The Monitor will also be adding a Sunday magazine. Please excuse the wildly-misleading New York Times headline that says the Monitor will be online only. In fact, the new magazine will cost more per issue than the old weekday publication.
The Sunday magazine will cost $89 for a years subscription, while the old five-day-a-week print edition cost $219 a year. That translates to more than double the subscription revenue per issue. The idea is to make the print product more valuable per edition (for both readers and advertisers), while also shedding much of the printing and distribution costs that plague daily publication.
Part of this transition includes upgrades to the Monitor Web site, CSMonitor.com, (which makes perfect sense). From the press release about the upgrades:
Original reporting on global news and events seven days a week
Continuously updated stories
Global conversations between readers and Monitor staff
Links to valuable content elsewhere on the Web
Top editor John Yemma said a decision on the future of the Monitor was coming this fall in the podcast I had with him a week ago. At the time, he said the Monitor was considering either adding a weekend edition on top of its weekday publishing or going to a model that focuses on online with a weekly news magazine.
The Monitor went with the latter, more logical option. This is what the weekly magazine will feature:
The Monitor’s well-regarded analysis of both US and global news
Weekly snapshots of life around the globe and news around the Web
Profiles of individuals who are tackling tough problems and trying to make a difference
Special emphasis on the environment, innovation, money & values
This is a model I have been trying to sell people on for more than a year now (and brought up at ONA 08 to the “super panel.” The idea was essentially scoffed at by some execs at dying print publications). Here is why I have championed this model:
Daily reporting on the Web — Newspapers all across the world are filled with old news. Print publications are ill suited to break news and to report on news as it is happening.
Analysis pieces once a week — Daily reporting is not always the best way to look at the bigger picture or to provide historical context. This is where strong, thoughtful and, yes, often long analysis pieces come into play. This is the kind of reporting that belongs in print. I may not want to spend a few hours reading about one subject online (I’ll get distracted quickly), but I am willing to devote much more time to print, especially on weekends. I’ll say it again, I love the Economist magazine.
Synergyrent a car bulgaria — Top editors like to prentend like their employees don’t waste time, but they do — a lot of time and resources. And what are they wasting time doing? Duplicating content for print and the Web. A lot of the beat bloggers I work with complain that they have to “re-report” news for the print edition after they post it online. This often means reconfiguring a story to fit into the print model. It might mean finding “man on the street quotes.” And it can mean finding ways to explain things in print that simple links do much better on the Web. All of this means, however, wasted time and resources. But if print doesn’t care about breaking news, this isn’t an issue.
I think the Monitor’s new model could work very well for a lot of publications. At the minimum, we’ll learn a lot within a year from now how much this new model makes sense and where it can take traditional news media.
When historians come to write the history of the newspaper industry over the last two decades, they’ll talk about how newspaper companies squandered it all with a series of unfortunate — and often short sighted — decisions.
I want you to read what Alan Mutter had to say about newspapers in his latest blog post. Think about this for a second:
If newspapers had invested in new products even a modest fraction of the bodacious profits they reaped in the last decade and a half, they might have invented anything from MarketWatch to Yelp to Google.
Instead, publishers concentrated on accelerating profits to lift the stock prices that determined their bonuses and/or borrowed what proved to be dangerously large sums of money to buy more of the newspapers they regarded as perpetual money-making machines.
Most newspaper companies are still money-making machines, with profits that far outpace the typical Fortune 500 company. The problem? Massive debt burdens.
Cheap credit earlier this decade led a lot of newspaper companies to make a lot of really bad decisions (well, a lot of industries are facing this same problem right now). Companies were gobbling up newspapers left and right, and now those acquisitions are worth a fraction of what they paid for them. Many of them are simply over leveraged now.
To put this in perspective, Journal Register Co., a publisher that already has defaulted on its reckless debt, still generated a 16.9% operating margin in the last 12 months. That surpasses the margins in the same period of such companies as Exxon (15.7%), General Electric (14.2%), Boeing (8.7%), Wal-Mart (5.8%) and Amazon.Com (4.7%).
