Drewbot

Pew Research’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just released “The Search for a New Business Model”, a new study “which combines detailed proprietary data from individual newspapers with in-depth interviews at more than a dozen major media companies” in order to understand how newspapers are digitally innovating or otherwise trying to stymie their rapidly disappearing print revenues.

It’s not pretty. Reading the report is like watching someone with a headwound fumble for tiny bandaids in the dark.

Here’s the narrative I walked away with:

• Digital revenues aren’t even close to covering print losses. For every $11 in print revenue, papers brought in $1 in digital revenue. Put a more depressing way: for every $1 gained in digital $7 are lost in print revenue.
• Newspapers don’t know how to sell digital advertising. Papers are barely selling targeted advertising. Instead, they choose (or only know how) to sell discrete display advertising campaigns. Such campaigns cannot scale to the scale of their audience and reduce the value of digital sales efforts by a factor or two.
• Newspapers are unable to hire digital talent. The majority of executives said it’s almost impossible to hire digitally fluent sales people, due to newspapers’ bad digital repuations. Further, even if they can hire digital talent they haven’t figured out how to integrate digital sales people with their traditional sales personnel.
• Newspapers don’t want to think about digital. A surveyed executive worries that they spend too much time working on digital, “We spend 90% of our time talking about 10% of our revenue.” A number of executives expressed concern that they have “too many people-whether it be in the newsroom, the boardroom or on the sales staff-who were too attached to the old way of doing things.”

Based on this report, I’d wager a large chunk of these businesses will die before they change.

Which would you rather be: a business with 100,000 print subscribers (which is the high-end of those surveyed) or a digital-only news startup with $100,000?

Publishers have stopped referring to their products as journalism, writing, literature, photography, or art. Today, everything is simply “content”.

Those working in media, especially digital media, can attest to the word’s popularity. Quantitatively we can observe this trend in the chart above: over the last ten years, annual financial reports from The New York Times have leaned more and more heavily on the word “content” when describing their business. The share of “journalism” has remained relatively flat.

The NYT and other publishers rely on the word “content” to help them understand the breadth of their output. But by reducing their writing, photography, videos and more to a single, nondescript term they’re setting themselves up for failure.

The Rise of “Content”

“Content” emerged with the rise of the Internet, which detached pieces of work from their primary media. Before the web, we referred to works by the media format which delivered them: as newspapers, magazines, paintings, photographs, records, CDs, and so on. As digital representations grew in popularity these monikers became increasingly awkward. Is a newspaper still a “paper” when the majority of its readers view it on screens? To abate this awkwardness, we began to search for a more apt term. We landed on “content”, a bucket term which we ask to describe anything a publisher could publish, from the most revelatory art to the most hackneyed rags.

At this point, “content” was an innocent, sloppy fix. A stopgap until the Internet settled down and a proper term could be coined. Unfortunately, the pace of innovation quickened and today language is unable to keep pace with rapidly emerging new ideas, art¹, and businesses.

So we’ve stuck with “content”.

The Assumptions & Allure of Content

To achieve its representative breadth, the word “content” makes two assumptions:

1. Each piece of “content” is equal and is therefore interchangeable: As stated earlier, “content” is used to represent a wide breadth of works. A Pulitzer winning report and a Business Insider slideshow are both single instances of “content.” The word must remain formless, devoid of emotion, and of indefinite form and quality. Any characteristic which might differentiate two works must be ignored. This rhetoric categorization gives rise to the second assumption.
2. “Content” production is trivial: Since each bit of “content” is interchangeable, “content” is only as hard to create as the easiest instance.

Publishers buy into these two assumptions because “content” allows them to easily measure and analyze their output. Messy qualitative measures are hidden so output fits neatly within Excel cells. This is the allure of “content”: it allows comforting, structured data which simplifies the complexity of a large business and makes decisions less intimidating. Executives aren’t making qualitative picks regarding art or an artist, they’re merely signing off on whichever “content” produces more valuable metrics.

At The New York Times it’s conceivable that editors and executives have a handle on their output. But businesses with strategies dependent on massive levels of “content” production cannot know the quality of everything that ships. Think YouTube, where users upload more than an hour of video every hour. Or content farms like Demand Media, which claims to have created 2 million articles and 200,000 videos as of June 2010.

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USC’s Anneberg School summarizes their 10 years of studies in the report. They write:

“Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest,” said Cole. It’s likely that only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive.

Their list of survivors looks good. LA Weekly disagrees:

We think that the L.A. Times should be considered among those papers that will survive. There’s no reason why the paper shouldn’t thrive as well as, say, the Washington Post, and for decades it was mentioned as being among the “big four” papers presenting the best journalism in the land (next to The New York Times, the Post and the Journal).

LA Weekly’s reasoning is flawed: great journalism isn’t the cost of entry for USC’s list. If it was do you think The Wall Street Journal or USA Today would be there?

The reason the NYT, the Washington Post, WSJ, and USA Today will survive is that they have unique reasons to exist beyond journalism for audiences sufficient enough to support them.

The WSJ isn’t a newspaper so much as a financial resource. Similarly, the Washington Post is a political source. USA Today is our only national ‘paper of record’ that’s built for national coverage divorced from a city; hence its common denominator drivel (but good sports coverage). The NYT is the paper of record for the high end audience that doesn’t lean on the WSJ or, for many, the reliable source of great journalism the LA Times hopes be.

If the LA Times wants to survive in a daily paper form it needs to find an audience that isn’t political, financial, pop, or quality concerned.