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Google CEO Should Pledge Help at NAA; AP Targets Aggregators

By Rick Edmonds   

"What Would Google Do?" Jeff Jarvis asks in the title of his recent book, suggesting that everyone's favorite search engine can be viewed as a business messiah for the 21st century.

 

I have a different question. If Google truly feels bad about the loss to democracy wrought by waning newspaper journalism -- as bad as CEO Eric Schmidt has said -- when is the company going to move past vague concern and actually do something?
 

As it happens, Schmidt is the wrap-up speaker Tuesday morning in San Diego at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America. What better time and place to announce that Google is coming to the help of the industry?

 

The stakes for Schmidt's speech were raised Monday when the Associated Press board of directors announced that it will launch an initiative "to protect news content from misappropriation online." In what seemed a thinly veiled dig at Google, AP Chairman William Dean Singleton said, "We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."

 

In his most recent discussion of Google and newspapers in a January interview with Fortune, Schmidt said the company is looking for a way to help -- not with money, but tools. Until the newspaper industry addresses the problems with its business model, "we're in this uncomfortable conversation," he said. "We write large checks when we have a great strategy. And we don't yet have that strategy," he continued. "A fair statement is, we're still looking for the right answer."

 

With due deference to Google's preference for big sweeping solutions, may this not be a case in which the perfect is enemy of the good? Since the Fortune interview, four newspaper companies joined Tribune Co. in bankruptcy, two metro newspapers folded and hundreds of professional reporters and editors lost their jobs.

 

There was plenty of damage to newspapers in the second half of 2008, too, soon after Schmidt told another interviewer in June that "it's a huge moral imperative" for Google to help newspapers.

 

I wouldn't try to make the case that Google is single-handedly killing the newspaper business, but it does wield one of the longest daggers. Consider just a couple of recent metrics and moves.

 

Google's revenue in 2008 was $22 billion, just under half of the entire newspaper industry (roughly $45 billion). Newspapers operated at 10 to 11 percent margins, Google at roughly 20 percent. So its profits about equaled those of all newspapers.

 

Remember that of all of Google's wide-ranging activities, 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising. Newspapers were not especially nimble competitors as search took the country by storm. They probably could benefit by applying some of Google's expertise in maximizing value for Internet advertisers.

 

Then there is the matter of the aggregation site Google News. In the past, I've argued that newspapers have been winners on this one. They volunteered to have their stories picked up, and Google News ran no ads, so the newspapers got the whole benefit of any ad revenue as stories were clicked and read.

 

But in February, Google News began to run advertising -- not on the home page or with articles, but with Google News search results. Google hadn't promised never to add advertising to Google News; still, there was an element of bait-and-switch. Now that newspapers rely on this traffic, they find themselves donating the stories and sharing the revenue.

 

I can see why crafting an aid package for the industry isn't easy for Google. Volunteering to pay a usage fee for content accessed through Google News or Google search could have broad legal implications and leave every blogger lining up for a royalty check. Giving newspapers too much help with advertising risks damaging Google's core business, with a huge block of local advertising still in play.

 

So I defer to the smart people at Google, who understand their current business and its future direction better than I do, to craft a win-win strategy for bolstering journalism -- or, failing that, a helpful stopgap. It's a terrible time, though, to continue to do nothing, and others may soon join Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney in accusing Schmidt of "crocodile tears."

 

While I don't think Schmidt will base his speech on advice in the Biz Blog, I hope that Google folks reached some of these same conclusions as they reasoned through the situation. Otherwise, why accept the NAA invitation?

CORRECTION: The original version of this story misstated Google's revenue in 2008.

Schmidt to NAA: Online News, Ad-Supported, Will Dominate

By Rick Edmonds   

Some in the newspaper industry are spoiling for a fight with Google, but the search giant's CEO took a friendly, conciliatory tone at the Newspaper Association of America convention in San Diego today. Eric Schmidt focused on future partnership opportunities in his keynote speech, though he provided few details.
 

