point were made so I thought I’d share it with you.

You can listen here:
[audio:http://plain-glass.flywheelsites.com/wp-content/audio/twim_116_aud.mp3]

Or download (here).

Take our business, please! We’re throwing in the towel!

Simon Dumenco of AdAge delivers the keynote this holiday season:

“That big publishers can’t manage to sell enough print ads, in a post-print media economy shadowed by a larger economic meltdown, is not exactly shocking. What is shocking, though, is that they’re essentially saying to scrappier, upstart online competitors: Take our business, please! We’re throwing in the towel! If we can’t play by the old rules of publishing — the profit-soaked, imperial model with endless layers of coddled management ensconced in luxe trophy offices — then we don’t want to play at all!”

“I’m just asking: Are you willing to radically adjust your business model precisely because you still believe in the act of publishing?”

“And when I say ‘radically adjust your business model,’ I don’t mean radically amputating so the patient bleeds to death faster. I don’t mean cutting all the front-line content producers — the editors and writers and art staffers who don’t make million-dollar-plus salaries — in great brutal rolling waves so that soon you’ll be unable to produce any content anymore. I don’t mean changing your business purpose from editorial brand building to, basically, editorial brand hospice care — abusive, inadequate hospice care at that.”

Read it all (here).

Why A Magazine Is Like A Record

I know some people can’t stand the comparison between the media industry and the music industry and it’s been pointed out that the history of the recording industry and the way consumers use music prevent direct comparisons but follow me for a second on this one.

There used to be two basic types of buyers for records. The core buyer is someone who will consume anything the artist puts out and will listen to every single track of a record over and over. Then there’s the casual buyer who likes one or two songs on the record but is forced to buy the whole thing because that’s the only way to listen to those one or two songs.

Magazines are the same way. Some are bought by people who will read cover to cover and back again (I remember reading the ads in Powder Magazine when I was obsessed with skiing because I’d already read every last caption and sidebar and it was still 29 days till the next issue came out) and some are bought by people who wanted to read one or two stories but still had to buy the whole magazine to do it.

So, then the internet came along and the distribution for music suddenly got easier and that one song you wanted to listen to but didn’t want to be forced into buying the whole album for was suddenly easy to find and download for free at first and now for 99 cents or less. It’s interesting to note that a common practice in the recording industry was to make a couple hit songs with a producer to trick consumers into buying the whole album.

When are magazines going to finally figure this out? People who used to read one story per issue now read none, because a comparable story can be found online for free. Advertisers seem to have already figured out that most people aren’t reading the entire magazine.

But, here’s the rub in the whole deal. An album of music used to be worth $12 and now it’s worth $1 or $2 to some people and $12 to others. It’s possible that still adds up to whatever amount you would have made previously if the $1 or $2 purchases are ten times what they would have been because you brought in people who were reluctant to buy the whole album for one or two songs. But, it’s entirely possible the profits are 1/12 of what they used to be.

None of us care if you make one million dollars instead of twelve next year but you’d better realize pretty quick that people aren’t buying into the packaging anymore and all shit you stuff in there for advertisers because pretty soon it’s going to be zero. The future of magazines is producing singles.

A Call For Change In The Publishing Industry

It’s time for change in the publishing industry.

There could not be a better time for change in the publishing industry. On the eve of new leadership for America, magazine publishers need to pull their collective heads out of their asses and stop hacking away at the quality of products they produce (and the spirit of those that produce them) and start leading this industry in a new direction.

After announcing a restructuring of their magazines and a staff cuts Anne Moore CEO of Time Inc. told publishers at a circulation conference that Time Inc.’s decision to reorganize had “nothing to do with digital and one hundred percent to do with the recession” (here).

Really Anne? Yes, advertisers are leaving because of the recession but they are also leaving because the product you produce no longer works for them, because there are new and exciting opportunities online and because you keep hacking away at the staff, frequency, page count, trim size and contributors until what’s left is not worth what you are charging. Was it ever worth what you charged them? You’ve certainly made millions off advertising to your readers but I think we’re about to find out if that was a fair deal for everyone.

This AdAge article (here) presents two scenarios for the next five years. Either, top tier magazines that somehow find a way to survive will reap huge returns when the recession ends or advertisers that are leaving now will never come back again. Without a doubt I know all the publishers are betting the former and I think they are all completely wrong.

