Newspapers

Yet another challenge for publishers: Subscription fatigue.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Content Creation and Content Management, Media, Media Consumption, Publishing , , , , , , , ,

As if it isn’t enough that newspaper and magazine publishers have to compete with an ever-widening array of information providers, in the effort to migrate subscription revenues from print to digital these publishers are squaring off against an additional challenge: subscription fatigue.

Not every consumer is opposed to paying for media, but with so many fee-based streaming services now being offered — including the ones by powerhouses like Netflix and Spotify — trying to get people to focus on “yet another” resource is proving difficult.

Moreover, when it comes to news information sources it’s even more challenging. According to a recent Digital News Report prepared by Reuters Institute, when given a choice between paying for news or paying for a video streaming service, only ~12% of respondents in the Reuters survey stated that they would pick the news resource.

It seems that with so many time demands on people’s online activities, fewer are willing to pay for access to information that they don’t wish to commit to consuming on a regular basis. Unlike most of the entertainment streaming services, news stories are often available from free sources whenever a consumer might choose to access such news stories. Those alternative news sources may not be as comprehensive, but i’s a tradeoff many consumers appear willing to make.

This is hurting everyone in the news segment, including local newspapers in smaller markets which have faced a major falloff in print advertising revenues.

Underscoring this dynamic, more than 1,800 newspapers in the United States have closed their doors in the past 15 years. Today, fewer than half of the country’s counties have even one newspaper within their borders. This fallout is affecting the availability of some news information, as local media have a history of covering stories that aren’t covered elsewhere.

But it’s yet more collateral damage in the sea change that’s upended the world of newspapers and periodicals in recent years.

More findings from the Reuters Institute report can be accessed here.

The “creeping crisis” for newspapers seeps into yet another corner of the industry.

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Newspaper revenue trend lines are problematic, to say the least.

The travails of the newspaper industry aren’t anything new or surprising. For the past decade, the business model of America’s newspapers has been under incredible pressures.  Among the major causes are these:

  • The availability of up-to-the-minute, real-time news from alternative (online) sources
  • the explosion of options people have available to find their news
  • The ability to consume news free of charge using most of these alternative sources
  • The decline of newspaper subscriptions and readership, leading to a steep decline in advertising revenues

Exacerbating these challenges is the fact that producing and disseminating a paper-based product is substantially more costly than electronic delivery of news. And with high fixed costs being spread over fewer readers, the problems become even more daunting.

But one relative bright spot in the newspaper segment — at least up until recently — has been local papers. In markets without local TV stations, such papers continued to be a way for the citizenry to read up on local news and events.  It’s been the place where they could see their friends and neighbors written about and pictured.  And let’s not forget high-school sports and local “human-interest” news items that generally couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Whatever online “community” presence there might be covering these smaller markets — towns ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 population — is all-too-often sub-standard — in some cases embarrassingly bad.

But now it seems that the same problems afflicting the newspaper segment in general have seeped into this last bastion of the business.

It’s particularly ominous in places where daily (or near-daily) newspapers are published, as compared to weekly pubs. A case in point is the local paper in Youngstown, Ohio — a town of 65,000 people.  Its daily paper, The Vindicator, has just announced that it will be shutting its doors after 150 years in business.

The same family has owned The Vindicator for four generations (since 1887).  It isn’t that the longstanding owners didn’t try mightily to keep the paper going.  In a statement to its readers, the family outlined the paper’s recent struggles to come up with a stable business model, including working with employees and unions and investing in new, more efficient presses.  Efforts to raise the price of the paper or drive revenue to the digital side of the operation failed to secure sufficient funds, either.

Quoting from management’s statement:

“In spite of our best efforts, advertising and circulation revenues have continued to decline and The Vindicator continues to operate at a loss.

Due to [these] great financial hardships, we spent the last year searching for a buyer to continue to operate The Vindicator and preserve as many jobs as possible, while maintaining the paper’s voice in the community. That search has been unsuccessful.”

Youngstown, Ohio

As a result, the paper will cease publication by the end of the summer. With it the jobs of nearly 150 employees and ~250 paper carriers will disappear.  But something else will be lost as well — the sense of community that these home-town newspapers are uncommonly able to foster and deliver.

