A professor today asked me:

"What will the future of the newspapers be?"

Meanwhile, someone on the Online News publishing discussion lists notes:

The question is often asked: 'What will be the future of the newspapers? But, it seems that before we ask that question, we'll have to first figure out what, if anything, constitutes the absolute core minimum of what it takes to be called a 'newspaper.'

What iss troubling about those questions is these people are still trying to define their news organizations according to products that are becoming obsolete. The true question is 'What will news organizations do in the future?'

No news organization should be a 'newspaper"' in the future. Nor a 'news network'. Nor a 'news radio station'. Nor a 'TV station news department'. It's time that news organizations stopped defining themselves according to news formats that are becoming obsolete.

Yes, I realize that newspapers are now asking themselves 'What will newspapers do in the future?' That news radio stations are now asking themselves 'What will news radio stations do in the future?' That TV station news departments are now asking themselves 'What will television stations news departments do in the future?' And that TV news networks now are asking themselves 'What will television news networks do in the future?'

However, the basic fact is that each is a news organization. The problem is they're internally organized to produce products that are becoming obsolete.

Obsolete? Yes, the likilihood is that consumers in the future won't want to receive a daily news report printed on wood pulp or even the online analogue of wood pulp (despite some video and animation added). Nor will consumers want to receive audio or video sent to them in a schedule or program line-up that they can't control or re-arrange. The era of the 'newspaper' in the United States, Canada, and many other countries, is over. And the simultaneous era of tradition 'broadcasting' will likewise be over once broadband becomes part of the tuning mechanism of the average consumer's television.

Note that I didn't say that journalism is ending. News organizations and the service of journalism that they produce will still be wanted and needed after the obsolete products known as newspapers, news networks, news radio, and news programs are long gone. Each news organization will be producing services that utilize all those traditional forms (i.e., text, photography, graphics, audio, video, or animation) plus new forms have yet to discover. No news organizations will any longer produce just one, two, or three of those forms (such as just text and still photos or just audio and video) anymore.

People refer to these new journalistic services as 'multimedia' or 'convergence.' Well, the trick to 'convergence' isn't necessarily to produce 'multimedia.' It is for each news organization to learn which of its traditional practices (such as its journalistic focus, staffing, assignments, workflow, business practices, business models, etc.) to continue and which (such as printing news on wood pulp or transmitting news only at a set schedule) to discard, plus what entirely new practices to adopt. 'Convergence' is as much a choice of practices as it is producing 'multimedia.'

News organization that print news on wood pulp must stop defining themselves as 'newspapers' because that traditional definition intrinsically limits what they should do. Likewise, news organization that have always transmitted audio news clips on set schedules must stop defining themselves as 'news radio.' Etcetera.

The true question is 'What will news organizations do in the future?' Not what will 'newspapers' do?

Many commentators are hailing the demise of The New York Times' TimesSelect service as the demise of paid content online. I hate to rain on their parade, but paid content isn't dead. Consumer Reports, Zagat, Playboy and other premier brands prove everyday that paying for the premier content in a topical category is very much alive.

So why did the premier brand of The New York Times fail at paid content with Times Select? Because The New York Times and other traditional newspapers don't provide premier content in a topical category. Traditional newspapers provide a package of news that attempts to satisfy everyone's interests in all categories— an endeavor that is doomed to fail online and that is increasingly failing in print, too.

The demise of TimesSelect is notable only because it's the last major gasp of newspaper publishers' attempts to charge for providing everybody online with the exactly the same package of content. Not only won't online consumers pay to receive exactly the same package as everyone else gets from a newspaper brand, but they won't pay for even the best slice of that package.

That doesn't mean that online consumers aren't willing to pay; they just aren't willing to pay to receive exactly the same package as everyone else gets. Unfortunately, most media executives don't seem capable of conceiving that their companies can produce anything else at once but the same package of content for every consumers. Those executives are stuck thinking in what academics call 'one-to-many' or mass media terms.

People would be willing to pay a subscription fee for a service that delivers news to them online; but not for a service that doesn't exactly meet their needs and interests, that sends exactly the same package of news to everyone. Paid content isn't dead; just payment for the traditional 'one-to-many' package of content is.

There is a three-step process towards understanding why TimesSelect and other similar newspaper projects are doomed from the start. The steps are to understand why more than one billion people worldwide have gravitated onto the Internet; why traditional newspapers fail to match the reason why those people gravitated there; and why the traditional packaging of newspapers needs to radically change if that industry is to survive.

The fact is that, while everyone shares a few common interests (the weather, for example) and some people share some common interests (such as fans of the Red Sox), each person has many specific interests (a fan of Patrick McGoohan, knitting, Malaysian cuisine, etc.) and each individual is a quite unique mix of those common and specific interests.

To satisfy her mix of interests, an individual will use whatever media is available to her. Thirty years ago, her only choices in media were the three or four general-interest TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and maybe PBS) she could receive via antenna, one or two dozen magazines (mostly general interests ones such as Time, Newsweek, USN&WR, Life, Look, etc.) available on her local newsstands, and one or perhaps two (unless she lived in a metropolis) daily newspapers that were delivered in her town. While those would likely certainly her common interests each day, she'd have to glean them for the very occasional that might satisfy her mix of specific interests.

Then came cable (and later satellite) TV, which gave her dozens of specifically topical channels 24/7/365. Then came developments in offset lithography that made publication and distribution of topical ('niche') magazines economical, and hundreds appeared on newsstands. And then she got access to the Internet, which gave her access to millions of topical webpages. Usage of all of these satisfies her - and a billion other people's -- unique mix of commons and individual interests better than any general-interest newspaper or news program can. People's use of the Internet to satisfy their individual mixes of interests caused the growth of the search engines. They didn't gravitate to online to read general-interest newspapers and news magazines (things that later followed them online).

Because people now have better means of satisfying their unique mixes of common and individual interests, general-interest newspapers' circulation and readership are declining, as are general-interest news program's listenership and viewership. For the past 30 years, you can track those declines to match the rise of CATV, 'niche' magazines, and Internet access (the recent plummet in newspaper circulation began almost exactly when the majority of Americans got broadband access, 'always-on' access to this better way satisfying their individual mixes of interests).

Traditional newspapers are obsolete. The reason why the traditional newspaper deliver exactly the same package of stories to all readers isn't because all readers want exactly the same package. It's due to a limitation of the Industrial Era technologies still used to produce those newspapers: an analog press (like an analog broadcast transmitter) can only produce the same edition at one time. That's the latent reason why a newspaper editor picks for publication mainly the stories that are of most common interest. For example, I'm a New York Times subscriber who's a soccer and Formula One racing fan but I rarely see stories about those sports in that newspaper. Yet I know NYT receives entire wires devoted to daily events those sports (even the Swiss Intercantonal league, Turkish Third Div., etc.) because I was the Reuters executive in charge of delivering those to the Times. The NYT newsroom has the soccer stories I want, but doesn't print them and instead prints baseball and American football stories, because its analog presses simply can't produce editions that match each individual subscriber's interests.