This vapid struggle to remain profitability may be the final nail in the coffin for several over-leveraged newspaper companies:
The bitter irony for the newspaper industry is that the desperate reductions in staffing and newshole are compromising dangerously the quality of the products that built each of its valuable franchises. The compromises, which typically dismay most loyal and discerning newspaper readers, are likely to speed the declines in circulation and sales that are the root cause of industry’s faltering profitability.
If you’re a newspaper reader, how much longer will you consume a product that is continuously getting worse? Less news, shorter stories, more ads, less sections, etc.
The Washington Post and The New York Times are two papers that are not owned by over leveraged companies. Their brands have remained strong during these troubled times. Many smaller publications like weeklies are doing fine as well.
But the papers of Tribune, McClatchy, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Journal Register, Lee Enterprises, et al?
You don’t need a fancy new CMS, a new editor in chief, new business model or prayer to start innovating today.
This month’s Carnival of Journalism, hosted by Will Sullivan over at Journerdism, asks a very pragmatic question:
What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?
Pragmatic questions need pragmatic answers.
Stop wasting money on software and IT you don’t need:
Times are tight, right? Then why does every one of your employees have a copy of the full Microsoft Office Suite? A lot of those people probably hardly ever touch it, and those that do use the software could probably get away with a much cheaper software solution.
Don’t waste money on IT spending that you don’t need to spend, especially on software that makes you less productive. Most of your employees could do everything they need to from Google Docs. Google Docs is either free or cheap ($50 a seat for the premium version per year), and it allows for powerful collaboration.
News organizations are now trying to cater to different audiences — print, Web and mobile. It’s hard to properly disseminate content to those different streams without good collaboration.
Google Docs has fantastic collaboration built in. It could save a lot of time spent sending e-mails back and forth, and even — gasp — time spent in e-mail. Teams can share documents for specific projects.
I use Google Docs for everything I do on BeatBlogging.Org. I love how no matter what computer I’m on, I can have access to all my documents. I love how easy it is to share documents with people. I love the simplicity.
When I worked at Stars and Stripes, I had a full copy of Microsoft Office. There is nothing that I ever did there that I couldn’t do with Google Docs. In fact, I still used Google Docs when I wanted to share documents with other employees.
Yes, some of your employees probably need Office because it does have features that Google Docs doesn’t have, but the vast majority of your employees don’t need it. Regardless, Google Docs will help with work flow.
Create a culture of learning, everyday:
This isn’t as far out as it sounds. Sign up for Lynda.com and similar sites. Purchase books on HTML, CSS, Flash and other tools. Encourage your employees to subscribe to RSS feeds of sites like This Week in Django.
Have your employees sign up for free blogging accounts at WordPress.com or a similar site. Have them sign up for Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. The only way to understand social networking is to get out there and do it.
Allocate a few hours each week when employees are expected to spend time learning new skills and tools. Encourage your employees to spend their down time at work learning. Allow your employees to take courses while they are at home.
Let’s make it easy for our employees to get wired, and let’s get everyone on Wired Journalists.
Have seminars and classes every week:
This again, isn’t that crazy of an idea. These seminars and classes can be led by employees. Many newsroom already host weekly classes where blogging, Twitter, HTML, social networking, video, etc are discussed.
But if you don’t have qualified employees in some of these areas, bring in outside people. The last thing you need is for your employees to learn the wrong ideas and techniques or get discouraged when their teachers doesn’t really know what they are talking about.
We can’t honestly expect all of our employees to be up-to-date on the latest trends if we don’t even talk about what those trends are and how we can use the newest technology to produce better journalism. Remember, some trends aren’t worth our time. They have to help us produce better journalism and connect better with our readers.
I’d also have every one of your beat reporters and editors reading BeatBlogging.Org for great ideas on how to incorporate social media.