For a city like Youngstown, which has seen its population decline with the loss of manufacturing jobs, it’s yet another whammy.

Because of the population loss dynamics, it might seem like local conditions are the cause of The Vindicator‘s situation, but some see a bigger story.  One such observer is Nieman Journalism Lab’s Joshua Benton, who writes:

“I don’t think this is just a Youngstown story. I fear we’ll look back on this someday as the beginning of an important — and negative — shift in local news in America.”

What do you think? Is this the start of a new, even more dire phase for the newspaper industry?  Is there the loss of a newspaper that has his your own community particularly hard? Please share your thoughts with other readers here.

Print vs. online newspaper readership behaviors don’t look promising at all for media properties.

Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Economics, Media, Media Consumption, Publishing , , , , , , ,
New York Times CEO Mark Thompson

From the New York Times on down, leading publishers are telling us that print versions of their newspapers will eventually disappear.  The only question is how soon it will happen.

But what are the implications of this pending shift to all-digital? Will online news consumers be as strongly engaged as they have been with the print newspaper product?

We now have a window into answering this question by looking at the experience of The Independent, a UK national daily paper.  Two years ago, The Independent made the shift to become an online-only publication.

And the result was … no measurable increase traffic shifting from offline to online. That finding comes from a before/after analysis of the publication’s performance as conducted by European communications industry researchers Neil Thurman and Richard Fletcher.

What they learned is that shutting down the print property didn’t drive those news consumers to print-like consumption habits on digital devices.

Instead, these customers became like other digital readers. That is to say, in the words of the researchers, “easily distracted, flitting from link to link, and a little allergic to depth.”

Let’s drill down a little deeper. At the time it ceased publishing a print edition of its newspaper, The Independent had a paid print circulation of approximately 40,000, along with ~58 million monthly unique visits on its digital platform.

That a humongous chasm … but the researchers found that the publication’s relatively small number of print readers were responsible for more than 80% of all time spent consuming all of The Independent’s news content – print and digital.

That is correct: Considering engagement on all of its digital platforms, all of that added up to fewer than 20% of the time collectively spent reading the print publication.

The chart below shows what happened to readership. All of the time The Independent’s print readers spent with the paper seems to have simply disappeared when the company ceased publishing a print version.  It didn’t transition to independent.co.uk.

Even more telling, the researchers found that half of print recipients had read the newspaper “almost every day,” whereas online visitors read a news story in The Independent, on average, a little more than twice per month.

While print readers typically spent from 40 to 50 minutes reading each daily edition of The Independent, online readers spent, on average, just 6 minutes over the entire month.

Here’s the thing: Whereas print newspapers usually have few if any competitors in their immediate space, online there are an unlimited number of competing sites to attract (and distract) the reader – all of them just a mouse-click away.

Even if we discount a measure of exaggeration on the part of respondents in terms of how much time they actually expend on their reading consumption versus what they reported to survey-takers, the print/online dynamics reveal stark differences. As researcher Thurman reports:

“By going online-only, The Independent has decimated the attention it receives. The paper is now a thing more glanced at, it seems, than gorged on.  It has sustainability but less centrality.”

There is one silver-lining of shifting to an all-digital platform, at least in the case of The Independent.  That shift has resulted in increased international reach by the publication.

But The Independent is a national newspaper, unlike most of America’s leading papers, and so that sort of positive aspect can’t be expected to apply very easily to those other media properties.  How many people outside of central Colorado can be expected to read a digital edition of the Denver Post?

The main takeaway from The Independent’s experience is that for any paper choosing to go all-digital, chances are high that the audience isn’t going to follow along – certainly not at the level of loyal, in-depth time once spent with the print product.

Sure, the very real costs of printing and delivery will now be a thing of the past. But a significant – even dramatic – decline in reach, influence and impact will be the new reality for the publishers

Baby, meet bathwater.

The latest newsroom employment stats aren’t pretty — and unfortunately not “fake” either.