Though that limitation of analog presses doesn't exist online, almost every newspaper is inadvertently transplanting it there. For most of the past ten years, I couldn't get those soccer stories from NYTimes.com either, because it would publish online only the stories that appeared in print. (For the past four years I've been able to find the soccer wire on NYTimes.com but had to click half a dozen levels down into the site to find them.) Shoveling into online the same package of content for everyone doesn't add value in a medium that people are using to satisfy their individual interests and needs.

Moreover, people 'unpackage' the traditional newspaper's package of content online. A person who might have read the printed Willimantic Chronicle for national news because it's the only printed daily available in Willimantic aren't likely to read that paper's website for national news, because they've got now access to NYTimes.com, CNN.com, etc. Ditto with national sports, business, international news, etc. They'll use a newspaper's website only for whatever that newspaper can uniquely do (which is local news in the most cases). This means that only a fraction of the traditional newspaper's package of content has value online. That means people might be willing to pay, at most, only a fraction of the traditional price for it online (which fits within surveys that indicate people are willing to pay online for newspaper content, but no more than about $1 per mo.)

So if providing the same package of content for everyone doesn't add value in a medium that people are using to satisfy their individual mixes of interests and that package is worth only a fraction online of what (fewer and fewer) people are willing pay for it in print, why do so many newspaper publishers still hope people will pay the same for it online as in print? Or pay something for just a slice of that traditional package?

The NYT at least realized that its columnists were a unique part of its traditional package, but wildly miscalculated the people would pay $50 per year for that. Some 227,000 people did, producing $10 milion per year in revenue for NYT, but they were only 1.6% of NYTimes.com's 13M registered users and that revenue wasn't much compared to its $300M in revenues. Pluse, lack of access meanwhile displeased the other 12.7M registered users.

The reason I mentioned soccer is that the stories exist that can satisfy each person's unique mix of common and specific, but traditionally produced newspapers -- in print and online -- don't deliver the right match to each person's mix. It's a distribution problem: the stories exist but aren't getting to the right people. So, people are using new media to hunt for the mix that satisfies them, visiting many sites and using many different mechanisms. Eliminating their need to hunt is the business opportunity here for media companies. Google and Yahoo! know that, which is why they're beginning to offer customizable services that can deliver from all sources stories that can match each user's unique mix of common and specific interests.

Although services like that can be subsidized entirely by advertising, if people are willing to pay for anything online, it's likely that they'd be willing to pay for a daily news service that uniquely matches each of their mix of common and specific interest. Would you be willing to pay $5 to $3 per month for a service that each day delivers exactly what you want from all news sources, trade journals, blogs, etc.? The technologies (structured data, etc.) to do this online already exist, but the problem is the news industry's infrastructure is still based on the Industrial Era practices of producing the same thing for every users and producing it from only one brand.

Therein also lies the problem with most micropayment systems. You'd need a universal one to satisfy most people's needs and interests. People aren't going to use a different one for each site (even if it might serve a number sites). It'll need to either be build into the infrastructure, not layered atop the status quo, or exist upstream of the consumer and built into whatever service ultimately delivers the customized service to her. In other words, the aggregation of micropayments would be done wholesale by whatever service charges the consumer the monthly macro-price.

A paid service for custom content would likely also feature advertising, except it would be advertising to match the person's unique mix of interests. Such a service would be more valuable to both consumer and advertiser. [How to remedy the way that online marketers have blown consumers' trust during the past 15 years is another matter.]

A unique printed edition for each user can also now be produced. Agfa and Oce are now manufacturing digital presses (i.e., giant inkjet printers) for newspapers that, when coupled to a database and templates, can produce an edition uniquely customized for each subscriber. (For example, the Agfa Dotrix press costs a fraction what an analog press does, requires only one operator, and can produce 20,000 newspaper copies per hour. That speed is fine for about 1,000 of the nation's 1,450 dailies; larger ones need only buy multiple digital presses.) I know that MAN Roland and other manufacturers of traditional presses are likewise developing digital presses that would service larger newspapers. [Whether printed editions will soon be supplanted by e-paper is another matter.]

So, the era of one-to-many, of each person getting the same thing daily, is over. People aren't going to pay for that online. Fewer and fewer people are continuing to pay for it in print. And if soon nobody's going to pay for that package, then nobody's going to pay much or anything for just a portion of that package.

Paid content online isn't dead; just payment for 'one-to-many' content. Unfortunately, most people in the news industry, including most of its pundits, still think in only 'one-to-many' terms, which is not how consumers use online.

Dorian Benkoil last month e-mailed me asking what I thought about Business Week columnist Jon Fine's recent article, When Do You Stop The Presses?.

In the column, Fine ponders which major American newspaper will be the first to stop publishing a print edition and publish online only. He speculates that it will be the San Francisco Chronicle, which has reportedly lost $330 million this decade, approximately $1 million per week. Fine wonders if how the Chronicle should consider stopping its presses and start delivering news only online.

On the surface, that sounds like a good idea. The Chronicle's print edition is losing money. It has a large potential online-only audience in San Francisco. And if the Chronicle stops using its presses, it will no longer have to bear the costs of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper edition, costs that probably total 50 to 60 percent of the Chronicle's expenses.

But before roaring off with this idea, check under its hood to make sure it has an engine. I don't know what percentage of the Chronicle's revenues its website produces, but my guess is 5 to 10 percent. The printed product generates the rest. So, if the Chronicle were to stop printing paper, it would reduce its expenses to only 40 to 50 percent of their prior level, but the will have also removed 90 to 95 percent of its em>Chronicle's revenues. So, it's rather obvious that the Chronicle would be in a much, much worse predicament than it is now if it were to stop its presses permanently and publish online only. A not-so-fine idea.

But what really troubles me about Fine's speculation—and for that matter most newspapers' attempts to shovel their printed content onto their websites— are two two unconscious and linked presumptions that I think underlie such ideas: (1) That there is nothing inherently wrong with the Chronicle's product (i.e., its package of journalism and advertisements) except (2) that it should be delivered online rather than on paper because more and more people are getting their information online.

A lot of publishers suffer from these presumptions. They see less and less people reading printed publications, more and more of those people reading things online, and believe that all they need to do is shovel their printed editions over to online (and add video and audio) to reverse their newspapers' declines in readership.

These presumptions ignore the fact that newspaper readerships have been declining for more than 30 years and that approximately half of those declines occured before the Internet was opened to the public or the public had any online access. Shouldn't that give publishers a hint that the major cause of their readerships' declines isn't the Internet or their content not being online?