		RELATED
		Audio of Schmidt's NAA speech Transcript of Q&A session Archived live chat hosted by NAA during Schmidt's speech

Schmidt may not have come up with a Marshall Plan for an industry that has found his company a crippling advertising competitor, but he did offer some candid analysis:

• Admitting to viewing the world through the lens of Google's success, he said that the future of news is online and primarily advertising-supported. There is a place, but a smaller one, he said, for online subscriptions, micropayments and special paid content.

• Newspapers should move their readers online, ultimately building an audience five to 10 times their print base because of lower distribution costs. That assumes the quality of the sites and the ads can be significantly improved; Schmidt indicated he thinks they can be.

• Unexpectedly, he volunteered that news online is "still relatively unpleasant to read ... terrible compared to magazines and newspapers." He expects presentation to improve, along with much greater personalization, timeliness and speed of navigation.

• Schmidt gave newspapers good marks for recreating their reports online and adding features like blogs and reader comments in the late 1990s. But, "there wasn't an act after that," he said, and newspapers are still having trouble weaning themselves of the "scarcity economics" that applied in the print era but break down on the Internet.

Asked by Paul Tash, editor and CEO of Poynter's St. Petersburg Times, about the Associated Press' threats yesterday to get more aggressive in protecting the intellectual property of American newspapers, Schmidt had a four-part answer:

• Google has a "multimillion dollar deal with the Associated Press" not only to license the wire service's content but host it.

• The ultimate resolution of any dispute, Schmidt said, depends on how you interpret fair use. "In my position, I've come to learn that lawyers go to different schools, and if you went to school A you learned it one way, and if you went to school B you learned it another way," he said. "And if you're Google, all your lawyers went to school B and if you're the other side, all your lawyers went to school A."

• "Think about what the reader wants" -- more access, not less."These are ultimately consumer businesses," he said, "and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more, right?"

• Finally, he noted, any newspaper that prefers not to have its stories summarized and linked on Google News can simply opt out.

Google CEO Should Pledge Help at NAA Tuesday

By Rick Edmonds

"What Would Google Do?" Jeff Jarvis asks in the title of his recent book, suggesting that everyone's favorite search engine can be viewed as a business messiah for the 21st century.

 

I have a different question. If Google truly feels bad about the loss to democracy wrought by waning newspaper journalism -- as bad as CEO Eric Schmidt has said -- when is the company going to move past vague concern and actually do something?

 

As it happens, Schmidt is the wrap-up speaker Tuesday morning in San Diego at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America. What better time and place to announce that Google is coming to the help of the industry?

 

The importance of the speech heightened after the Associated Press Board of Directors, announced today that it was launching an initiative "to protect  news content from misappropriation online."  In what seemed a thinly veiled dig at Google, AP Chairman Willaim Dean Singleton said, ""We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."

 

In his most recent discussion of Google and newspapers in a January interview with Fortune, Schmidt said the company is looking for a way to help -- not with money, but tools. Until the newspaper industry addresses the problems with its business model, "we're in this uncomfortable conversation," he said. "We write large checks when we have a great strategy. And we don't yet have that strategy," he continued. "A fair statement is, we're still looking for the right answer."

 

With due deference to Google's preference for big sweeping solutions, may this not be a case in which the perfect is enemy of the good? Since the Fortune interview, four newspaper companies joined Tribune Co. in bankruptcy, two metro newspapers folded and hundreds of professional reporters and editors lost their jobs.

 

There was plenty of damage to newspapers in the second half of 2008, too, soon after Schmidt told another interviewer in June that "it's a huge moral imperative" for Google to help newspapers.

 

I wouldn't try to make the case that Google is single-handedly killing the newspaper business, but it does wield one of the longest daggers. Consider just a couple of recent metrics and moves.

 

Google's net income in 2008 was $22 billion, just under half of the entire newspaper industry (roughly $45 billion). Newspapers operated at 10 to 11 percent margins, Google at roughly 20 percent. So its profits about equaled those of all newspapers.

 

Remember that of all of Google's wide-ranging activities, 97 percent of its revenue comes from advertising. Newspapers were not especially nimble competitors as search took the country by storm. They probably could benefit by applying some of Google's expertise in maximizing value for Internet advertisers.