There are two monumental changes in our industry:

1. The balance of power has gone to the consumers, contributors and even *gasp* your employees who can create, distribute and use content online practically for free.

2. The web allows you to save millions of dollars in creation and distribution costs.

Yet, I feel like many people in publishing think they’re not monumental. If a magazine is anything it’s a very expensive and complicated way to package and deliver content. Suddenly this takes zero effort and publishers are all standing around scratching their heads screaming how will we make money off this.

The changeover to the digital use and distribution of your content is going to be a mess, a complete mess, but without significant investment from existing publishers you will see your market share dwindle and eventually disappear completely. There’s nothing wrong with this really, it happens when the market changes and companies don’t see that hairpin turn in the road and just drive straight off the cliff. I’m sure there are many who will not be one bit sad to see the demise of a few publishers out there who don’t treat their employees or contributors very well.

Here are my 5 easy steps to making the transition to a new media economy:

1. Plow all of your profits back into the your company. Then get into the savings account an grab some of the profits from the 90’s when you were getting obscenely rich off your advertisers and plow some of that back into the product. Use it to make mistakes.

2. Gather all the employees you were about to fire because they don’t fit in so well with your organization or because they are too green to have mastered traditional publishing and give them promotions. Put them in charge. Gather all the people you’ve trained to say no to change and yes to whatever you say is good and fire them (ok I know this will mean there is nobody left in accounting and IT so keep a few of them around but maybe go for the junior ones).

3. Now, add staff and make everyone spend half the day doing traditional print work and half the day working on the online thing (it’s not a magazine). Make sure they try lots of crazy ideas and make lots of mistakes.

4. Invest in your contributors. You spend a tiny fraction of your production costs on the contributors yet the product without them is worthless. If you don’t start building some loyalty with your content creators they will leave you when a better deal comes along.

5. Photography is the key. Figure out how to use it. Video online is TV. We already know that works. Text online is, well, it’s great to read at a certain length but you know, it’s always going to work better printed. Photography is the perfect medium for communication online.

Change or die. It’s up to you.

ImageSpan May Change Stock Photography Forever

Whats the biggest problem facing stock photography today? Is it finding pictures or is it licensing pictures? For a certain group of clients and buyers it’s finding pictures that meet a specific criteria, which inevitably includes a level of trust that the image appears nowhere else and that the model release is solid. That market is fixed and declining so I believe the potential for growth lies in easier licensing of images. That way you can license to consumers, to people who have no clue how to do it and to people who steal images. This is where the potential exists (story here) and this is where image span has taken a step in the right direction with their license stream software (here). They allow you to attach licensing to an image and publish it anywhere. You can even publish it straight into google from their dashboard.

In the words of CEO Iain Scholnick, “Image Span hopes to do for digital content what credit card companies do for physical content. Make it easy to buy.” They even take a credit card like five percent of the transaction. Now, buying images with credit cards is not an original idea and two recent high profile failures in the industry, that were geared towards selling the pictures of any photographer around should be enough to tell you it’s a tough market to crack. Ian told me the problem with their licensing was that humans were doing the transactions. The solution is to automate it. I can certainly see how the future of stock photography is about buyers clicking on images and making instant purchases with instant delivery. But, for me it’s about the ability to distribute the content in new ways. On google, blogs and even the NY Times website. When photography travels with it’s own license the potential is endless.

Sounds pretty sweet right. You attach licenses to your images and scatter them around the internet and when people want to use them they click and make a purchase. Well, here’s where it becomes real interesting because they announced a new development today called content tracker (press release here). The images you want to license can now also be tracked and when they appear in unlicensed uses you will be notified. I was told by Ian that they create a digital fingerprint of the image from the ones and zeros and that makes it impossible to crop the tracking out. They even have one click notifications that you can send to the offending party to ask them to license, remove or properly credit the use. This closes the loop on publishing images online because it allows you to track all the uses of your images and can be a powerful deterrent in preventing theft.

I’m sure this is just the very beginning of the potential for something like this and if the investors are any indication (Bertelsmann) there’s a huge need for licensing and tracking on the corporate level but what I like best is they’ve created a solution for everyone.