And is adding video and audio to that content (so-called 'multimedia') going to reverse those declines? Consider that television station's news viewerships have been declining for more than 20 years and that radio station's news listenerships have been declining for even longer. Do you think that if radio or television stations add newspaper-like texts to their own websites that this will reverse the declines in their viewerships or listenerships? So, why do publishers think that newspapers adding video and audio to their own texts online will reverse newspapers' declines in readerships? Adding together two or more declining media do not an ascending new-media make.

The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on. But I digress.

Back to Fine's column. If the San Francisco Chronicle, despite losing money, cannot afford to stop its presses and go online only, what it is likely to do?. I think that daily newspaper presses will be outsourced before being stopped.

I think the Chronicle will try to do what another troubled newspaper is considering. Boston Herald owner and Publisher Patrick Purcell has been talking about outsourcing his newspaper's printing. Dow Jones & Company has a printing plant with spare capacity 80 miles outside of Boston, a plant that prints the regional edition of The Wall Street Journal. This plant in.Chicopee, Massachusetts, is far more efficient than the Herald's antiquated presses. Purcell is calculating whether eliminating his own presses, pressmen, ink, and paper costs would save him money against whatever markup on those costs that Dow Jones would charge him.

Two footnotes:

First, we frequently see much larger dollar amounts printed in the business sections of newspapers ('Murdoch Buys Dow Jones for $5 billion', etc.), making us somewhat inurred to smaller financial figures such as $330 million or $1 million per week. However, the San Francisco Chronicle's latest weekday circulation figure is 386,564, so if that newspaper has lost $330 million during the past six years, it's lost approximately $853.67 per reader during that time or $142.28 per reader per year! Now does its amount of loss impress you? It does me. The Chronicle would lose less money if it just bought each reader a fine meal each year at San Francisco's best restaurant instead of delivering a newspaper each day.

Second, earlier this week I posted on my own company's blog some reasons why I've not been blogging here or there lately. I apologize for my absence.

[Update: when I wrote this post a few days ago, I didn't (and I suspect Fine didn't either) that the Chronicle has already signed an agreement to outsource its production to a third-party printer. A tip of my hat to Alan Mutter's blog. The outsourcing deal will cost the jobs of 230 unionized press operators when the new plant opens in 2009. When this outsourcing contract was signed, I wonder how large a newspaper the Chronicle's executives thought they'd be producing in 2009?]

Yesterday on the Online News Association's discussion list, the editor of a 37,000-circulation daily newspaper asked to hear:

"…from folks who have tried something in between free and paid regarding your online content, such as holding back some print content from online; charging for 'premium' online content; giving access to some online content only to print subscribers. If you've done anything like this has it produced revenue or slowed print circulation erosion?"

Though I've not run a newspaper website in more than a decade, I today replied because I've spent more than a dozen years studying online paid content strategy and cases and had for several years been a columnists about the subject.

Here's the information I provided:

In 30 years working in news media, I've never encountered a more beneficial cause than the Media Loan Development Fund. So, I've been volunteering some of my consulrting time to it.

The idea behind the MDLF arose during the late 1980s when Yugoslavian broadcaster Sasa Vucinic watched freedom of the press almost evaporate in his country. He worked for B92, which was the independent radio station in Serbia and a thorn in the side of dictator Slobodan Milošević's regime. Unable to find a legal pretext to silence B92, the regime began threatening the radio station's advertisers. B92 began running out of money and Vucinic was unable to find any bank, inside or outside of Serbia, that was willing to loan B92 money to keep operating.

Vucinic never forgot that experience (he gave an videotaped talk about it at the 2005 TED conference). In 1995, he approached billionaire George Soros, who himself grew up under a Communist regime in Hungary, about the idea of creating a foundation to loan money to independent media in countries that have repressive regimes. Soros agreed to setup the Media Development Loan Fund, which is based in Prague.

Vucinic's first MDLF project was a newspaper that during the late 1990s was being forced by the Slovakian government to travel 400 kilometres to print the paper. The newspaper wanted to purchase a printing press, so MDLF loaned it the money. MDLF has since financed 135 projects for 58 independent media companies in 18 countries. When MDLF began, Soros didn't think the foundation would ever see its loans repaid, but 97 percent of the 58 projects have repaid their loans on time.

In 1998, MDLF established the Center for Advanced Media-Prague (CAMP) in 1998 to introduce new-media concepts and solutions to independent media in the post-communist and developing countries. Earlier this year, Patrice Schneider, MDLF's director of development and formerly the Managing Director of Netscape Europe and Deputy Managing Director of Hachette Filipacchi Media, asked several other international new media experts and I to advise MDLF and CAMP about coming changes in new media and new media technologies..

If you have a chance to help MDLF's worthwhile cause, please do so.

[When terminology gets stretched too far, discussion distorts and tempers snap. A friend in the Poynter Institute's Online News discussion group industry recently stretch the definition of 'citizen journalism' to include Letters-to-the-Editor. That 's when my patience snapped and I released criticisms of the 'citizen journalism' movement, which I've intentionally withheld for years.

Online News is an email-based discussion group, so some other friends have since asked me to post my criticisms here, so that they can hyperlink their own blogs or publications. Here goes:

Letter-to-the-Editor are as much journalism as a man's video of his kid's wedding is cinema. Or as much as a woman putting a Band-Aid (or 'plaster' the British would say) onto her kid's bruised knee is practicing medicine. Or as much as a guy appearing in traffic court to dispute a parking ticket is practicing law. It's too much of a rhetoric stretch.

Does its publication in a newspaper somehow make a person's opinion be journalism? If so, you might as well shutdown college schools of journalism. No need for those.

Yes, too many newsroom have become remote from, and condescending to, readers. Letting readers comment or converse in newspaper (web)pages is a much needed remedy. Yes, it's great when citizens who posses a particular expertise help report stories about that topic. Likewise, when citizens who witness a news event contribute their first-hand experiences. And, yes, it's heartening to believe that citizens themselves might be capable of reporting a significant portion of the news. Don't get me wrong: The concept behind 'citizen journalism' is noble, much like Karl Marx's vision of pure communism or Jean-Jacque Rousseau's vision of natural goodness or Ayn Rand's vision of objective individualism.

However, I live in the world of real people. It's hard enough to find a professional journalist who can sit through 52 weeks of zoning board hearings and write intelligently about that, nonetheless finding an amateur who doesn't have a vested interest or axe to grind and who can sit through and objectively write about those hearings.

Too much of what's being cloaked or prattled about in our industry as 'citizen journalism' isn't journalism at all and a lot of it is simply b*llsh#t. I'm sorry, but I'm tired of all this groupthink. We need objective reporting about this topic, too.

