We are only now learning how to sell audience based on what we know or surmise about our audience. But we moved beyond even that on Saturday, focusing on the messages businesses want to communicate to prospective customers, most of which should be...March 21st Manifesto
Newspapers are in crisis. The old revenue model is no longer viable. If media companies want to produce journalism, they’ll need to find new ways to fund it — even if those ways are not explicitly tied to editorial content.
On March 21, the undersigned will gather in Washington, DC to start creating the new revenue models everyone agrees are needed, but no one has yet delivered. We call this effort RevenueTwoPointZero.
But unlike recent confabs of executives, editors and academics, we are hands-on professionals charged with delivering media solutions every day. And because we’re hands-on, we know how build to prototypes to demonstrate our ideas to the newspaper industry. We aim to do that by the end of the day on March 21st.
We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy. The latest report from Pew concurs. Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it from advertising.
We will begin with these tasks:
- Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.
- Create a better CraigsList.
- Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.
- Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.
This ad hoc group has been assembled by Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design and Matt Mansfield of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Jacobson has been talking about online revenue for more than a decade. Mansfield is a former deputy managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News and is the current president of the Society for News Design.
The Society and its members have been at the cutting edge of virtually every newspaper innovation in the past 30 years including pagination, color, digital imaging and multimedia. SND has more direct leadership experience with radical change than any other group in the newspaper industry. And everyone in the industry agrees that radical change is needed.
Despite the fact that most of us come from editorial, we pledge to focus 100 percent of our energy on March 21 to developing advertising models. Our commitment is such that we are paying our own way. We are employed at the following places, but we are not representing them in this endeavor.
Vernon Loeb, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Eric Seidman, AARP
Jay Small, Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group and Small Initiatives, Inc.
Mary Specht, Gannett
Yuri Victor, Gannett
Jon Wile, The Washington Post
Chrys Wu, Washington Post Digital
Chris Amico, PBS NewsHour Online
Patrick Cooper, USA Today
Kristen Novak, USAToday.com
William Couch, USAToday.com
Wesley Lindamood, USAToday.com
John Kondis, National Geographic Digital Media
Kris Viesselman, National Geographic
Kaitlin Yarnell, National Geographic
Chris Courtney, Tribune Interactive
Ernie Smith, Express and ShortFormBlog
David Kordalski, Cleveland Plain Dealer
Steve Dorsey, Detroit Free Press and SND Secretary/Treasurer
Matt Mansfield, SND President and Medill
Alan Jacobson, Brass Tacks Design
13. March 2009 at 4:45 pm :
Cool. Interesting to see so many news design folks involved. Maybe someday we’ll join forces.
13. March 2009 at 5:00 pm :
Godspeed.
I do think it’s a good idea to get content producers thinking about advertising and the business side of journalism. Most have never done this. Journalism is a business afterall.
I still think you’d be better served to have at least a few non-editorial people at this.
13. March 2009 at 5:17 pm :
Go team! I resemble your remarks. Godspeed.
14. March 2009 at 1:07 pm :
Great idea, looking forward to following the results.
15. March 2009 at 8:04 am :
Thank you for your goals: advertising is the answer. Free content with paid ads is the answer. I am glad there is a group out there making this assumption and coming up with solutions with that in mind.
16. March 2009 at 11:21 am :
what a smart timely endeavor…what a great group of people giving their time to participate…
16. March 2009 at 12:23 pm :
It is childish to think that your group will discover the answer to journalism especially with such a limited scope, as if you are blessed by god. This has been done before and for a longer period of time. You are asking the wrong questions.
If you want to see where we’ve already been with a similar group, please read this series of posts:
http://www.fixjournalism.com/?p=400
16. March 2009 at 6:45 pm :
Mike:
Isn’t the premise here more about the business and revenue model, and not about the journalism?
Not that I automatically presume that this initiative can automatically crack the nut that an entire industry has been bashing its head against for years. I don’t think they presume that, either.
But this takes a different angle of attack. A bold idea. Let’s see where it goes.
16. March 2009 at 9:32 pm :
Mike: You and I were tweeting back and forth about this earlier today, so thanks for taking a look at the post I did on the SND Update site (find that here: http://bit.ly/YiHK4).
And thanks for being passionate about what might work and what won’t. As I said, we are not foolish enough to think we can figure everything (anything?) out in one day, but we have to start somewhere and we need to see how design thinking can help.
I do think there’s something about limiting the scope to revenue to start, especially because so many other people are looking at the entire world of journalism. That might actually help us be productive.
16. March 2009 at 9:58 pm :
Matt,
I posted my first comment before I started talking to you on Twitter and before my recent blog post. It was abrupt, I admit.
I think it’s a good idea to think about revenue models. But the post above specified “old-fashioned” advertising models which I think is a bad idea.
Dean and Matt,
I was not clear in my first comments. But I think if you’re going to talk about revenue models you have to know what you’re making revenue on first. My point is that journalism is current in an identity crisis and I don’t feel like you can market/sell/monetize something that does not have an identity. Journalism has had a solid place in society for a long time until now. It is now so many things, which is why so many divergent experiments for revenue and operation exist.
