The Mu

Newspapers were originally very good at being part of the communities they served.  To save money, they started buying content, thus losing their connection to the community.  Now that bought content is available for free all over the Internet, meaning that many newspapers have lost any edge they may have once had.  TechDirt reports on a newspaper in Austin that has ties with the South By Southwest (SxSW) event and is doing very well thank you.

This is another example of the “local sells” idea that I have been pushing lately. But imagine if someone were selling local stories to a local newspaper — it would still lack a true connection to the community.  So we’re not just talking about paying lip service to the idea of local content, but really being involved in and aware of local happenings.

Clay Shirky recently wrote a brilliant piece about the inevitable death of newspapers.  He gives a bunch of reasons for this inevitability, but also casts the light of hope on the situation.  He does that by showing how we are in the midst of an upheaval, a revolution, and predicting the outcome or showing what will replace the dead newspapers is impossible at this point.

Lots of people are tuning up to play the funeral dirge for the newspaper business, but Shirky points out that journalism will continue to thrive, albeit in a different form.  This makes sense to me, and I think the previous doom and gloom scenarios about how the Internet is making people illiterate are utterly false.  Writing well is just as important as ever and the proliferation of blogs provides more people an opportunity to practice the craft.  I would also venture that investigative and research skills (another key aspect of good journalism) are not diminished by the Internet per se (as many people claim, pointing to aggregators and link farms as proof of laziness).  There were lazy journalists before the Internet and there will be in the future too.

I think the future of media is murky, yet bright — hey, you can get a sunburn on an overcast day.  I look forward to seeing the waters clear over the next few years.

The headline is of course a red herring.  The newspaper business is dying.

But as late as last year, there was one sector of the newspaper industry that was still growing (at least in several geographies): local weeklies.  Amazingly, advertising salespeople in this niche are just now turning to the web to augment the advertising packages they offer to clients. As I’ve been posting recently, locale-specific web advertising works.  The challenge for any media company is to include quality locale-specific content along with the advertising.  Citizen journalists, like the mythical shiftless immigrants that take the blame in other industries, are supposedly stealing jobs from “real reporters”.  In fact, there is a collusion of events and circumstances that have gutted most news gathering organizations.  Sadly, a vicious cycle compounds the problem: the more anemic a news gathering staff becomes, the less capable they are at producing quality content, the less the readers want to read, the less the advertisers want to pay, the less money the paper has, the more anemic a news gathering staff becomes…

Steve Yelvington is a brilliant man who (based on what I can tell from his brief bio) has worked in the newspaper business all his career.  But he is one of the few thinkers in this area, with such a background, who has broken out of his shell and is coming to pretty solid conclusions about how to move forward.  It’s cool to read about his work to implement a content management system for his company, but also get his perspective on the issues facing his industry as a whole.  Many of the issues are related to the newspapers trying to drive revenue and thinking they can charge for their online content.

One interesting conclusion he has come to is that combining the online and traditional print organizations into a single entity often fails.  I find this counter-intuitive.  But when I read his reasons for stating this, it is purely to do with human nature: the way people resist change.  I truly believe that if a media outlet were to launch tomorrow and they built a combined web/print model from the ground up, the combined effort would be much more natural.

Another key point that Yelvington tries to get people to listen to: unique visitors is a bogus statistic.  If you think you can capture 10 percent of the “85 zillion” unique visitors, you’re dreaming.  What you really want to focus on are the return visitors.  People who like your site enough that they keep coming back.  Yelvington warns that this number is usually surprisingly low.  His dire statement: “If you can’t get people to come back for free content, what makes you think they will pay?”

Yelvington also remarks frequently on his blog about something that is really at the heart of Media 3.0 thinking: technology matters far less than the community.  All the assumptions that the innovations in software and bandwidth are what really drive growth are discounting the power of social media: it’s about people not technology. Yelvington cites Pownce versus Twitter.  Pownce was slicker, faster, and easier to use.  But it is gone now.  Twitter had the critical mass of people interacting (so much so that the community on Twitter has a joke about “fail whale“: what happens when the traffic gets so heavy that Twitter just stops working).  The Twitter team has worked diligently to overcome the scaling problems and the “tweeting” community continues to grow.

I will continue to read Yelvington’s blog with interest.  It’s great to see new thinking coming out of an industry that most technology pundits have simply written off.