I sincerely compliment my friend Dan Gillmor who, in a neologism that Thomas Paine would have admired, coined the term 'citizen journalism.' That coinage helped make the concept palatable to many professional journalists, a group hugely pre-disposed to believing that everyone has a latent desire to do what they do. Others in our industry, such as my friend 'Robespierre' Jarvis, have even painted 'citizen journalism' as a struggle between the people and 'big media' (I remember Andrea Panciera of 'big media' Belo's Projo.com retorting at an ONA meeting, 'Hey, I'm too a citizen of my community!') And many of the news industry's think tanks -- whose own thinking about how to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership has become bankrupt -- have climbed aboard the citizen journalism bandwagon for lack of anything else to play. Propelled by all this groupthink, the concept has gained huge inertial momentum in our industry.

Again, don't get me wrong. I think that technologies via which readers can comment, help report, eyewitness, tip off, and otherwise supplement, amplify, or redirect newspaper coverage are absolutely needed. These are tools that every news organization should begin using (oops, I should have used the politically correct phrase: 'begin sharing') with people. I applaud BlufftonToday.com and other well conceived applications of this. And I support my friends who are helping to teach citizen journalism to the few citizens who do want to report.

But citizen journalism is a supplement, not a panacea. Citizen journalism itself isn't going to reverse the declines in news readership, listernership, and viewership. Not by a longshot. The real solution requires more than just the tools that folks in our industry are calling 'citizen journalism' and that are providing so much distraction.

(Oslo Harbor, 3 February 2007)

Every country seems to think that someone else is ahead of it in practical application of online media. I'm often asked which country is the best. The answer since the late nineties has clearly been the four Scandinavian counties, though South Korea and Estonia have joined them in the top rank during the past four years. The Finns, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, South Koreans, and Estonians have pulled well ahead of the Americans, Canadians, British, Irish, Dutch, Germans, and Singaporeans in online media usage and application.

Before putting Norwegian online usage into perspective, allow me to first tell you about Norwegian printed media usage. Until Japan surpassed it last year, Norway for years had the world's strongest readership of daily newspapers – 0.626 copies sold daily per adult, compared to 0.33 in the US). At the beginning of 2006, the national tabloids Dagbladet and Verdens Gang Verdens Gang and Dagbladet were selling 343,703 and 252,716 copies per day respectively in a nation of only 4,610,000 people. Imagine the equivalent daily circulations in America, which adjusted for population would be 22,366,789 and 16,445,726, far above the actual circulations of 2,269,509 for USA Today or 1,086,798 for The New York Times. DB and VG are very successful printed newspapers.

Despite that strong readership, print circulation is rapidly declining in Norway. The state agency Medianorway reports that VG's circulation dropped 6.2 percent and DB's 13 percent during 2005. Several DB staffers told me that the as yet unreported 2006 circulation changes were be similar. [Update: Audit Bureaux of Circulation figures released Febuary 12th showed that VG's daily circulaiton during 2006 had dropped by 28,000 copies to 315,500. I don't yet have the ABC figure for Dagbladet.]

As in most other countries, many print edition executives are blaming their companies' free online editions for cannibalizing printed edition circulation sales. These print edition executives want either (a) access to the online editions to be sold for a subscription fee equivalent to print or else (b) that the online editions not provide full news and instead encourage online readers to get that by purchasing a printed copy.

That first option is philistine and regressive in a world where the only growing sector of daily newspaper circulation is free papers – up more than 137 percent during the past five years, from 12 million to 28 million copies worldwide. The second option is like insisting that each automobile one hundred years ago have a horse in front of it, a workable but really dumb idea.

Almost all Norwegian adults and teenagers are online, far higher percentages than in America, Canada, or the UK. The average bandwidth into Norwegian homes and offices is 1.5 megabytes per second. And the strong newspaper readership and advanced online infrastructure shouldn't lead to any mystery that Norway produces what may be the world's best online editions (so too do several of the dailies in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland).

VG.no receives 950 000 unique users per day and Dagbladet.no 750,000. The weekly unique user numbers are 2,240,000 and 1,820,000 respectively, almost entirely domestic traffic. The equivalent number in the US would be 61,822,124 and 48,806,940 unique users daily, or 145,770,060 and 118,438,174 per week. Compare those numbers to to NYTimes.com's 13,372,00 unique users per month. Online editions are pervasive in Norway.

Dagbladet's new-media EBITA earnings climbed from 8.5 million to 22 million Kroner (1.3 million to 3.3 million US dollars) between 2004 and 2005. The 2006 increase was at least 40 percent more and forecast to be the same during 2007. The Economist magazine last year reported that VG's publisher Shibsted earned nearly 40 percent of its revenues from new-media. Dagbladet AS reportedly earned about a third of its that way. New-media will probably contribute more than 40 percent of each companies earnings this year.

I asked Dagbladet staffers whether they or VG had the best online edition. With typical Scandinavian humility, most answered that VG did. Their answer was like the student who scores 98/100 saying the student who scored 99/100 is better. A tiny difference.

I've been in Oslo because Dagbladet asked me to be the featured speaker at their seminar Thursday for approximately 90 of Dagbladet's online advertisers. My role was to explain what the future of digital media will be. No one, including me, truly knows the answer to that. I chose not to tell them the trends — indicators that have too often been wrong during the past 15 years of public access to the Internet. I instead explained the underlying dynamics that are driving change and, in particularly, what this will mean to not only dagbladet.no but the company's social networking site, blink.no. More than 350,000 Norwegians – including 42 percent of norwegians between ages 16 and 18 and 75 percent of those younger than 26 years– belong to it.

[I apologize if I'm being cryptic here about what underlying dynamics are driving change. It's intentional and I apologize. I've been writing a long piece about the answer, which I plan to post soon. During the past few months, I've had a radical change in philosophy about what ails the news industry. Let me leave for now to state that the answers are two-fold: failure to utilize fully the new technologies plus the errant course that journalism itself has taken during the past 30 years. The latter should put me in real good standing with journalists and J-schools!]

Dagbladet also invited me to their parent corporation's winter holiday party – where I was easily identifiable as the sole person among the 300 there who didn't speak Norwegian.

I was surprised to discover that the Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, which has long been involved in online media, produces a good website, but its online, mobile, and interactive/digital TV developments and strategies seem behind the British Broadcasting Corporation and other Western broadcasters, and well behind the South Korean broadcasters. Is it lack competition that could make NRK change more quickly? I don't know.

While in Oslo, I talk to several people about the idea of holding an online news publishing conference in Scandinavia. But the World Association of Newspapers beat me to the idea, announcing yesterday that one will be held there on March 8-9 – relatively short notice.

By the way, did you know that the Norwegian word for beer, øl, is pronounced url? No wonder Norwegian's are technosavvy.

The Coming Storm (portent for 2007?), Puerto de las Nieves, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, 23 December 2006

On November 22nd, a date which marked my 10th anniversary of consulting full-time about new-media to traditonal media companies, after a speech at the Spanish Daily Newspaper Association's annual meeting, I took the liberty of staying in Spain for the rest of the year as an extended vacation in that country's Canary Islands. (Forgive me, but this long vacation was long in coming. My first vacation lasting more than a week in over five years).