Work flow says a lot about your organization:
Organizations with modern work flows are often more innovative. Now, maybe you can’t change your whole newsroom work flow overnight, but you can at least change how your team works. Maybe just your team adopts Google Docs to share ideas, but it will still make your team more efficient and allow you to produce better results.
I’d strongly consider project management software like Basecamp. Basecamp combined with Google Docs can help transform a newsroom into a modern, efficient organization. Many Web teams especially don’t have software to help manage projects and work flow.
Basecamp is the kind of modern IT spending that makes sense. Why newsrooms still blow money on Office or even Exchange e-mail makes no sense to me. Microsoft programs are terrible for collaboration, and they’re expensive.
I think any small news organization would be crazy to spend money on Outlook/Exchange. A bigger organization can spread the cost around to more employees, but a smaller organization has to pay a lot of money for software, servers and people to maintain both.
And Outlook/Exchange that doesn’t really allow employees to be efficient because of its 20th-century mindset. Google Apps and GMAIL is a great solution for many newsrooms (if you’re a small paper like a weekly, you’d be crazy to use anything else).
E-mail is not a project management tool:
How many of your news organizations send out e-mails about mandatory meetings? How many of your organizations also send out reminders about said meetings? Now how many of your organizations how a calendar system like Outlook?
Well, why don’t your news organizations just place these mandatory meetings on your calendar? People need to stop living out of their inboxes. Your inbox is not where you should go to find out what to do each day.
That’s what your calendar is for. Many companies all over the world have created a culture in which e-mail is the main productivity tool. But using e-mail for anything more than it is intended for makes everyone less productive.
There really is no excuse for employees to be CCed and BCCed on every little e-mail. Frankly, it’s embarrassing when many employees get hundreds of e-mails a day. A lot of those e-mails should be IMs or on another, more relevant communication platform.
Outlook/Google Calendar, Google Docs, Wikis, Basecamp, etc will all make your news organization more efficient. We all have less resources today. Let’s put those resources to better use.
Ad revenue will continue to dry up. Many traditional print advertisers (car dealers, real estate agents, etc) are facing tough times and some are going out of business. This economic crisis will claim many people’s jobs and shrink ad budgets around the country.
It will further squeeze already squeezed newspapers. Even CPMs are down. Many newspapers have been slow to embrace video ads, which pay much better. Newspapers also have not been able to discover newer revenue streams.
It’s well known that many older newspaper subscribers do not frequent newspaper Web sites, and this is one major argument against cutting back on the number of days that newspapers publish. Many of these core newspaper readers still read and enjoy newspapers every day. Newspapers don’t want to alienate some of their most loyal readers.
The problem is that newspapers have to move forward into a Web world. Resources are still skewed wildly in favor of print at most newspapers. With little audience overlap between print and online products, newspapers have little synergy and are unable to produce products that compliment each other.
Imagine how much more sense it would make to have The Washington Post, for example, to publish daily online and produce a once-a-week print publication that focuses on analysis, enterprise stories and the big picture. It would be the Yin and the Yang. It would be synergy city.
Many newspapers may never see this reality. Ad revenues will continue to plunge, newspaper managers will continue to cater to print subscribers who are slowly dying off and leaving for richer online experiences and this will be the end for many dailies.
But maybe this could be the event that brings synergy to print and the Web. There is still a future for print — albeit a much different future than daily newspapers are used to. I receive The Economist, National Geographic and the Sunday Washington Post (it would be much stronger if it were the only Post edition each week). A lot of younger people do like print publications, but we don’t like daily publications.
They make little sense. I don’t have time each day, or the will, to read a daily print product. Daily print products also clog up my apartment and are bad for the environment. But giving up on print would be a mistake too.
Could the death of daily newspapers be the catalyst that brings in older readers to Web journalism?
If older readers came onto the Web en masse, newspapers would no longer have to cater to two distinct audiences. Finally, newspapers could produce a print product that made sense in a Web-first world. I fear this reality, however, can only happen if many older readers are forced to start reading online news because many newspapers fail.