Phillip Nones Human Resources, Media, Media Consumption, Publishing, Social Commentary , , , , , ,

For people who might be hoping for a turnaround in the news industry that could take us back to a world more like the one we once knew – you know, with actual journalists writing primary-sourced stories and conducting formal fact-checking – those days seem less likely than ever to return.

In late July, analytics firm MediaRadar reported on the latest stats for print advertising in the United States – and they’re continuing a long slide by falling another 13% between January and April of 2018.

Even worse:  Most of the companies that stopped their print advertising during the period didn’t migrate their ad dollars over to digital. Instead, they stopped advertising altogether.

This by now numbingly-familiar trend in advertising is directly related to the financial well-being of the news media, as advertising has traditionally bankrolled the lion’s share of newsroom activities.

But with revenues dropping relentlessly, it’s having an outsized impact on newsroom employment. The Pew Research Center has just released stats on the number of employees in American newsrooms – and those figures aren’t pretty, either.

According to Pew, in 2008 America’s newsrooms collectively had approximately 114,000 reporters, editors, photographers and camera personnel on staff. As of 2017, the number had plummeted to around 88,000.

That loss of ~27,000 people represents nearly 25% of all the newsroom jobs that were existed in newspaper, radio, TV/cable and other information services in 2008.

Not surprisingly, the biggest decline was experienced in the newspaper segment – down a whopping 45% to ~39,000 jobs. The digital-native sector was something of a bright spot, with job numbers increasing by nearly 80% over the same period to reach a level of ~13,000 jobs in 2017.

But digital news personnel growth hasn’t been nearly enough to make up for the job losses suffered by the other newsrooms.

What’s more, even digital newsroom jobs aren’t particularly secure, with frequent restructurings being the order of the day thanks to the unsettled nature of the industry as it attempts to adjust to ever-evolving news-consumption preferences.

How are news media organizations responding? Give them credit for trying all sorts of gambits – from membership programs to paid newsletters, premium news paywalls and in-house content studios.

But how many of those efforts have proven to be financially robust enough to shoulder the costs of running a “legitimate” newsroom?  Whatever the number, it hasn’t been sufficient, because whether we like it or not, most people have become conditioned to expect their news and information delivered free of charge.  And while many may lip service to favoring traditional journalistic practices, most aren’t willing to put up their own money to pay for it as part of the bargain.

Meanwhile, the hollowing out of traditionally structured newsrooms continues on, with no end in sight.  I wonder if there even are other financial or business models that could stop the hemorrhaging of jobs in newsrooms.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

The New York Times: Out of print in ten years?

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It isn’t anything particularly special to hear people talking about the declining market for print newspapers, and how market dynamics and demographic trends have put the traditional newspaper publishing model at risk.

At the same time, most newspaper publications have found it quite challenging to “migrate” their print customers to paid-subscription digital platforms. The plethora of free news sites online makes it difficult to entice people to pay for digital access to the news – even if the quality of the “free” coverage is lower.

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, appearing on CNBC’s Power Lunch program (February 12, 2018).

But it was quite something to hear a forecast made by Mark Thompson, The New York Times’ CEO.  Earlier this month, Thompson made remarks during CNBC’s Power Lunch broadcast that amounted to a prediction that the NYT’s print edition won’t be around in another ten years.

Thompson went on to explain that his company’s objective is to build the digital product even while print is going away:

“The key thing for us is that we’re pivoting. Our plan is to go on serving our loyal print subscribers as long as we can.  But meanwhile, to build up the digital business so that we can have a successful growing company and a successful news operation long after print is gone.”

It’s one thing for newspapers in various cities across the country to be facing the eventuality of throwing in the towel on their print product. It’s quite another for a newspaper as vaunted as The New York Times to be candidly predicting this result happening.

It would seem that the NYT, along with the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and possibly USA Today would be the four papers most able to preserve their print editions because of their business models (USA Today’s hotel distribution program) or simply because of their vaunted reputations as America’s only daily newspapers with anything approaching nationwide distribution.

I guess this is what makes the Thompson remarks so eyebrow-raising. If there isn’t a long-term future for The New York Times when it comes to print, what does that say about the rest of the newspaper industry?  “Hopeless” seems like the watchword.

