the newspaper business

The Tennessean.com (Nashville), News-Press.com (Ft. Myers), DesMoinesRegister.com, and maybe others, I didn’t check them all, have made the transition to the same website design.

Courier-Journal.com is in beta. Login: louisvil-beta Password: louisvil

Coming soon to your Gannett city.

I like the design, and if it works, why not roll it out nationally. Takes out the problem of ad placement for national advertisers, centralizes design/support staff. Lot of advantages. I don’t see any downside.

McClatchey’s CEO Gary Pruitt will be installed as the Newspaper Association of America’s chairman in April. He tells execs not to attend. Same with American Society of Newspaper Editors.

“I would prefer they make the wise decision due to economic conditions,” Pruitt told E&P late Thursday. “The vast majority are not attending, it is a larger percentage than usual.”

In other words, there’s nothing going on at these major meetings that would benefit you.

Junkets.

Pruitt said he will be unaffected by the attendance of McClatchy papers. “It is not important to me,”

During opening remarks at SNPA’s recent Key Executives Conference, Reid Ashe, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Media General, examined six myths about new media. Ashe is chairman of SNPA’s Marketing Committee, which sponsored the conference.

We may need a completely different sales model for the Internet. It might include telesales or even self-service advertising. Much of Google’s $16 billion in advertising revenue, for example, is never touched by a sales rep.

(emphasis mine)
The stubbornness of newspaper executives to change just astounds me. He lays out all the ways newspapers are different than online, but we only MAY need to change our sales model?

We’re fooling ourselves, though, if we think everything works like newspapers. If we let it, our lens of experience can produce a myopic view.

Yeah, I think I first hear that about eight years ago? Turn of the century? Methinks somebody is stuck.

In an email today, NAA suggested checking this out…

In NAA’s recent report, “Imagining the Future of Newspapers,” Mindy McAdams provides two anecdotes the newspaper business can use to improve itself and its prospects: content and delivery.

…which was written in November.

The most recent entry is from December 20, 2007.

w00t!

The NAA is cutting edge! They have a blog!

Well almost. What NAA is going is cross-posting from other media bloggers. 

Some refer to that as splogging. I guess the only difference is NAA asked permission.

Websites catering to niche markets are popping up and taking local content that newspapers should have owned. Like local search, high school sports, and college sports. A Forbes dud says…

Why do these sites even exist? The newspaper industry should have owned these local niches, especially anything pertaining to local sports and entertainment. And even when they had the foresight to get in early, they lacked the smarts to stay with it when the payoff wasn’t immediate.

We have local search, and local sports, and local college sports on our site. And for a two person operation, we do it pretty well, with occasional slide shows and video.

We have the Amplifier to supplement our coverage of Arts and Entertainment.

The two sports niche sites here haven’t been updated in ages. At least two free web only classified sites have launched and failed. Craigslist is pretty puny compared to our classifieds.  There is no other entertainment site for this area.

Forbes also says…

Instead, the vast majority of newspapers own just one Web site organized exactly like a print newspaper with the expectation that readers want the same one-stop-shopping menu of local, national, international, sports and entertainment news that they traditionally got from the print paper.

I agree. But newspaper site traffic is growing, newspapers are recognizing the shifting of how media is consumed, so we’ll get there.

We agree on one thing: newspapers are not moving fast enough. Including this one. But we’re working on it. There still is a hesitation here not to put breaking news on the website. We do it, but not daily.

It will come sooner rather than later. Do I wish it would have happened a year ago? Yes. But I don’t run the newsroom.

Mitch Joel says:

Print publications need to embrace the new reality that they have become Multimedia Publications. The big wins are not going to happen by putting their print materials online.

Chris Houchens says:

But, with all things, moderation. While I wholeheartedly agree that a media outlet needs to develop and nurture an online presence that goes beyond the abilities of their traditional counterparts, there also needs to be a master plan for both.

Read more here and here.

Chris said newspapers are in for a painful transition. I agree.

Without Parade magazine, the world’s worst dictator would go unnoticed.

Kim Jong-il of North Korea has been designated the World’s Worst Dictator in PARADE Magazine’s 6th annual listing by Contributing Editor David Wallechinsky. Kim beat out Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, who held the No. 1 position for three years in a row, from 2005 to 2007. Kim was No. 1 in 2003 and 2004.

Who knows if this will get printed in the Daily News, so I’m putting myself on the record here. For more click here.
Dear Editor,

Kentucky and the nation is being mislead by the use of the term broadband to include DSL.

The story, Friday, Feb. 15, headlined: USDA, FCC launch internet initiative; uses the term broadband and DSL as synonyms. The fact of the matter is that the United States lags woefully behind other developed nations in the roll out of high speed internet.

Technically, you can refer to DSL as broadband, because the FCC has no definition for the speed required to be a broadband connection. In essence the FCC says anything other than dial-up is broadband. But that would be like referring to every paved surface as an Interstate highway.
Kentucky Connect is helping perpetrate this deception because they make no distinction between the speed of the connection.

As most internet users know, speed is everything.

In Bowling Green, the best connection an individual homeowner can expect is 7 megabits per second (mbps) download speed via Insight Cable.

In France and Sweden the download rate is 18 mbps. China and Korea are 50+ mbps down. This determines the speed at which text, images, audio or video is available at a computer.

For Kentucky Connect to issue reports that do not attempt to measure and classify download speeds is giving a false impression to the public.

If Kentucky Connect wants the commonwealth to be near the top for internet access, they should be lobbying to make access to high speed internet as easily accessible and affordable as water and electricity.

They should also be fighting the FCC to set a definition of “broadband” or “high speed.”

Kentucky Connect is nothing more than a “feel good” program designed to change perceptions without improving our technological capabilities.

Gawker is pretty much a junk news site so one shouldn’t hold them to very high standards, but it’s pretty obvious they didn’t even wikipedia their story about the New York Daily News adding color.

The headline for the story was Adventures in ROYGBIV: Why the Daily News Is Going Color.

If you don’t remember seventh grade science or art, Roy G Biv is the mnemonic way to remember the colors of the light spectrum in order of wave length: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Which has nothing to do with printing color in a newspaper.

For those non-newspaper readers, all those lovely colors are created from four inks, referred to as CMYK. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (K)

Pretty amazing, huh? That newspapers use four colors and nature uses seven?

The founder of Monster.com tinkered around and blew a bunch of VC money ($40 million?) on a website for the boomer crowd called Eons.com.

Eons.com is drawing it’s last breath, so now Jeff Taylor is after another bastion of newspapers - obituaries.

He’s entering a crowded field with a rather limited market. Legacy.com has been around a few years and has a very complete online obit package. There are other smaller players but Legacy.com is the market leader by a long shot.

Many funeral homes offer a “memorial website” as an upsell for their services. If Taylor’s obit site wants the information and thinks it will be free, he might have a rude awakening.

• Many newspapers charge for obituaries. The Daily News doesn’t.

• Many newspapers are cutting down on the space for obits by eliminating facts the families would like to have included. The Daily News is more liberal in including these facts than a few years back.

• Many newspapers won’t put in photographs of the deceased. The Daily News will upon request.

If a newspaper is publishing basic “death notices” ie: absolute minimum, and is charging for anything more, an alternative might be attractive to the families/funeral homes.

Once again, an entrepreneur has set his sights on taking away a probable revenue source and for sure readership generator.

Here we go again.