If you’re going to think of revenue model for journalism, you need to first identify what kind of journalism you want to monetize. Or, as I posit in my blog post, What is journalism? What is it for?
It’s the chicken before the egg.
17. March 2009 at 3:27 pm :
As an advertising guy I applaud you all for this undertaking. I very much like the tasks you have identified intially and your direction. Those of us on the revenue side know we must figure out a way to do things differently but struggle with what that revenue module may be especially in the smaller to medium markets. Keep us in the loop and if your committee catches fire consider broading the group and its make up.
17. March 2009 at 5:52 pm :
Newspapers are in crisis. They still haven’t gotten the prosumer + long tail thing. They think the web is beating them in some unfair way. It is that victim mentality that is the prepetuating and deepening the crisis. TV is finally starting to get it so there is still hope for newspapers.
http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2008/05/media-economy-20.html
17. March 2009 at 9:54 pm :
Best of luck! I hope you can discover something innovative!
Have you considered charging readers for a day’s pass on the online version of newspapers? I’m talking something small, like $.05 a day.
18. March 2009 at 12:59 am :
You’re onto something. Look forward to hearing about the results and thank you! Best, Lydia Chavez, UC Berkeley, Mission Loc@l
18. March 2009 at 7:25 am :
Color me a hopeful skeptic. IMO, one of the biggest continuing blunders of our industry is too much time spent listening to ourselves hem and haw, and not enough time devoted listening to our customers and solving their problems. Please, prove me wrong this time.
18. March 2009 at 7:30 am :
As a former publisher and executive editor for Knight Ridder and McClatchy, I am encouraged that someone is trying to be innovative.
I have long argued that newspaper companies cannot tweak their way to the future. We need bold ideas, so don’t rule out anything and don’t be intimidated by naysayers. You just might come up with a solution.
One idea I would love to see you explore is a partnership with Amazon or one of the other eBook book producers. It would work on the Gillette principal — give the customer the razor and then make your money off the blades.
Here’s how it could work. Trade advertising with Amazon for each Kindle. Then give the Kindle to any subscriber who agrees to EZPay $9.99 a month. For most papers, that is more than enough to make up for the lost insert revenue. Plus it saves on delivery costs and printing.
The customer would have a free Amazon as long as he/she continues to pay the monthly fee. The advantage for Amazon would be that the reader is likely to order more books or other publications. Plus, they get an incredible amount of advertising.
The papers would have to produce a mobile page that is easy to read online and it could even have sponsors or advertising. The Washington Post is already doing something like this for the iPhone. Or the eReader version could be a digital paper much like Olive or NewsStand produce. The advantage to this is that the paper could continue to sell regular display advertising that would also be digital with hotlinks back to the advertiser’s website.
Something like this would solve the biggest problem newspaper websites face — older readers who don’t have or don’t want computers. Believe me, they’ll love the Kindle.
Good luck with your meeting. Please count me in as someone to help in anyway I can. After 30 years in the business (including a stint working with Steve Dorsey), I’m not ready to give up on the future.
18. March 2009 at 9:15 am :
The problem as I see it _not_ “how do we create content?”
We’re experts at content creation and message massage.
Its just that we’ve never been paid for it. _Never_.
Our message, our medium if you’ll pardon the McCluhanism, has always been carried and paid for by the advertisers. They gave us a ride, but only grudgingly.
If we had credibility, they liked our reporting when it was favorable and could take comfort that our alleged media effects were just that, alleged. We were living proof that, as Leibnitz said, “the power of the press belongs to those who own one.”
Now we have some real competition, not for the fruits of our journalistic and entertainment labors, but for the dead trees that we used to print them on. (Yes, we can even extend the metaphor to any physical product which embodies any kind of message, textual, audio, video…)
So lets restate the problem as “How can we deliver a message and get paid?”
That is something quite novel since the actual product of the creation, design, writing, fact checking and editing is the _process_ of content creation and has always been hidden behind the delivered goods.
We have to become far more open about the work, the process, that goes into the creation. No more cliquish awards hidden behind red velvet ropes. We have to be quite visible, bold in our byline, instead of being relegated to moldering in a bibliographical reference.
So, to reiterate, how can we deliver a message and get paid?
By allying ourselves with a service, an existing service, which delivers billions of messages, everyday, all over the planet, for trifling sums.
I refer of course to the international postal services, which in many countries already function as non-lending, non-interest paying ‘cash-flow’ banks. (Stamps and Postal Money Orders are as good as cash, though of limited use. Some postal services accept cash from their customers for the payment of certain bills and will issue cash to their customers for the settlement of certain obligations.)
Now just authorize the postal service for the collection for and delivery of on-line content.
They can take care of collections and delivery of RSS packaged data, regardless of the actual form and format, and issue payments to the originators (say a news organization.)
This would require no changes in their systems or their charters and make the post offices relevant again, apart from the delivery of bad news, bills and junk mail.