It will be interesting indeed if, a decade from now, we find no print newspapers being published in this country save for hyper-local news publications – the ones which rely on print subscribers seeing their friends and family in the paper for weddings, funerals, community activities, school sports and other such parochial (or vanity) purposes.

Interesting … but a little depressing, too.

Fact Checkers: The “New-Old” Job in Journalism

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The topic of “fake news” is all over the journalism ecosphere these days. It’s the subject of charges and countercharges tossed back and forth between politicians, industry specialists, the scientific community and the media.

In the current environment, even the slightest mistake in the media – no matter how innocuous – can turn into a contentious social media debate, whereas in the past it might have merited just a quick corrective notation as a follow-up.

These days, more often than not everyone gets sullied in the process – even innocent parties caught in the crossfire.  So, it isn’t surprising that as the issue of “fake news” has risen in prominence, fact checking in journalism has taken on more importance than ever.

An IFCN global summit conference held in Madrid Spain in July 2017.

In 2015, the Poynter Institute established its International Fact-Checking Network to support initiatives aimed at ensuring better accuracy and journalistic best practices. In addition, over the past year the New York Times and several other prominent newspapers have brought more fact checkers on board – not merely to verify the information being reported, but also to work in “real time” with journalists – checking breaking news stories for accuracy as they are being produced.

These new fact-checking resources have been added without a lot of fanfare, but it’s a quiet acknowledgement that the “fake news” controversy is one that strikes at the heart of the press’s reputation.

But there’s a significant shortcoming:  The new emphasis on fact-checking is consequential in just one corner of the news universe.  The arena of “news” now extends well beyond traditional outlets to also encompass social media platforms, blogs and a myriad of informational websites that frequently offer a distinct “point of view” in their reporting.

So, while the fact-checking resurgence may help buttress the reputation of “legacy” news organizations such as high-profile newspapers, national TV networks and marquee online news sites, that doesn’t mean it’s reaching into the many other places where people encounter and consume news.

I suspect that the “fake news” phenomenon is going to be with us for the foreseeable future, despite all of the good-faith efforts to keep it in check.

Local TV news viewership continues to decline … even as stations ramp up their news coverage.

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How’s this for an ironic twist: The Pew Research Center is reporting that the local TV newscasts if ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC affiliates across the United States are continuing to show viewership declines, even as stations are increasing the amount of the local news content they broadcast.

According to Pew, which analyzed Nielsen results for its report, “late” news (10 or 11 pm) suffered an 11% decline to 20.3 million viewers across the United States during 2016.

Early evening news (5 or 6 pm time slots) lost ~9% in viewership, dropping to 22.8 million viewers.

Morning news? It didn’t fare any better, falling a similar ~9% to just 10.8 million viewers.

But despite these continuing declines, there’s scant evidence that local station executives see local news as a losing proposition.

Instead, they appear to be doubling down on it, figuring that local news is one of the few remaining points of differentiation against online news sites that usually don’t provide very much in the way of in-depth local coverage.

Underscoring this, according to a survey conducted by the Radio-Television-Digital News Association and Hofstra University, local TV stations averaged 5.7 hours of news programming per weekday during 2016, which is up slightly from 5.5 hours in 2015.

Stats aside, one has to wonder how much longer local news can continue to be a differentiating factor for local TV stations? Those very same stations are creating their own competition by operating robust websites of their own.  And of course, many people have become quite adept at punching their own zip codes into weather apps to obtain “micro-local” weather information.

Sports? There are thousands of websites and apps available that provide fingertip results and stats down to the most minute level of detail.

Furthermore, as the older population “ages out,” the notion of sitting down at a prescribed hour every day to watch the news on television is likely to go the way of newspapers.  Which is to say, an inexorable slide into irrelevance.

It just isn’t how the world operates any longer … even if one is 60 or 70 years old.

More statistics from the Pew Research Center report can be accessed here.

The fundamental problem with newspapers’ online endeavors.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing, Media, Media Consumption, Publishing , , , , ,

olnIt’s no secret that the newspaper industry has been struggling with finding a lucrative business model to augment or replace the traditional print medium supported by subscriptions and advertising.