 

Then there is the matter of the aggregation site Google News. In the past, I've argued that newspapers have been winners on this one. They volunteered to have their stories picked up, and Google News ran no ads, so the newspapers got the whole benefit of any ad revenue as stories were clicked and read.

 

But in February, Google News began to run advertising -- not on the home page or with articles, but with Google News search results. Google hadn't promised never to add advertising to Google News; still, there was an element of bait-and-switch. Now that newspapers rely on this traffic, they find themselves donating the stories and sharing the revenue.

 

I can see why crafting an aid package for the industry isn't easy for Google. Volunteering to pay a usage fee for content accessed through Google News or Google search could have broad legal implications and leave every blogger lining up for a royalty check. Giving newspapers too much help with advertising risks damaging Google's core business, with a huge block of local advertising still in play.

 

So I defer to the smart people at Google, who understand their current business and its future direction better than I do, to craft a win-win strategy for bolstering journalism -- or, failing that, a helpful stopgap. It's a terrible time, though, to continue to do nothing, and others may soon join Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney in accusing Schmidt of "crocodile tears."

 

While I don't think Schmidt will base his speech on advice in the Biz Blog, I hope that Google folks reached some of these same conclusions as they reasoned through the situation. Otherwise, why accept the NAA invitation?

Newspapers, GM and Big Pharma: Sharing the Business Model Blues

By Rick Edmonds   

I took a break last week from digesting the daily menu of industry calamities to speak at a conference of drug and biotech science execs on how newspapers got into their current fix. 

 

Big Pharma is not doing as well as it used to, you may have heard, increasingly turning to mergers to mask slowing growth. The organizers of the Miami conference, coyly titled rEvolution, were hoping for lessons from industries in far worse shape. That's how I came to share the stage with, among others, Alan Taub, director of research and development at General Motors. 

 

Let me play back parts of the conversation in reverse -- how the issues of some other industries bear on ours.

 

Pharma seems to be where newspapers were a decade ago, even five years ago -- loaded with cash, still highly profitable, but experiencing marked reduction in revenue growth. Cracks have appeared in the pipeline of developing new medicines and selling them for years as high-priced, proprietary brands.

 

The Rx has been a bunch of mergers, which has made bigger (and perhaps more efficient) companies but has added big debt loads in the process.

 

"Don't do that," I suppose I should have shouted, "or you may end up like Tribune and McClatchy, still operating profitable units but choking on interest payments."

 

Give credit to the pharma folks, though; the company executives smell trouble, rather than blowing off criticism by outside analysts -- as the newspaper industry did when Monster, Craigslist and Google were in the early stages of eating their print classifieds lunch.

 

Pharma, unlike newspapers and autos, is not especially sensitive to recession. But generics and managed care have put pressure on the old reliable of high-priced, breakthrough medicine. The companies are casting a wider net for research collaborators rather than trying to do it all in-house. And the industry is focusing on cutting-edge treatments that go beyond the standard pills and devices into such novel concepts as personalized, targeted medicine that's heavy on gene research. Do some of these threats sound familiar?

 

Turning to GM, Taub spoke about the Chevy Volt, a hybrid electric/fuel-burning car to be released in 2010. The car, which is on a much faster development track than is typical for the company, represents a calculated gamble on what green-minded consumers are looking for. (The Obama administration trashed projections of how the Volt will sell as overly optimistic in its semi-takeover of GM over the weekend.)

 

Under questioning, Taub was candid about how much the American auto companies have been hurt by their insular, in-house approach to R & D. You're talking about three companies, all based in the same place, whose execs know each other and live in the same suburbs. Only belatedly have the Big Three woken up to the value of spreading research around and bringing in fresh insight from a diverse group of vendors. 

 

Richard DiMarchi of Indiana University posed a tough question for all of us. Commitment to change and experimentation is great, but do we have a clear sense of how companies or industries that have successfully transformed did it? Taub and I suggested that some of the classic examples -- Western Union becoming a specialist in financial transfers, IBM fleeing mainframes for a computer solutions approach -- were instances of companies reimagining and reinventing themselves as a fundamentally different businesses.