Thoughts on Media – October 2008

“I think we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism.” — Matt Thompson, Newsless.org

This new site called Newsless.org that I discovered via an article on the site Publishing 2.0 about the need for a new AP (here) is authored by Matt Thompson–currently undertaking a year-long research fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri–is an exciting new voice with thoughts and reporting on the future of journalism and newspapers.

I like the the idea that he and Jeff Jarvis float that journalism needs to evolve from the story to the topic:

“I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.” — Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine.

There’s an undeniably massive role for photography in a shift like this because topics require moving the story forward and moving beyond attention grabbing to attention holding and that requires a certain type and depth of photography.

But, when I read these discussions I’m often left wondering why nobody is talking about photography. I mean, why is photography only popular online when it’s used to sell cameras to consumers. Why can I find hot topics like politics, environment, economy and sports all covered in words, podcast and now video but nothing done purely with photographs. Is that because the consumers aren’t interested or is because photographers aren’t doing anything about it.

I’m currently on the lookout for several things to happen with photography online:

A photography site to become popular that isn’t about selling cameras or techniques to consumers.
A site that tells stories of national interest in pictures (with text is fine, but equal).
A top tier photographer producing content online only.

Maybe I will never see any of that. Maybe I’m wrong about the value and interest in photography online.

I hope not.

“No, the essence of the problem is that we thought the internet represented just a new gadget and not a fundamental change in society, the economy, and thus journalism.” — Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine.

Tina Brown Launches The Daily Beast

Designed to have the look of a European “smart tabloid,” something already feels different with the simplicity of the front page and use of photography. This will be interesting to watch as Tina is well known in the editorial world for injecting life and chaos into venerable titles like The New Yorker (She redesigned the magazine and introduced the first staff photographer, Richard Avedon) and Vanity Fair.

From the article in PaidContent.org (here).
Web over print: Brown: “I so much prefer it. There’s nothing like actually doing something to learning exactly how it should go. One of the great agonies of magazines is it takes so damn long. It just takes forever to get a magazine out and, once it is out, I remember with monthlies, you’d publish your first issue and almost within hours of getting it out and the first response, you knew exactly how you wanted to tweak it and do things and change it and make it different and better but you were already halfway to press with the next issue so it was really sort of three months before you could change it. What I’m loving about this is we’re actually able to build it fast and get the response and weave that into our evolution. It’s very exciting. It’s thrilling.”

The Daily Beast (here).

James Nachtwey’s TED Prize and You

James Nachtwey and TED need your help breaking a major story that Jim has been documenting over the last two years as part of winning the TED prize in 2007. On October 3, his work will be simultaneously revealed online, disseminated through numerous media channels, and projected on monuments and public buildings throughout the world.

How to get involved:
The following link contains embeddable badges, Nachtwey’s TEDTalk, and other information related to Nachtwey’s wish.
http://www.tedprize.org/nachtwey/bloggers.html
The site will redirect on October 3 to unveil the story.

Nachtwey wished for help in breaking a news story in a way that demonstrates the power of news photography in the digital age. Let’s do whatever we can to make it happen.

Top 100 Media Companies

AdAge has their annual list of the top 100 media companies (here) and I was surprise by a couple things. The growth in 2007 was the slowest since the last recession in 2001 at 4.6% and almost 300 billion in revenue. I thought it would have been flatter then that and I was shocked to see that when they started the list in 1981 the top 100 had revenue of 30 billion. That’s some serious growth in the last 26 years.

The only significant movment came from who else but “Google — whose leap to 12th from 19th last year was the only big gain in the top 20…” “‘This is a changing of the guard,’ said Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo Group and chief innovation officer for Publicis Groupe Media. ‘If you look back 20, 30 years ago, the major companies would probably be print-based. Then they move to basically be broadcast based. Now we’re looking at companies that have basically digital or technology underpinnings.'”

Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?” and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York levels a little criticism at the list by saying that “There are new paths to big-ness. And those paths are not necessarily through ownership and corporate control.” He goes on to say, “The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches,” Mr. Jarvis said. “Advertising people roll their eyes at me and say, ‘No, no, no.'” They cite big draws such as “American Idol,” he said. “But we all know how inefficient that’s been. And what’s artificially propping it up has been the advertising industry, because they like one-stop shopping. They’re not built to find these highly targeted networks.”