The problem is, their efforts are thwarted by market realities at every intersection, setting up the potential for head-on crashes everywhere.

In October, the results of an analysis conducted by several University of Texas researchers were published that illustrate the big challenges involved.

The researchers pinpointed 2007 as the year in which most large newspapers’ online versions had been available for about a decade, meaning that they had become “mature” products. The evaluation looked at the total local online readership of the Top 50 American newspapers, and found that nearly all of them have been stagnant in terms of growth over the past decade.

Even worse, since 2011 more than half of the papers have actually lost online readership.

The issue isn’t that people aren’t going online to consume news; the precipitous drop in print newspaper subscriptions proves otherwise. The problem is that many consumers are going to news aggregator sites – places like Yahoo News, CNN.com and other non-newspaper websites – rather than to sites operated by the newspapers.

That leaves online newspapers attracting disappointing advertising revenues that can’t begin to make up for the loss of those dollars on the print side. To wit, the University of Texas study reported that total newspaper industry digital ad revenues increased only about 15% between 2010 and 2014, going from ~$3 billion to ~$3.5 billion.  That’s pretty paltry.

The problem goes beyond ad revenue concerns too. In a market survey conducted in 2012, two-thirds of newspaper subscribers stated that preferred the print version of their daily newspaper over the web version.

I find that finding totally believable. I am a print subscriber to The Wall Street Journal whereas I read other newspaper fare online.  My daily time spent with the print WSJ ranges from 30 minutes to an hour, and I peruse every section of the paper “linearly.”  It’s an immersive experience.

With online newspaper sites, I hunt for one or two topics, check out the headlines and maybe a story or two, and that’s it. It’s more a “hit and run” operation, and I’m out of there in five minutes or less.

The notion of carefully picking my way through all of the menu items on an online newspaper’s navbar? Forget it.

And with such a tentative relationship with online newspapers, do I want to pay for that online access? Nope.

Magnify that to the entire market, and the web traffic stats show the same thing, which is why online advertising revenues are so underwhelming.

Once again, the optimistic goals of newspaper marketers are running up against cold, hard reality. The fact is, people don’t “read” online in the traditional sense, and they’re quick to jump from place to place, in keeping with the “ADD” most all of us have developed in our online behaviors.

There just isn’t a good way that newspapers can take their product and migrate it to the web without losing readers, losing ad revenue – and indeed, losing the differentiation they’ve built for quality long-form journalism.  And so the conundrum continues …

What about your print vs. online newspaper reading habits?  Are your experiences different from mine?  Please leave a comment for the benefit of other readers.

Downsizing hits America’s most prestigious business media properties.

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bwsjThis past week, the business media world was buzzing about the inadvertent release of information concerning pending layoffs at Barron’s magazine, thanks to editor-in-chief Ed Finn mistakenly hitting “reply all” on a message intended for just one person.

But the more interesting news is what’s happening right now with two of America’s most important national print publishing properties: Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal.

Up until now, it was thought that a select handful of America’s largest and most pervasive publications with national reach and reputation would be the ones least susceptible to problems befalling the industry regarding declining advertising revenues and changing news consumption habits.

At or near the top of the list of those rarefied properties were these two publications for sure.

But now we know a different reality — or at least a more complicated one. WSJ editor-in-chief Gerard Baker announced last week that the publication is seeking a “substantial number” of employee buyouts to limit the extent of involuntary layoffs that will need to happen otherwise.

The WSJ buyout offer been extended to all news employees worldwide – managerial and non-managerial – and includes a lucrative voluntary severance benefit that’s 1.5 times larger than the company’s standard buyout package.

WSJ employees will need to make up their minds quickly, as the buyout offer is good only until the end of October.

wsjbAs for Barron’s, its situation became public only after the Ed Finn memo was received in the New York City newsroom of The Wall Street Journal in error.  The Finn memo, which had been intended for Dow Jones Media Group publisher Almar Latour, speculates on how The Wall Street Journal’s announcement might affect an upcoming round of layoffs at Barron’s.

That bit was “new news” to pretty much everyone.

Aside from the “drama” of news scoops happening because of unintentional actions, the bigger question is this: What do these layoffs and buyouts portend?  Is it the end of the adjustments – or just the beginning?