And while I will lament and mourn the loss of newspapers around the world, I believe this is a better future. The downfall of newspapers could lead to better journalism. So many news organizations are held back by the past, by bureaucratic inertia, by institutional memory.
Imagine a future in which the only thing holding back news organizations was our imaginations. This economic crisis could not come at a worst time for newspapers, and, frankly, no one really knows how bad it is going to get. I do know, however, know that in good times and bad, people want to be informed.
Maybe, just maybe, this crisis will force us to reinvent journalism. Maybe it will spark an unprecedented wave of innovation as we face the realities of a new world for journalism.
As if it was Zell’s hubris that led them to think they were a national (international?!?!) paper. As if it was Zell’s ignorance that led the Times to have a horrible Web product for years. As if it was Zell’s leadership that thought endless jumps on meandering stories was a good idea.
The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves. Oh, I, too, am angry at the state of newspapers in America but I’m angry at the right people. The LA Times’ problems — like those of other papers — were caused by by decades of egotistical and willfully ignorant neglect by the owners, managers — and staff — at the paper.
When more than one editorial regime had the hubris to think that they should turn the Times into a national – even international – paper, opening bureaus all over the globe and insisting on writing every commodity news stories under their own bylines while letting local coverage suffer, did you protest, litigators? No, those bylines and bureaus were yours.
Honestly, who is more to blame for the current situation at the Times? Sam Zell who is trying to rescue a sinking ship (even if he is doing a very poor job at it and has some bad ideas) or the former captains and shipmates who drove that ship into an iceberg?
If I was the LA Times, I’d consider firing a bunch of do-nothing employees and hire this guy or gal over at Not the LA Times who ruthlessly satired the ridiculous LA Times lawsuit:
On the heels of a class-action lawsuit accusing L.A. Times owner Sam Zell of wrecking the newspaper, dissident Times writers are now suing 425,000 former subscribers for “failing to appreciate our bodacious journalism.”
“By recklessly canceling their subscriptions, these morons have caused irreparable harm to the newspaper, breached their civic duty to stay fully informed, and missed some totally awesome articles by Pulitzer Prize-winning auto columnist Dan Neil, as well as money-saving Sunday coupons that could easily offset the subscription price,” the lawsuit alleges.
Additional efforts to entice subscribers included frequent use of the word schadenfreude, a front-page redesign that made the paper look like a ransom note, and gutting the Sports section, according to the lawsuit.
Times employees contend they did everything possible to maintain a relationship with the former readers. “In January 2005, to cite just one example, we published a 2,600-word Home section cover story on decorating your house in the Viennese Secession style of Art Nouveau,” the lawsuit said. “You can’t get more in touch with average readers than that!”
At least this person gets what’s going on. Zell may not being doing a great job, but it wasn’t him he drove the Times to the edge of this precipice.
Let’s get a few things straight here, shall we?
The LA Times is not The New York Times or The Washington Post. The only time the LA Times should be mentioned in the same sentence as those two is when people are generically talking about large papers. Something like, “Why has the LA Times Web presence sucked so long when other large papers like the NY Times and Post have been much more innovative?” Or something like, “What papers have Times in their names?”
The LA Times has willfully neglected the Web for years. I realize that Russ Stanton has breathed life into the Web presence of the Times, but it’s probably a little too late. Still, the Times’ Web presence is behind a lot of other U.S. news operations.
The Tribune board accepted Sam Zell’s offer on April 2, 2007. He didn’t take the company private until December 20, 2007. The LA Times was in very bad shape prior to then. It’s not like magically the bottom fell out of the Times in the last year.
If things were going so well at the Times, how come prior to Stanton being named executive editor, the Times had three editors in less than three years?
I was just at Cleveland.com, and I was looking at all the new features the site has launched recently.
Certainly, the new features are upgrades over what used to be there. The new design is a step forward. The site, however, is a hodgepodge in many ways.
The search engine is worthless and rarely returns relevant results. The UI still needs a lot of work. It’s hard for me to quickly find the content I want.