I'm back at work now, and want to start 2007 with a suggestion to news websites:

If our new media is to succeed traditional printed and broadcast media, then it also must assume traditional media's responsibilities about press freedom around the world. The world is now in its second ten years of mass use of new media, and I think the time has now come for new-media journalists and editors to begin assuming the mantle of world press freedom in general.

In 1993, the United Nations declared every May 3rd to be World Press Freedom Day, a day to pay tribute to the journalists around the world who risk their lives by professional choice, in their effort to promote the free flow of information and assertion of press freedom on behalf of all members of society. World Press Freedom day also is commemorated by organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Inter American Press Association, International Federation of Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, International Press Institute, Media Institute of Southern Africa, and the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).

WAN, for example, supplies newspapers with press freedom case study stories, public service advertisements, and even videos, to publish on May 3rds. According to WAN, as of November at least 109 journalists had been killed during 2006 and many more have been imprisoned. WAN is even holding a conference about 'New Media: The Press Freedom Dimension' in Paris on 15-16 February 2007.

On May 3rd, 2007, I think news websites should each devote a story and at least one home page banner ad (even if in rotation) to World Press Freedom. If newspapers can promote it, why can't our sites? Heaven knows, we should be able to do even better than traditional media. And our commitment is only one story and one banner ad on one day a year. Wouldn't it be great to see nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk, dw-world.de, oglobo.com.br, and smaller sites reminding what journalists risk on users' behalf.

As a publishing consultant and former journalist, I'm asking my clients to promote World Press Freedom Day online.

Sincerely yours,

Vin Crosbie

Newspapers all across America are using newsprint to wave the white flag, surrendering to the major search engines.

Earlier this month, 50 American newspapers agreed to have Google sell some of their online advertising inventories. Those newspapers include The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune.

Today, 176 other American newspapers announced their agreement to have Yahoo! sell some of their online advertising inventories. These include newspapers owned by MediaNews Group, Hearst, Belo, E. W. Scripps, Journal Register, Lee Enterprises, and Cox Enterprises.

Welcome to the wholesale surrender of major American newspaper companies to the search engines!

The chairmen of many of these newspaper companies are claiming the deals represent victories or advantages for their newspapers, but their claims are hardly true. The deals instead represent their failures during the past ten years. You can see this when looking back on the long perspective (which is why I've pictured the white flag atop the mountain, above).

Reporting Yahoo!'s arrangements with those newspapers, The New York Times today mentioned the effort ten years ago by the New Century Network consortium of the largest American newspaper companies -- Advance Publications, Cox Newspapers, Gannett Company, Hearst, Knight-Ridder, The New York Times Company, Times-Mirror, Tribune Company, and The Washington Post Company -- to form a common online advertising platform and also a common news search engine that included all their newspapers content and advertising space. But the executives of those companies bickered and failed to work together, and the New Century Network effort collapsed.

Little was done in the nearly ten year interim. Three of those companies (Gannett, Knight Ridder, and Tribune Company) joined forces to create a common online job ads services (Careerbuilder.com); and, along with Belo, McClatchy, and The Washington Post Company, a common online automobile ads service (Cars.com), but those online ventures intentionally excluded many other newspapers companies.

Moreover, almost all American newspaper companies during the past ten years have decried the growing market power of the online search engines. Google and Yahoo! have captured more national online advertising, and almost more local online advertising, than all American newspaper sites combined. American newspapers also worry if the search engines' news search sites sucks online traffic from their own sites. (In Europe, the World Association of Newspapers is leading an effort to sue or block the search engines from accessing newspapers' contents without remuneration.)

However, now most of those American companies or their successors have agreed to let Google and Yahoo! sell their newspaper's online ads. So, much for newspapers competiting with those search engines for ten years!

On this day when eMarketer estimates that Google is well on the way to capturing 25 percent of all U.S. online advertisement spending and almost twice the amount of Yahoo!'s revenues, with which Google's revenues only 18 months ago were on par, here are some other issues that my business partner and I are examining:

° What will be the future role of news agents and newsstands? Although they don't play a sizeable role in distribution of American, Canadian, German, and Japanese newspaper (only about seven percent of circulation in those countries), local newsstands and news agent play a most significant role in most other major countries' newspaper ecology. Plus they play significant roles in magazine distribution in every country.

In most of the world's countries, newspapers and their hired wholesalers distributed daily copies to the news agents and newsstands, who then distribute them to you. when you subscribe to home delivery of a daily newspaper, you make your subscription with your neighborhood newsstand or news agent (not directly with the newspaper as is the situation here in the U.S.) The news agents or newsstand has the relationships with the subscribers; the newspapers themselves don't know who subscribes, just that the wholesalers reports how many copies were sold to the retail newsstand and news agents.

Some digerati simply expect newsstands and news agents to go out of business if newspapers and magazines someday switch entirely to online publication. But that would create a major disruption in countries such as the United Kingdom, where 47 percent of the daily newspapers' gross revenues came from newsstands and news agents. Must the newspapers forge direct subscription relationships with consumers? Will physical newsstands and kiosks cease to exist? (Do remember that browsing a physical newsstands if much easily than one online.) Or will they be replaced by physical versions of some sort of electronic kiosk?

° More immediately on that topic, we've today been helping a U.S. investment client ascertain what the U.K. Office of Fair Trade's provisional decision-making about news agent competition means for major newspaper and magazine distribution wholesalers such as W.H.Smith, Menzies, or Dawson News.

In the U.K. wholesalers grant news agents and newsstands exclusive rights to distribute certain titles in specific geographical areas (a rural town, a one block radius in London, etc.). Since 2004, the OFT has been investigating whether such exclusivity is anti-competitive and disserves consumers. It last year issued a provisional finding that these exclusivities weren't anti-competitive with newspapers but were with magazines. Several months ago, it however changed its findings to say the exclusivities are anti-competitive for newspapers, too. It's still investigating, and will issue new findings in the spring.

° Would the regional press be better served using virtual newsrooms? We know several reporters at various regional newspapers who've gotten into trouble by not being at their newsroom desks five days and 40-hours per week. They've defended themselves by pointing out that news doesn't occur in newsrooms. That's all too true. The successful newsroom was an empty one 25 years ago because all its reporters who expending shoe leather, but too many corporations now consider an emply desk or cubicle in a newsroom to mean that the reporter isn't doing her job.

Today's technologies allow reporters to work from anywhere. So, why should they be physically anchored to their newsroom for most of the work day? Newsrooms are a great place for reporters and editors to have story conferences, but with instant messaging, SMS, person-to-person webcasting and voicecasting, mobile devices, etc., the reporter should be able to work from his car, home, local coffee shop, or the news scene. Why chain them to an Atex or SII mainframe six or eight hours each day?

Many journalism schools teach how to report using multimedia and new technologies, but none teach editors how to use those technologies to replace the newsroom itself. It's time that was done.

