McGuire on Media

It has been major sport for some time to mock the newspaper business and its executives for failure to act. Now words like “collusion’ and “bullies” and “too late” are pock-marking what should be an intelligent debate.

Jeff Jarvis, a guru way out of my league, is the hero of the critical set whose main message to publisher  is “You blew it.” He hammers that message home and accuses newspapers publishers of a “hissy fit” because they raised the issue of AP and other papers charging aggregators for content links.

It is late in the game for newspapers to try to gain control of their content. Is it too late, is the more important question. When your industry is teetering on the brink of extinction even though you still have millions of readers I’d say it is not too late.  I think critics need to breathe in slowly and consider these crucial points.

While the stock market, media visionaries and critics see the handwriting on the wall there are still a phenomenal number of newspaper readers and content consumers. In some ways that’s a problem, but simply dumping those readers without viable alternatives seems like folly to me.

Forget the monopoly thinking. Newspapers are no more monopolies these days than ice cream parlors. If information is the business, they are not monopolies. If advertising messages are the business, then newspapers certainly are not monopolies.  If Phil Meyer’s term from The Vanishing Newspaper, the advertising “tollgate” is the test, newspapers certainly don’t control that tollgate anymore.

I have heard noises about potential anti-trust actions surrounding some of the newspaper closings and potential closings. I have laughed out loud. I think it will require phenomenal department of justice creativity to find a dying industry guilty of anti-trust behavior. 

In the same way I simply do not see collusion in the meeting Alan Mutter describes in his fantastic Sunday post.  If an industry whose business model has imploded searches for a new business model I don’t see collusion. I see recognition that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a train.

Dean Singleton said in an interview April 6 that newspapers “have been very timid about protecting our content.” Yes, and it gets hot in the desert too. It has been a while since a more obvious statement has been uttered. Even at the expense of explaining the obvious it is important to understand the reason for that failure to protect content.  Newspapers, unlike any other business in America, have two products.  Newspapers produced content that was consumed by readers for a relatively low price. Newspapers then turned around and sold those eyeballs to our advertisers at a very high price, arguably too high.  And it is that business of selling eyeballs to advertisers that has imploded. We are learning with each passing day that click throughs from aggregators are not being monetized enough to support once-healthy newspaper businesses 

For some time it has struck critics as common sense that newspapers should redo their business model.  Apparently there were parameters around that demand. I am convinced that newspapers’ relationship with people who want to distribute business messages does need to change. However, that does not have to mean only  the advertiser part of that model gets tweaked. Newspapers must look for revenue everywhere, and that content product has value which needs to be captured. When we talk business model we need to talk content and a new form of business messaging.

Jeff Jarvis is ardent and eloquent in his belief that it is too late and the newspaper business blew it. I can agree with him and still ask what would he have the industry do?  Throw in the towel? I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I have always found that simply leaving them in the past and giving up is a distasteful option. I try to circle back and improve the outcome.

We can be critical of newspapers’ timing in their effort to own their content, but the effort is an important one not only in the interest of protecting the business of newspapers, but in protecting the quality of journalism that lubricates democracy. 

Presstime has published a pretty interesting analysis of the future by a bunch of folks with lots of theories about where newspapers are heading. The piece offers some good insights. Presstime was kind enough to include my comments, but they edited some of my wisdom just as they edited everybody else.  I think it it is notable that there is not a lot or agreement in that post

A blog allows me to print my comments as I submitted them.

1) What is the mission of the core newspaper print product these days?

The mission of all print products should be to make sense of the news to make citizens better. Some of that is an altruistic democratic notion, but print products can make readers better in a host of other ways too. . Print products cannot get caught up in “commodity” information. Everything a print source does must “add value.” Even weather and sports must be presented in ways that distinguish the information from commodity sources.

2) You’re starting the newspaper print product from scratch. What stays and what goes (e.g., sections of the paper, beats, days published, classified ads)? How do you rethink the parts you keep?

What important here is not the individual pieces, but how I think about it. I think about the value proposition of specific readers in specific demos and I contemplate the “value-add” my organization can bring. I concentrate on “stuff people don’t know.” In every news category I have to develop approaches and material that does not fall on the commodity side of the news line. A simple AP story on the bailout simply is not enough. I have to explain the bailout, I have to tell readers whether it makes sense and I must tell readers what it means for them to in the efforts to buy a car or a house a week from Thursday.

3) A number of newspapers are dropping sections or days of distribution. How does remaking the newspaper in these ways strengthen the core product in the long run?

In most cases it is short-term thinking to pare costs. I believe that printing some days may be a viable answer, but it’s happening for all the wrong reasons. I think more newspapers ought to be asking where are the holes in my media market and how can I fill them? And, they should be asking if we make certain moves in this market like publishing three times a week, what are the counter moves I can expect. I am going to be stunned if a competitor does not put a Sunday-Monday sports product into Detroit. The Detroit papers should do that before a competitor does.

4) Who is the audience the core product is aiming at now, in terms of readers and advertisers? Who should it be aiming at?