And the homepage design suffers from being overly crowded. It’s a prime example of the Wall of News. Plus, the homepage doesn’t have a clear graphical focus or main story.
I couldn’t help but think that if Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer could start from scratch they would do things differently. There is no way that Cleveland.com is the site they ultimately want. But it’s the site they have because of years of legacy code and legacy decisions.
I hate to see the past holding back news organizations on the Web. The Web demands agile development and quick decision making. I assure you that Web-only news organizations will not fall into the same trappings as traditional news organizations.
The pace of innovation on the Web from most news organizations feels very print like. It’s OK to tweak a print design every 5-10 years, but a Web site needs continual R&D. Not only do Web sites require new features, but they also require that those new features fit into existing designs and frameworks (Cleveland.com feels so broken and disjointed at times).
The Las Vegas Sun blew things up and went from being a zero to a hero in a matter of months. You can say all you want about how they have a unique JOA or about how they aren’t making money right now off their Web site. That doesn’t matter.
There is nothing stopping Cleveland.com, The Plain Dealer and their Advance Publications overlords from making Cleveland.com into a very good site.
Nothing, except bureaucratic inertia. Nothing, except being beholden to yesterday’s decisions. Nothing, except old media think.
And, to be honest, I do not have faith that either Cleveland.com or Advance have the right Web talent and minds in place to turn things around. Maybe most news organizations can’t do everything that the Sun is doing, but every organization could adopt their aggressive Web mindset. Every news organization could embrace agile development.
It is the mindset of The Las Vegas Sun that really stands out. It is mindset that is killing this industry. There is too much can’t do attitude and not enough can do.
One can’t help but wonder if all the legacy editors who cut their teeth in print simply do not understand the pace of the Web. Print was a monopoly. It never demanded innovation — agile or not.
Innovation can start from the bottom, but mindset starts from the top. When a high school Web site is better than most “professional” news Web sites, you know the problem is mental, not financial or technical. If it seems like I’m rambling, it’s because this is getting depressing.
How many news organizations can honestly say that the Web products they have right now are the products they would want to make if they could start over? If the answer is no, why not start over?
If fact, I don’t understand why any star print columnist or beat reporter doesn’t just start his or her own Web site. The Dallas Cowboys Blog for The Dallas Morning news can get hundreds of thousands of page views in one day. And that’s without a really good beat blog that really harnesses the power of the Web and social networking.
Imagine the possibilities. More on that in a minute.
Mariotti threw a few bombs on his way out, including about how he believes that newspapers are dying and how the future is on the Web. He is absolutely correct, however.
First, let’s look at Mariotti’s claim that newspapers are dying. Vin Crosbie believes more than half of today’s 1,439 daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t exist by the end of the next decade. In fact, the Sun-Times is a prime candidate to not be around much longer.
The Sun-Times Media Group was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. That doesn’t happen for being too good. It happens when a stock falls below the minimum trading value.
Despite what many curmudgeons would like to believe and like to have you believe, newspapers are not in a cyclical down period. Many are about to be down for the count.
For a sports columnist like Mariotti, there is little incentive to stay in print. He can make more money in other mediums that have less turmoil.
Many of the best sports writers like Rick Reilly are being bought up by ESPN (for $3 million a year), Yahoo!, CBS Sportsline and other Web sites. Before the Web, print — especially newspapers– was just about the only place for a star columnist to work.
Because of the monopolies that newspapers had, columnists were at the mercy of newspapers. That has flipped with the Web. Now anyone can be their own publisher and become successful like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
I’m sure Mariotti was well paid by newspaper standards, but those standards aren’t very high (and just a fraction of Reilly’s new salary). Frankly, the standards of most newspaper Web sites aren’t very high either, which is one major reason why Mariotti left the Sun-Times:
To showcase your work … you need a stellar Web site and if a newspaper doesn’t have that, you can’t be stuck in the 20th century with your old newspaper.