 

That's a topic worth more reflection on another day. For now I'm pretty sure that GM, Big Pharma and newspapers all know they need a reformulated business model, but aren't there yet.

A Morning-After Take on the Nonprofit Newspaper Bill

By Rick Edmonds   

I look at Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin's "Newspaper Revitalization Act," to allow newspapers to operate as tax-exempt nonprofits, as the first pitch in a long season. The dissents are already coming in from those who see the proposal, introduced Tuesday, as well-intentioned but flawed. There also are likely to be additional or alternative legislative ideas for helping newspapers through their current financial plight. 

 

Here are some thoughts on how bringing government into what Cardin calls "newspaper preservation" will play out:

• I have already heard, privately and publicly, comments from smart people who are not so sure these desperate times call for the desperate measure of turning to government for help. What government gives, government can and will threaten to take away, they say. Fair point; I can remember not so many years ago a Republican administration bringing some heat to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to serve up a mix of documentaries that were more, let's say, "fair and balanced."

• Tim Windsor was first out of the gate in a post on the Nieman Lab blog with a second argument I expect to hear more of: Doesn't special help for newspapers impede the growth of emerging media in search of an economic model?

• I would not expect a rush of conversions to nonprofit organizations even if Cardin's bill passes quickly. It could, however, help individuals or groups who want to acquire and revive a waning newspaper in their city. Contributions would be tax-deductible, whereas investments in a for-profit -- such as those made by Brian Tierney's group in Philadelphia -- were not. There will not be such a group in every city, but I wouldn't underestimate the civic pride that could be mobilized as metros vie for the dubious distinction of being the first without a newspaper.

• Groups that are serious about acquiring papers and converting them to nonprofits will face a series of practical challenges. How do you reach a reasonable price in this climate? What are the tax consequences and the impact on labor agreements in such a sale? Are you ready to run at a loss for a while and underwrite exploration of new media and new revenue options?

• Other approaches to helping newspapers will emerge. Marcus Owens, a tax attorney with the Washington law firm of Caplin & Drysdale, is an advocate of the limited liability, low-profit structure known as an L3C for newspapers. Currently, this is authorized in just three states (Vermont, Wyoming and Montana), but Owens and others would like to see a federal equivalent.  

• Easing antitrust regulations would be a third approach, whether by allowing Joint Operating Agreements in extended metro areas, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, or other industry-wide business ventures. Newspapers are no longer potent monopolies in their hometowns, nor is the industry especially consolidated compared to radio or non-media businesses.

• Don't look for any move that could be tagged as a bailout. Direct subsidies such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy's free subscriptions to young readers would be a non-starter here. Widespread use of Cardin's options could take taxable income out of IRS reach -- but that's spare change compared to the billions going to financial institutions and the auto industry.

While there are significant counterarguments and practical difficulties to what Cardin proposes, I'm not from the preemptive "don't-even-go-there" school. This is a time for exploring lots of options -- and nonprofits are an option that could help.

Maryland Senator Introduces Bill Allowing Newspapers to Become Nonprofits

By Rick Edmonds   
The intense financial pressure on American newspapers moved to a new arena this morning as Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) introduced legislation that would allow newspapers to organize as nonprofits.

 

Cardin's bill would allow newspapers to choose to operate roughly like public broadcasting -- accepting tax-deductible contributions large and small and exempt from taxes on advertising and subscription revenues.

 

Newspapers choosing this form of incorporation would lose the ability to make endorsements in political races (direct political activity is forbidden for so-called 501(c)(3)s under federal tax code). They would be free, though, to cover and offer opinion on political races, as NPR and PBS do now.

 

In a speech on the Senate floor, Cardin cited the shrinking news staff at several metro papers, along with recent bankruptcies and closings, as evidence of a crisis situation meriting congressional intervention.

 

"Most, if not all sources of journalistic information, from Google to broadcast news or punditry," Cardin said, "gain their original news from the laborious and expensive work of experienced newspaper reporters, diligently working their beat over the course of years, not hours."