18. March 2009 at 10:09 am :
I’ve been looking at the task list:
1. Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.
2. Create a better CraigsList.
3. Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.
4. Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.
Why are you wasting your time doing
1. Apple’s job,
2. Craig Newmark’s job,
3. the impossible (show them and they still wouldn’t get it, [might as well try to explain multidimensional network topologies to people who can't even read a map,]) and
4. the advertising agencies’ job?
These are all dead ends pointless tasks which show me that you’re are attacking the symptoms without having a clue as to the underlying fiscal disease.
You have to find a way of generating revenue for doing your job: journalism.
That requires that you ally yourselves with someone who’s business model is delivering information to any and all payers: the postal service. In fact we’ve been subsidizing them for years to do so.
Synergy requires that you think outside the box.
18. March 2009 at 10:13 am :
We’re “wasting time” on this because that’s where the money is. Journalism doesn’t generate revenue, nor should it.
18. March 2009 at 10:22 am :
Alan Jacobson wrote:
18. March 2009 at 10:13 am :
We’re “wasting time” on this because that’s where the money is. Journalism doesn’t generate revenue, nor should it.
=========================
Sorry, Alan, but you just lost me there. Just because no one’s done it well (i.e., generating revenue directly from a fee-for-content) arrangement doesn’t mean that it cannot or should not be done.
18. March 2009 at 10:42 am :
I agree completely.
Journalism hasn’t made a dime for a journalist outside of working for a newspaper.
But you assume that it can’t while it always has.
Its about time the creative and editorial processes were actually respected and turned into a revenue generation mechanism.
People bought newspapers for the news they contained and it was the tail that wagged the dog of all those ads, which paid for the paper.
The Web freed the reader from all those unfocused ads and pointless noise while people are more focused reading the news on-line OR using Google (and other search engines) to zero in on the information they are looking for.
The Web freed the advertisers from all that un-essential and pointless noise while they were able to reach their potential and current customers and be discovered by Google (and other search engines) zeroing in on the information they are looking for.
You can’t un-build the ‘Net, the Web or Google (and other search engines.)
You depend on those things as much as anyone else.
So what makes journalists unique?
THAT’S your selling point.
The rest is just temporary clap-trap.
Why don’t I know the name of the editor of my local paper, the name of a single journalist, researcher or fact checker?
Because they have been hiding, toiling in obscurity, behind a masthead.
Now the mast-heads are going away.
The future belongs to the “Matt Drudge”s among us, the “Ariana Huffington”s
The future belongs to a synergy of the content creators, who should be concerned with nothing but content creation, and their readership/listenership/audience.
Leave the delivery to the post office who can be our modern day news-agents and collect the nickles and dimes for us.
20. March 2009 at 5:10 pm :
From the Ad side of the street…TeamR2.0 good start to your list! John, love your zeal. I do not know if activation rates on a kindle platform ROP ads will be comparable to print…study that so you can sooth the fears your advertisers will have. Some additional thoughts as you prepare to meet…The number one online ad crisis is CPM value. Action point 1. Make a pact when you meet on the 21st to drop every Google ad and or remnant ad from your sites. Google will eat your local lunch as you justfy the ad purchase. Insist on a local CPM that is sensible by product and by city size… $15 or > min. may be a benchmark you can shoot for. The number two online ad crisis is miserable activation rates (less than 1% onlne vs. as high as 7% for print) (points well made by Alan Jacobson’s post). Action point 2. Concentrate efforts on upgrading your ad producing creative staff. Products follow people. You have spent the $ to get the newsroom up and current…now start cultivating 3 dementional ad producers and STUDY what works and does not. For instance, some text ad formats seem to work as well or better than display ads. Point 3. Strengthen your print product. (others have already unpacked this subject) abandon those efforts at your own peril. Point 4. Renegotiate your AP contract and get back the control of your news content. Take a cue from the record industry and fight the dissemination of your hard earned content for second party commercial gain (Napster-esk). Watermark it, copyright it, organize and sue Google News. 5. Study online micro stores to help local business direct merchandize product with a pay by performance price model. Hosted carts are already available. Leverage your audience not just your ad relationships by facilitating local merchants ability to sell direct. 6. Better define your electronic content consumer markets and package them to ad buyers. You will need to choose between demographic or geographic markets. You will think that demographic is better (normal mass reach thinking) but I believe the better money is by targeting geographic zones as it assumes some of the demographic prizm values but nets a greater number of local advertisers who are concerned about location. 7. Craig list survives by having a virtual blind box function on the buying side and self serve on the posting side. This ugly combo has earned it an F rating from the BBB for pervasive fraud. If we create a blind box for buyers and a human interface for posting we will one up them. 8. Hire a separate team for your new online sales functions. I am convinced that the print ad sellers are not capable of doing online justice. Good Luck!
2. May 2009 at 3:50 pm :
I don’t really care to crown or demonize you guys like some on this thread have taken to, but I really appreciate you dedicating your time and resources to trying to fix the journalism industry. I remain cautiously optimistic and will keep a very interested eye on this site.