If I were Mariotti, I’d start my own Web site and post my work there. Yes, he could go work for ESPN full time like many of his former print colleagues have, but then you are at the mercy of ESPN, which is notorious for being overbearing and controlling. Or he could join an online-only sports site.
But why bother? If I were Mariotti, I’d focus on building my own brand with my own Web site and social networking presence. With the right technical help, he could have a kick-ass WordPress installation, where he can publish his latest thoughts about whatever, whenever. He could also embed video clips, build interactive features, have a weekly podcast, interact with users and do all sorts of things that he couldn’t do at the Sun-Times.
Plus, his Web presence would be very 21st century, unlike the Sun-Times. If you’re a columnist, imagine a site that has all of your posts tagged, so that users can quickly and easily discover content. One of the most frustrating aspects of newspaper Web sites is the disarray that is their archives.
And most newspaper Web sites are unsearchable. So many page views are lost because of these technical deficiencies that a basic, free WordPress install doesn’t have.
I’d also start a Twitter account and begin building a fan base with strong user interaction. I would, of course, interact with users on my beat blog as well. Then I’d look into other social networking opportunities.
This is what Mariotti and any sports writer needs to get started: a laptop with a Web cam for video columns, a smart phone, a beat blog (WordPress is a great option), Google Apps for mail and word processing, a Twitter account and Viddler/YouTube and Seesmic accounts to put that Web cam to use.
He probably already has a laptop and smart phone. The Web technology I listed is all free. The only things that will cost money are the domain name (about $10 a year), hosting (might only be hundreds a year) and probably some technical and consulting help to set this all up.
Mariotti, if you’re reading this, start a beat blog. Don’t wait.
We have already seen a lot of top sports writing talent leave for ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, CBS Sportsline and others in the past year. I think the exodus of sports writing talent from traditional print publications is just beginning, because not only can big-name sports writers leave for online publications, but they can also now easily and cheaply start their own Web sites.
The idea that news organizations should charge for basic content on the Web is repugnant.
It’s a losing proposition. It’s a terrible, terrible idea. And journalism is filled with terrible ideas right now.
But that doesn’t mean news organizations can’t charge for content. Far from it. Rather, news organizations need to create upsell features.
For years, I have paid to be an ESPN Insider. Insider content is not for casual sports fans, which make up the majority of ESPN.com’s users. But that doesn’t mean some users, like myself, aren’t willing to pay for a premium product.
One of my favorite Insider features are scouting reports. I have access to scouting reports on every single football player in the NFL (and other reports for other sports). For many people that may sound pretty stupid, but it’s a pretty cool feature for me. ESPN also has in-depth trend data for every football game, and I can get AccuScore predictions not only for the outcome, but how each team should do running the ball, passing the ball and play on defense.
Content is one upsell area. Another could be business listings. For instance, a local site should offer every business and restaurant a free listing but also offer premium features for a price.
Want to be able to upload coupons each week to our Web site? Premium feature. Want an in-depth, easily changeable menu for your restaurant? Premium feature. Want a blog to interact with your customers? Premium feature.
Classifieds can be the same way too. Basic classifieds for individuals should be free, but we can still sell people on premium features. Want your listing to stand out with custom features, like Ebay offers? We’ll sell them to you.
Want your listing to show up at the top for a given search? Premium feature.
If we’re going to ask people for money, we have to create value. Basic content isn’t that. News organizations need to stop thinking of themselves as just journalism companies and start thinking of themselves as content companies.
Every news organization should have About.Com-like features for their areas. This evergreen content can be immensely useful for users. The history of an area, the best places to go, etc all should be covered.
New organizations also need to think of themselves as destinations. If you want to be a premium local site, you have to be THE destination that people want to go to. Journalism alone will not make you that destination.
Restaurant guides, business guides, kick-ass classifieds, maps and guides, evergreen content, etc are the keys to becoming a destination. Upselling does not mean offering bad basic products, but rather it means offering really good premium products that people and businesses are willing to pay for.