° Open archives. How much are newspapers really making by charging for online access to stories that might be more than a week old? Do they earn more that way than the online advertising revenues from opening up their entire archives to consumers and search engines? Are publishers being foolishly doctrinaire by charging for archives?

° American business publications in print took a revenue bath last month. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers' Talking Biz News reports Magazine Publishers Association data showing large drops in advertising pages and revenues.

Though Barron's, The Economist and Inc magazines showed increases in ad revenue,
Forbes 4.2 percent, Smart Money 5.4 percent, Money 6.6 percent, em>Business 2.0 fell 7.4, BusinessWeek 8.9 percent, Kiplinger 19 percent, and Fortune 28.1 percent (after that magazine had already declined 12 percent in August). It's odd that business magazines would have less advertising once the summer vacation season ended.

° The Financial Times and the weekly New York Sun published 'think' articles about the future of the American newspaper industry, and both make the same point about profit margin versus product development.

The FT story contrasts the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times. The former is owned by the publicly-traded Tribune Company and the latter owned by a not-for-profit trust. The FT's reporter suggests that Wall Street demanding too much profit ("trying to push profit margins beyond 20 per cent") comes at the expense of keeping newspapers viable.

The Sun's story looks at The Los Angeles Times and the now defunct Knight Ridder Inc., and is a bit more blunt:

It seems its [Knight Ridder] 32 daily newspapers had been able to record "only" a 20% return on investment in recent years.

Cut back on the quality of a newspaper in order to show an impressive short-term return for the market's sake, and the slide toward disaster has begun. Readers will notice and begin drifting away, and advertisers will soon follow. It won't be long before the vultures are circling.

° Last but not least, the online news pioneer Milverton Wallace, who'd organized the European NetMedia conference during the new-media industry's first decade, looks at the long-term changes underway, in an essay he's written for the Club of Amsterdam.

Pardon me for writing again about newspapers, but they're often the starting point in the feeding chains of broadcasters and bloggers. And this story is just in about newspapers themselves:

According to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America Newspaper Audience Database project, more Americans visit newspaper websites than purchase printed editions. That is, more do sometime during a month. The NAA announced that more than 55.5 million Americans now visit newspaper websites at least once per month and this total grew by more than 31 percent during the past year.

When many of us started publishing news online during the late 1980s (via Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and other proprietary online services) or in the mid-1990s on the World Wide Web, the time when newspapers would have more online users than print readers seemed a distant dream.

It's a milestone, an accomplishment that deserve praise.

Yet this dream isn't a wet dream. Nor is it real. The big caveat in the NAA announcement is those numbers are monthly, not daily.

Slightly more than 54 million Americans purchase a printed edition daily while 55.5 million visited a newspaper website at least once per month. Conflating daily print and monthly online figures makes it appear that the American newspaper industry isn't so much losing daily print readers as gaining equally frequent new readers online. That's good PR for the newspaper industry, and more power to the NAA for touting it. But the claim isn't really true.

Daily reach isn't monthly reach and vice versa. There may be 55.5 million users of newspaper websites, but they use those site far less frequently and less thoroughly than daily.

Look closely at NAA's NAD data (which is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet). How often does the average user visit a newspaper site during a month? There's are no data about that in the NAD data, but we can calculate an indication from the data. Though the NAD spreadsheet is password-protected against any changes or added calculations, you can simply add a new worksheet into it by using Excel's 'Insert > Worksheet' command and link it to the NAD data to make indicative calculations.

Take as an example the first newspaper listed in the data: The New York Times. Divide its number of monthly users into its number of monthly page views to calculate how many pages the average user saw that month. The answer is 24.8, or less than a webpage per day during any month. That indicates that the most frequent possibility would be the average user of that site visits almost daily (i.e., 24.8 times in a 30-day month) but sees only one webpage per visit and that the least frequent would be one visit per month during which he sees more than 24 webpages. (My guess within that range would be about six visits per month and some four webpages seen per visit.)

Make the same calculation about the Boston Globe (line 244 in the NAD spreadsheet) and the answer is 21.3 or only about two webpages every three days. Try the Miami Herald (line 1389) and get 5.6 webpages per month or less than one webpage every five days. Etcetera.

The NAA is conflating the numbers of people who read at least one printed page daily with people who might read perhaps only two webpages per week. Those numbers aren't really equivalent.

Moreover, I'm puzzled by another NAA datasheet (PDF) available online, this one from Nielsen/Netratings data. It shows almost the same number of site users per month as the NAD data, but an average of nearly 47 webpages seen monthly per user. That's a discrepency of more than 100 percent from the NAD data! I wonder what the explanation is such a huge discrepency in data covering the same period and through NAA.

Maybe a clearer picture can be seen in a report the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released this summer, Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership:

But the growth of the online news audience has slowed considerably since 2000, particularly among the very young, who are now somewhat less likely to go online for news than are people in their 40s. For the most part, online news has evolved as a supplemental source that is used along with traditional news media outlets. It is valued most for headlines and convenience, not detailed, in-depth reporting.

Broadcast news outlets continue to struggle over the last two years alone, the audiences for nightly network, local TV news and radio news have all slipped. Even so, the recent trends in news consumption are relatively stable when compared to the 1990s when TV news in particular was suffering losses of far greater magnitude.

Similarly, the latest Pew news consumption survey finds that newspapers, which also have seen their audience decline significantly, are now stemming further losses with the help of their online editions. However, the discrete online-only newspaper audience is quite modest in size.

Four-in-ten Americans say they read a newspaper yesterday, with 6% reading a newspaper online 4% read both a print and online newspaper, while 2% read it only online. In addition, 3% say they read something on a local or national newspaper website yesterday. As a result, even the highest estimate of daily newspaper readership 43% for both print and online readers is still well below the number reading a print newspaper on a typical day 10 years ago (50%).

The biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted among 3,204 adults from April 27 to May 22, finds that the audience for online news is fairly broad, but not particularly deep. People who say they logged on for news yesterday spent 32 minutes, on average, getting the news online. That is significantly less than the average number of minutes that newspaper readers, radio news listeners, and TV news viewers spend with those sources. And while nearly half of all Americans (48%) spend at least 30 minutes getting news on television, just 9% spend that long getting news online.

The web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail. Of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.

The rise of the internet has also not increased the overall news consumption of the American public. The percentage of Americans who skip the news entirely on a typical day has not declined since the 1990s. Nor are Americans spending any more time with the news than they did a decade ago when their news choices were much more limited. In 1996, people on average spent slightly more than an hour (66 minutes) getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers. Currently, they spend virtually the same amount of time (67 minutes) getting the news from all major news sources, the internet included.

As internet news has gone more mainstream, its audience has aged. Since 2000, nearly all of the growth among regular internet news users has occurred among those ages 25-64. By contrast, virtually the same percentage of 18-24 year-olds say they get news online at least three days a week as did so six years ago (30% now, 29% then). Currently, about as many people ages 50 to 64 regularly get news on the internet as do those in their late teens and early 20s.