 

"Newspaper reporters forge relationships with people: they build a network which creates avenues to information. These relationships and the information that follows are essential to a free democratic society."

 

Cardin had an 18-year career in the U.S. House before being elected to succeed Sen. Paul Sarbanes in 2006. 

San Diego Editor Says Sale 'First Positive Piece of News'

By Rick Edmonds   
The top headline on the sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune this afternoon was that it was sold at all. On the auction block for eight months, it seemed in danger of becoming yet another American newspaper no one wants to own given the industry's challenges.

Union-Tribune Editor Karin Winner told staff gathered that news of the sale was terrific. "This is a company that really wants to see journalism continue. ... This to me is the first 'up' piece of news," she said, "the first positive piece of news" for an industry in transition.

 

Copley Press found a buyer with serious bona fides. Platinum Equity will not be a household name to journalists, but it is a successful and fast-growing merger, acquisitions and operating firm. The Beverly Hills-based company employs more than 100 and founder and CEO Tom Gores (one of three investment banking brothers) is Forbes 400 material with an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion. 

 

For Platinum, this is almost certainly a straight business deal, not an exercise in community-spirited rescue. The company's Web site says it specializes in out-of-favor companies facing big transitional challenges. Typically it operates them for a period of time, making major changes, often including dealing off assets, then sells at a higher price.

 

Usually, but not always, a private equity strategy is to cut more deeply than previous owners could stomach. So the sale could bring big staff reductions, outsourcing functions as significant as printing, selling real estate or perhaps hastening a transition to an online-dominant product mix. However, the operating plan could involve instead an entirely different strategy and some reinvestment.

 

No sale price was specified, nor is it clear whether the Union-Tribune was profitable in 2008 (it probably was) or is operating at a profit this year (more problematic).

 

In the boiler-plate sales announcement, Copley disclosed the nugget that Canadian publisher David H. Black (no relation to the disgraced Conrad Black) would be involved in Platinum's operating team in an unspecified way. His company, Black Press, is a very successful operator, mostly of smaller papers and weeklies in Vancouver and northern Washington state.

 

It bought the Honolulu Star-Bulletin early this decade and the Akron Beacon Journal, when McClatchy sold some of its Knight Ridder acquisitions in early 2006. Black has a reputation for operating leanly but with some imagination and business flair.

 

I sat at the same table as Black during the luncheon where Hillary Clinton spoke at last year's Newspaper Association of America convention, awkwardly overhearing a business conversation with a colleague before I realized who he was. The talk confirmed what I had heard secondhand -- that Black was an optimist about the business and a potential buyer when many were bailing out. I introduced myself and said that. He said, yes, and we left it at that.

 

Private equity groups have not shown much of an interest in the many newspapers for sale over the last year (though several are among the finalists in bidding for the Austin American-Statesman). 

Avista Capital Partners overpaid in acquiring the Star Tribune of Minneapolis from McClatchy in December 2006, and the paper filed for bankruptcy early this year. That was hardly an encouraging precedent, and the consensus has been that smart private equity professionals are as baffled as anyone else about how to turn around newspaper properties in the short time frame of a year or two.

 

Copley has been a company in some decline since the death of matriarch Helen Copley in 2004. It sold a group of Ohio papers with the announced intent of focusing on its home base in San Diego.  But last July it decided to try to cash out of the Union-Tribune as well. The paper has a comparatively modest circulation (Daily 270,000, Sunday 342,000) for the enormous San Diego County area (population 3.1 million). The Union-Tribune was Copley's last asset of any size.

 

Lots of detail to follow, but chalk up the sale as evidence that some serious money people still see hope for the battered metro business.

With P-I Transformed, Watch for an Old-Fashioned Newspaper War Online in Seattle

By Rick Edmonds   
To paraphrase a Mo Udall quip on politics, everything that needs to be said about the new online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer (debuting today) has been said -- but not everybody has said it yet. So here's my two cents.