I believe too many core products are aiming at all people. Too much time money and energy has been wasted chasing young readers with the print product. We should get practical and realize the print product needs to be targeted 35-80. Ride that market down as you develop truly innovative web and electronic products for younger readers. We clearly have two audiences. It is time we treat both with equal respect rather than chase the other with the wrong vehicle. This approach would allow us to be nimble if a device appears that connects the two audiences again. That could happen.

5) In the past, reinventing the core product might have been seen as just redesigning the look of the paper. Is that still part of it? What else needs to be done?

Again, that would lead to only incremental change. Print publishers need to totally rethink what they are doing you are doing and adopt a process like this. There are many others, but you need a process.. A) Decide on a business model: Do I want to deliver eyeballs to customers or do I want to entice customers to pay for the product, or do I want a combination of the two. How do I support the news gathering I want to do? B) Determine my market. Is this a mass endeavor or it is targeted? What are the information opportunities for that market? C) What is my role in the democratic process? If you want one go for it. If you want to be all Britney, all the time, chuck the democracy façade. C) What are the market’s information needs and potentials? D) Develop a value proposition that adds value to commodity information. What is it that we can do for our market that nobody else can and how valuable will that be to the market? If it is a commodity product I can’t charge much. If it is truly special and distinguishable, the value of my product is greater. That will differentiate us from competitors and make us indispensable to readers E) Invent a new product that is not tied to yesterday but is tied to serving your market or community, create and add value that meets the market’s needs.

If you totally disconnect from yesterday a process like that should produce a new product that meets audience needs and business needs.

6) In a Web-first, print-second world, what role does the core product play? What is its relation to other products?

As I said before the web and print products must serve totally different audiences. Your web product is for younger readers and is the core of your long-term future. Your print product serves a still large audience that will die over the next 25 years. Do not chase one audience with the wrong product.

7) How can be the core product be reinvented or redesigned for greater synergy with online efforts?

Implicit in that question is a belief that the audiences are going to cross over. I don’t agree with that premise. Newspapers right now are trying desperately to hold on to the mass by forcing those two audiences together. I do not think it is going to work.
What’s the biggest obstacle in the way of reinventing the core product, and how do you remove (or at least lessen) it?

The biggest obstacle is this desire to create one product for all people. Those days are dead and too few publishers are willing to let go of that idea.

9) What will the core product look like in two, five and 10 years?

It depends on whether we make the right audience choice. If we design a value-added product for people who want to read a newspaper. It will focus on political news, sense-making, story-telling and “holy smokes Mabel stories” that high-end newspaper reader’s desire most.

There are lots of  musings out there about ASNE’s cancellation of this year’s annual convention, but the one that grabbed my attention came from my friend Steve Buttry. Steve opines that a merger between ASNE and APME makes the most sense. I think it is important that the record show that merger between the two organizations is not a recent discussion.

Steve Smith pronounced APME the feistier of the two organizations and in my ASNE-biased mind that has certainly been  true when it comes to merger. I don’t want to engage in any neiner-neiner” across backyards, but right at the turn of the millennium there was a great chance for a merger and it fell apart. 

A 2000 article in E & P says that there were no merger plans, but the two entities were ” emphasizing a commitment to work more closely with each other.” Yeah, right.  Those were was the really the words of a broken down negotiation that never flew. I was there.

Jerry Ceppos, who was president of APME in 1999-2000 acknowledged in a Poynter piece last year  there was “a process that led from my fairly private dream of a merger of ASNE and APME . . . to a simple last-ditch effort at cooperation between the two groups . . . . to the failure of both ideas because of organizational rivalries, among other reasons.”

That is a key quote. The talks fell apart because of rivalries that were in my mind always a bit mysterious. I still believe Rich Oppel and I, the top two officers in ASNE at the time, could have pulled it off politically, but we never got the chance. Jerry had been the instigator of the idea and he showed tremendous political courage by raising the issue. He got politically annihilated by APME board members who apparently thought ASNE was playing the role of the bully. That despite the fact Jerry carried the idea to us. I learned a long time ago that if somebody calls you arrogant, you have at least made somebody feel as if you have behaved arrogantly.  Perhaps ASNE did something that was arrogant, but I never got it at the time.

The reason this blog is important historically is because one of the key players over the years in making a merger difficult was the Associated Press.  Can I hand you a smoking gun that proves that?  No, I cannot. However, while I was born at night, it wasn’t last night. I am convinced to my core the AP actively lobbied against such a merger repeatedly. At one point I was told AP offered new assistance to APME to keep it running. Perhaps that was the right thing to do, but I do think it is a tad misleading to say organizational rivalries stopped a merger.  Institutional rivalries were at play too–AP’s.

Ceppos said in his 2008 Poynter piece, “Maybe my ideas came too early. Maybe I was a bad politician. But everything has changed (except for my political skills), and it’s clear that now is the time to merge to produce one blockbuster group rather than two diluted ones–if it’s not already too late.”

I do not fault anybody’s political skills. I do acknowledge dramatic change.  I don’t know if it was too late in 2008 and I don’t know if it is too late now. But with the profoundly changed role AP is playing in today’s newspaper world, perhaps it is time to have the discussion about one merged organization with AP sitting on the sideline without exerting influence.