If newspaper new-media is to succeed printed editions, then it still has a long way to go. And it will need to go that far within not much more than perhaps ten years before declines in print circulation will drop below he level where newspapers become uneconomic to publish and therefore insolvent, as others have calculated.

Have you ever wanted to take what you now know and go back ten years in time? I saw it done on Wednesday.

The American Press Institute, a training and think-tank institute for the American newspaper industry, warped time when presenting the second phase of its Newspaper Next project to transform that industry.

The project is being run by Innosight, the consulting company founded by Clayton Christensen (pointing at one of his slides above), the Harvard Business School professor who wrote the book, The Innovator's Dilemma about the troubles established companies have facing disruptive change in the markets. Because newspapers are facing such a change, the API hired Innosight to help it.

Innosight’s presentation on Wednesday basically consisted of two parts: An explanation of what tends to happen when established companies face disruptive change and basically two recommendations what the newspaper industry should do.

Let’s peek under the blanket because there's a lot of people in the dark there. A widespread misconception is that taking printed or broadcast content and putting it online or wireless is new-media. This misconception blankets even many new-media executives.

No, taking printed or broadcast content and putting it online or wireless is as much new-media as microwaving hamburgers is new cuisine. It’s just the same old beef reheated a new way.

The reason this misconception is so widespread is that most people, including most media executives, are myopic. They might see the superficial changes underway but rarely the seismic changes that underlie and motivate the surface. They can’t perceive the forest because all the trees get in the way.

But the verb evolve probably better describes what’s going on than motivate.

Media ever evolves towards greater, more articulate distribution. Technology drives the evolution.

Note that the evolution has two dimensions: Greater. And more articulate.However, most media executives still see only one dimension: the greater distribution (i.e., greater reach). They fail to notice the newer dimension: More articulate distribution. They're conditioned not to see it.

And why not? The first period of evolution led to the greatest distribution.

Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type allowed economical distribution of books, newspapers, and broadsides. The later invention of rotary presses, powered by steam and then electrical engines, allowed their mass production. Morse’s telegraph extended the reach of text. Marconi’s radio extended the reach of words. Farnsworth’s television extended the reach of moving pictures. By 1990, any content could reach anywhere in the world within 24 hours in the physical form of print or instantaneously when telegraphed or broadcast.

But the second period of media evolution is now underway, and it will lead to the most articulate distribution. That means the ability to distribute to each person those pieces of content that are most pertinent to that person’s unique mix of generic and individual interests. It doesn’t mean distributing the same package of content to everyone -- be that package an album of music, a printed newspaper or news magazine, programs in a broadcast schedule, or even an intact broadcast program.

As with geologic periods, there has been occurring a brief overlap between these two periods of media evolution. We are in that overlap.

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926 - 2004) postulated the now famous Five Stages of Grief that people undergo when faced with their impending death:

• Denial and isolation - The "This won't happen to me! I don't really have to worry" stage.
• Anger - The "Why me?" How dare you do this to me!" stage.
• Bargaining - The "Maybe I can evade this fate by co-opting or sidestepping it " stage.
• Depression - The "It's really happening and I can't stop it" stage.
• Acceptance - The "Let it happen; I don't want to struggle anymore" stage.

The news industry is dying. In which of Kübleresque stages is this industry. There have been some major changes this year.

But first, do I exaggerate the patient's condition? I don't think so. Nor do others. Furthermore, when I state that the news industry is dying, no, I don't want it to die. I am just stating the condition of the industry. There will always be a need for journalism, but the question is whether there will be an industry in which journalists can work.

Let's examine the patient. Its vital signs have been fading for decades. Circulations and readership of newspapers and news magazines has been evaporating. Listenership and viewership of broadcast news programs have likewise been are dissipating. These declines had been slow, about half a percent annually, but in the past few years have accelerated to a few percentages annually. The industry's heart still beats, and some industry leaders still to profess its vigor, but now even its core vital signs — its revenues (adjusted for inflation) and its profit margins — the pulse and blood pressure of the industry, have begun to wane.

Many industry executives claim that a transplant into the new-media will save the patient. However, an examination of data shows that their online editions are read by fewer people — and less often and less frequently — than the dying print or broadcast editions. Moreover, ten years into these efforts, the online editions are earning only one-twentieth to one-hundredth per user what the dying print edition earns per reader.

The news industry is in critical condition everywhere except countries that only now are forming their economic middle classes such as China and India; places only now rising to the levels North America and Western Europe reached 90 years ago (during the heyday of newspapers). The patient is dying everywhere else. The industry needs a radical course correction.

The eldest form of mass media will likely be the first to kick the bucket. 'Who Killed the Newspaper?' asked the cover of The Economist weekly news magazine on August 24th. , In a post-mortem a priori to newspapers' death, the magazine (which in a quaint British tradition styles itself a newspaper) The Economist cover story began with an editorial stating:

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold.

And later in a 2,900-word special report about the newspaper industry, it noted:

Batu Caves Shrines, Selangor, Malaysia, 18 July 2006   – © Vin Crosbie

If the Internet distributes information more efficiently and eliminates the middlemen, then why do so many owners and operators of traditional media — who are the middlemen — believe that they will make as much, if not more, money as the Internet becomes the primary means for distributing information?

That belief doesn't make sense.

Earlier this year at a conference in Paris, I pointed out to the newspaper industry that it is earning between one-twentieth and one-hundredth as much per website user as print reader. In April, Scott Karp independently analyzed further why media companies shouldn't make as much online as in their legacy modes.

His post made me wondering if there are historical precedents. When the Industrial Revolution began, did purveyors of cloth, coal, iron, lumber, and other goods that industrialization would revolutionize, believe that they too could maintain their previous profit margins? The answer is yes, those purveyors believed that industrialization would just markedly decrease their costs of production, enlarging their profit margins. But as the Austro-American guru of management Peter Drucker (1909-2005) noted, "Not only did the cost of production markedly decline, but so did the value people were willing to pay for the products."

The value people were willing to pay for those products declined. And that was when those products had been scarce. We today live an era when we're already awash in information. It's surplus, not scarce.

So, why do owners and opperators of traditional media companies believe that they will make as much, if not more, money as they switch to the Internet rather than using paper or radio or television as their primary means for distributing information? Wishful thinking. Belief. Faith.

But belief isn't business; it's religion. Root business concepts in reality, not in belief or faith. During Web 1.0, too many executives rooted their business plans in belief or faith. Unfortunately, the false idol they worshiped then turned out to be the Pets.com sock-puppet.