 

I would love to know the business model. In the unlikely event Hearst tells me, I'll discuss it. Meantime it looks as if Hearst and the P-I are eliminating expenses even more radically than I and others had speculated in discussing the pulling-the-plug-on-print scenario. Not only are they getting rid of paper, printing and distribution costs, they whacked seven-eighths of the newsroom as well. I'm guessing costs just went down 80 percent.

 

On the revenue side, the P-I will be building from a very modest base. Locally The Seattle Times ran the joint operating agency and advertising sales. Corporate parent Hearst may be able to contribute national advertising given its leading role in setting up the partnership of 700 newspapers with Yahoo and exploration of other high-tech ad placement options.

 

My former boss, Philadelphia Inquirer executive editor Gene Roberts, used to say it sometimes makes sense to start a new project before you are completely ready. That would make sense here -- assuming Hearst may have reached the go/no-go decision point only within the last several weeks. The P-I's site has a lead in monthly unique visitors over The Seattle Times (which had double the paid print circulation). So priority one is to hold onto that audience by continuing to publish online and, best case, build a wider, younger audience later.

 

Even if the site is not a money-maker for several years (my guess), if the losses are kept to a low roar, SeattlePI.com may make sense for Hearst and the company's surviving papers as a real-time test of what works and what doesn't in an online-only local site. Lots is up for grabs, including the ratio of news to non-news. (Keep sending those pet pictures, Seattle). Micro-payments are so last month; this week, aggressive experimentation is in.

 

Oddly, the death of the JOA will likely usher in a more intense and high-stakes competition in Seattle than before -- with the combatants duking it out in the fresh venue of online. Does the Times site -- with ties to an excellent (though smaller than it used to be) metro paper -- establish dominance? Or does the nimble, Web-savvy upstart better plug into the tastes of online users and the needs of advertisers? 

 

The P-I has already said it plans to stay competitive with breaking hard news. That is high on the list of what readers want. I'm enough of a traditionalist to be skeptical about how much news substance can be achieved with an eighth the professional staff the P-I fielded yesterday. But I will be watching carefully to see if Hearst's grand experiment proves me wrong.

Read More In This Series:

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sale Timeline
       3/16/2009 2:03:25 PM
• Post-Intelligencer to publish its last issue on Tuesday
       3/16/2009 3:00:39 PM
• Page One Today / P-I Slips Into the Past
       3/17/2009 6:27:06 AM
• New SeattlePI.com Strategy: 'Experiment a Lot, Fail Fast'
       3/17/2009 6:16:56 AM
• Seattle P-I publishes its final print edition
       3/17/2009 9:44:51 AM
• Seattle P-I staffers share their thoughts and reflections
       3/17/2009 10:13:52 AM

Cable Grows Audience, Advertising While Other Media Decline

By Rick Edmonds

The big media story of the decade is supposed to be the inexorable movement from print to digital, but there is a ringer attracting both audience and advertising as most news media suffer -- cable television.

 

With a big boost from the presidential election, cable news had a banner year in 2008, growing advertising spending 27 percent in 2008, making online (up 4 percent) look like a 97-pound weakling by comparison. So says the Project for Excellence in Journalism's sixth edition of its State of the News Media electronic yearbook published today.

 

As co-author of the newspaper chapter of the report, I'm on the leading edge of a litany of bad news familiar to most Biz Blog readers. But comparison to the fortunes of other media yields some surprises:

• Local television audiences were down 4.5 percent for early evening news in 2008, almost exactly matching newspaper declines (4.6 percent daily and 4.8 percent Sunday) for the most recent reporting period. Advertising revenues were down 7 percent, an astonishingly bad result in an election and Olympics year, which typically produces a big increase over a previous year lacking those revenue boosters.
• News magazines probably have it even worse than newspapers. They too had circulation declines of almost 5 percent and ad revenue declines of 17 percent. U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek are both rolling the dice with big changes in their formats.
• Ethnic media, a growth area through most of the years the report has been published, saw circulation declines for most African American papers, mixed results for Spanish language papers and continued growth for Spanish language television.
• Digital media took its own hit as the recession settled in, with ad growth slowing to a crawl. Newer formats like ads to mobile devices and pre-rolls continued to show healthy growth (59 percent and 33 percent respectively), but they were exceptions. Banner advertising looks less and less like a sustaining income source for newspaper organizations in transition or online-only startups. One ominous indicator for newspapers and local TV: While local advertising is a growing share of the online total, 57 percent of it goes to Google and Yahoo.