Clues to that answer come in Gerard Baker’s memo, where he reveals that The Wall Street Journal has “begun an extensive review of operations as part of a broader transformation program.”

Let’s see what kind of “silver bullet” business strategy they end up devising – and whether it will have its intended effect.

Memo to newspaper publishers: Don’t ‘diss’ your print subscribers.

Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research, Media, Media Consumption, Social Commentary , , , , , , ,

nindA few weeks ago, the Boston Globe stubbed its toe in major fashion when it changed the company it uses to deliver ~115,000 hard-copy versions of the daily paper in the Boston metro area.

And the problems continue to persist even now.

No doubt, the decision to switch home delivery services was made out of a desire to save money rather than to improve service.  And one can understand why management might have been looking for ways to cut production costs on the print version compared to the “go-go” online/digital realm.

But focusing on solely millennials and other younger customers can come back to “bite you on the bottom line” – which is exactly what happened in the case of the Globe.

Evidently, the new delivery service was untested – at least in terms of taking on a client with volumes as large as Boston’s leading newspaper.

As it turned out, tens of thousands of papers weren’t delivered, sparking a cataclysm of loud, negative feedback.

The pique of customers went well-beyond failing to receive something that had been paid for. In the case of the Globe’s extensive Baby Boomer subscriber base, missing home delivery struck at the heart of the time-honored rituals of how they receive and consume their news.

Consider this: The average subscriber to the Boston Globe pays around $700 per year for their home-delivery subscription.

That’s more than $80 million per year in income for the paper – before factoring in advertising revenue.

Of course, the costs of producing and delivering the print product exceeds that of digital. But this subscription base is more loyal than digital news consumers precisely because they value how the news is presented to them.

Let’s not forget that for people born before 1965, most are emotionally attached to print far more than those in other demographic groups. As Gordon Plutsky, a director of applied intelligence at IDG, writes about the Boston Globe snafu:

“[It’s] not just the physical paper, but the ritual of getting the paper off their driveway or front steps and starting their day spreading out the broadsheet and scanning the news. They missed curling up with coffee or tea and working the crossword puzzle or cutting coupons.  It is easy to forget that until the mid-‘90s, this was the only way to read the news and, for Boomers, it is how they learned to read and interact with the world.  Their brains are wired for print in the same way Gen Z is wired for mobile.”

Perhaps the Globe’s business and administrative staffers lost sight of that fact. Maybe they treated their “unsexy” print subscribers as an afterthought while forgetting that this segment of their customer base is critical to the very survival of their paper – and the industry – in a period of transition.

True, delivering the news to print customers is more expensive than doing so digitally. But these customers are more predictable and loyal, versus fickle and finicky.

… But only if the product is delivered. Fail in that fundamental function, and the gig is up.

nosThe Boston Globe’s print readers are hardly unique. Recently, Pew Research Center surveyed consumers in three urban markets.  Despite the differences in these markets (geographic, economic, social), a highly significant percentage of respondents in all three metro areas reported that they read only the print version of their local newspaper:

  • Denver, CO: ~46% read only the print version of their local newspaper
  • Macon, GA: ~48% read print only
  • Sioux City, IA-NE-SD: ~53% read print only

This isn’t to suggest that Boomer audiences are a bunch of rubes who aren’t connected to the digital world. Far from it:  They tend to be better educated and more wealthy (with more disposable income) than other demographic segments.  Their attachment to print isn’t in lieu of digital, but more in concert with their online habits.

Unlike other generations, they’re not single-channel as much as omni-channel consumers. The keys to newspaper publishers’ continued relevance are bound up in how they serve this older but critically important segment of their customer base.

Speaking personally, I can “take it or leave it” when it comes to print.  I don’t subscribe to a daily print paper, and the bulk of my news comes to me from digital sources.  But there’s something quite comfortable about sitting down with a quality daily paper and reading the news stories therein — including long-form journalism pieces that are difficult to find very many places these days.

There are millions more people across the country that are happy to continue paying for the privilege of consuming the news in just such a fashion.  Indeed, they’re the newspaper industry’s most loyal readers.