Cable news is the exception to the overall negative or mixed picture. Audience grew 38 percent in 2008. That probably cannot be sustained in 2009. But after decades weighed down by heavy initial capital costs, cable has evolved into a highly profitable business. It is sustained by subscriber fees even if advertising is soft. And the package of services (often including high-speed broadband connections and sometimes phone) is one consumers are loathe to cancel.

The report is cautious on prescriptives, dubious, for instance, about micro-payments for online content or a philanthropic rescue of failing newspapers. "The closest thing to a consensus right now," PEJ executive director Tom Rosenstiel writes, "is that no one source is a likely magic bullet (for newspaper organizations)."

 

More and more of the news audience, often in a "hunt-and gather" mode, goes to the Internet as a first choice, Rosenstiel writes, but the experimentation with new revenue models to capture that attention has been stalled by the recession.

Christian Science Monitor Prepares for Online, Magazine Relaunch This Month

By Rick Edmonds

I asked John Yemma by e-mail a week ago how the transition is going at The Christian Science Monitor as it readies to publish online only weekdays, with a weekend magazine-style print supplement. He was kind enough to provide a detailed answer.

 

In the double switchover, Yemma wrote, the magazine requires immediate special attention. Mapping out potential cover subjects and getting the hang of "long-throw" magazine pieces are new to the Monitor. CSMonitor.com already exists, after all.

 

"Think of our newsroom like a big planet with two moons," he continued. The planet is the news gathering and editing operation; the moons the production desks for the print weekly and Web site.  So far, so good, but wrapping minds and professional practice around the prospect of no daily print edition is tricky. Here is Yemma's description: 

 

"The Web is where most of our reporters and editors are having to think in new ways. If you don't have the daily print production deadlines, you are thinking more like a wire service. How often do you update a story? How long should a post be? How do you track continuous news -- and is there a role for the higher level of ordering the news content each day as we used to do in the Page One process? We are in constant conversation about these issues.

 

"We are installing new tools -- a new online content management system (EZ Publish) -- which should democratize the Web updating process, pushing more control into non-tech sections of the newsroom. When we switch from print-first to Web-first, there may not be much apparent change at first to a user, except that the site should have more new content more hours of the day. But as we push out into the new world in April, May and beyond, we'll be learning the rhythms of the Web, developing new features, and iteratively improving what we do.

"It is both an exciting time, and honestly one of some apprehension in the newsroom. Like everyone, we've had staff reductions (about 20 percent from last year's budgeted level), most of which we captured via attrition and voluntary departures. The unknowns of the Web and questions about whether fast, responsive metrics-oriented journalism fits with our journalistic culture of thoughtful perspective abound. No one has answers to these questions, and I'm not pretending I do.

 

"We are pushing off the shore and we'll just have to see what we encounter and adjust along the way. One thing I'm very glad about at a time when I see the cut-cut-cut problems everywhere in the industry: We have a plan. We have a narrative other than doing-more-with-less. That gives us some hope. Of course, we need to succeed at our plan and reach a level of sustainability. We are doing this with our eyes wide open, knowing what kind of an economy we are in. The secular decline of print, the difficulty of eking out enough revenue from online, and the devastating recession we are experiencing make all of this very difficult.

 

"So there are no promises. Any strategy will certainly have to be adjusted. But if we can get some modest success from our new business model when things are this bad, we should feel some reasonable hope that we can succeed in the long run. We'll know success because we'll be carefully measuring traffic on the Web and circulation in the print weekly and ad revenue from both. Sometime in the late summer or fall would be a good time to figure out how we are really doing."

 

The Monitor's last print edition will be March 27. Around the same time, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News will stop home delivery several days of the week, publishing condensed print editions, a new digital edition and letting the Web report otherwise carry the load.

 

Practicing newspaper journalism without the default story structure of how we have always done it in print is just around the corner.