Today is scarily similar. I'm seeing too many Internet trade journal stories about how this or that 'business trend' is underway because thousands of executives hope to do this or that. Poppycock! Instead, show me thousands of executives who are successfully doing this or that. Hope is wonderful thing (and also the name of a girl I used to go out), but business plans shouldn't be rooted in hope. (Perhaps I too should have stayed with Prudence in 1976 rather than leaving her for Hope, but Prudence is a story for another day.)

Unless you publish or broadcast religious content, hope, faith, and belief don't have any place in media business plans. Including plans from startups, too.

So, if you're the owner or operator of a media who believes that you will make as much, if not more, money online as you did in print or radio or television, get your head out of the clouds. That's not heaven you've been glimpsing. It's aerial fog.

No, the world isn't hopeless. Yes, you can make much more online than you're making online now, just not what you were making when you're business was based upon scarcity and Industrial Era technologies such as printing presses and transmitters. Your world is changing. Or as Ad Age's Simon Dumenco earlier this year wrote about the magazine industry's perchant for traveling in limousines, We're Sorry Ms. Wintour, but You'll Have to Walk. And please use a map, don't just hope or believe that you know where you're going.

I'm in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the Media Giraffe conference and am frustrated.

Most of the speakers from mainstream media seem to have an intrinsic belief that the package of journalism they're been providing for the past 50 years shouldn't change, plus that their journalism ("quality, objective journalism") simply needs to be placed onto new platforms (the Web, mobile phones, etc.) to get more people to use it and ensure the future of journalism and the news media in general.

The facts belie their faith in that belief. Newspapers' and news magazines' circulations and readerships are steadily declining, as is listenership and viewership of news broadcast. Some publishers and broadcasters claim that their websites' increasing numbers of users show that there are no declines but increases. But I know that the data from those sites show that those users actually use the news media online far less frequently and much less throughly than users of those media's traditional print and broadcast products. People are 'voting with their feet' and rejecting mainstream media's package of journalism, whether in print, broadcast, or online.

Meanwhile, I'm also frustrated by the alternative being offered here: the utopian fantasy that if the news media would only incorporate 'citizen journalism,' all will be well. Bullsh*t!

Yes, I think that most of mainstream media long lost ago lost touch with a plurality — if not majority — of their audience. I agree that much of traditional media might have been complacently 'talking down' to their audience for years. I indeed think that "citizen journalism' is an excellent tool for helping to repairing those problems; but it is just one of many new tools needed. Most of "the people formerly known as the audience" still want to be the audience, don't want the onus of reporting the news themselves, and the ongoing data — including those from 'citizen journalism' projects that have existed for a few years — about citizens' involvement in journalism isn't and won't reverse the declining usage of news. Facts, not faith.

During the opening session of this conference, I raised my worry about 'citizen journalism' being peddled as a panacea. But Jeff Jarvis, my co-moderator of that session, cut me off. "I don't think that's the question!"

Well, thank you, Jeff, for telling the conference that what you're co-moderator is asking is not the question. I think it is. I'm not alone 'Citizen journalism' shouldn't be a sacred cow. Certainly not at a conference whose stated purpose is to examine the future of journalism and participatory democracy.

Jeff has claimed that if only one percent of a site's users engage in 'citizen journalism,' it will create a "democraticized community." I think he's an advocate who's making the proof fit the results. His claim reminded me of certain 20th Century nations' claims that their 99 percent voter turnouts proved that they're democracies. No, give me usage rates of 40 percent (like U.S. voter turnout) or even 20 or 10 percent, and I might believe. Sorry, but one percent participation doesn't make something a success or a democracy.

There is a pile of solipcism in the news industry. We like to report the news, so we think that most people would, too. But I fear that some advocates' single-minded focus on 'citizen journalism' is distracting the news media from many, many other changes it must make. The advocates are succumbing to Maslow's Syndrome — when the tool in your hand is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. 'Citizen journalism' is a wonderful tool, but more tools than just that are needed to repair and rebuild the media.

Moreover, researchers and analysts such as Prof. Robert PuttnamBowling Alone) have ably documented that we live increasingly in a nation of couch potatoes when it comes to the news usage, civic involvement, and comity. Traditional media editors have long believed that they somehow can control that by changing the story package, but there's widespread evidence that their belief is just an article of faith and not fact. Likewise, advocates of 'citizen journalism' believe that they can that they have that influence, too.

No, just giving the tool of 'citizen journalism' to the public won't reverse the declines. More changes to journalism than just 'citizen journalism' are necessary. What's needed is not just including 'the people who used to be known as the audience' but also changing the core journalism by the people who used to be known as Knight Ridder.

Technorati tag: mgp2006

The average age of a user of American newspapers' websites has increased by five years during the past five years, according to annual survey data I've seen from Belden Associates. The data strongly indicate that the American newspaper industry's strategy of going online to appeal to younger readers is failing.

The average age of a user of American newspapers' websites was 42 during 2005 and 37 during 2000, according to Belden. The average increased during four of the past five years.

True, the average age of the website user is younger than that of the average reader of a printed edition — 42 versus 55. But the American newspaper industry's online strategy has been largely aimed at reaching users in the 25 to 34 age plus those in the 35 to 44 age group in general.

The Belden data shows that the ranks of newspaper website users who are age 25 to 44 have steadily declined during the past five years while those in the oldest age group (55 plus) have increased.

If the American newspaper industry is to reverse its declines, it must steadily decrease — not increase, the average age of its users — whether users of print or online.

Greg Harmon of Belden Associates showed me the data during Editor & Publisher and MEDIAWEEK magazines' Interactive Media conference.

Each year since 1999, Belden has interviewed more than 134,000 users (including 38,300 during 2005) of 39 U.S. newspaper websites of various sizes. Here are some Belden highlights about the users:

I'm still in shock after the two conferences I attended earlier this month. How times have changed!

During 1998, I flew from a new-media conference in Zürich to one in Las Vegas. I was in a different kind of shock then. Zürich and Las Vegas are remarkably different cities, but culture shock wasn't a problem. Jet lag was. My circadian clock was nine hours askew. Fortunately, Las Vegas is the city where being wide-awake at wee hours is perfectly acceptable.

This year, I flew from a new-media conference in New York City to one in Las Vegas. Jet lag wasn't a problem; there are only three time zones between those cities. However, a week later, I'm still in shock. Culture shock. But not because of the difference in cities.

I'm suffering culture shock because I'd too quickly gone from a conference of digerati to one of analogati. I'd almost say, to one of Ludderati.

Worse, the two conferences were all digerati back in 1998, but the times since have left one of those conferences behind.

The digerati were at the Syndicate conference last Monday and Tuesday in Manhattan. This conference was about how the Internet is changing the way that news and information is distributed. Among its 125 attendees and speakers were AOL Weblogs Inc. Founder Jason Calacanis, Rocketboom host and co-owner Amanda Congdon, Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson, Richard Edelman of Edelman PR (who has his own blog), Brightcove VP of Content and Online Services Eric Elia, ZDNet International Contributing Editor Steve Gillmor, Blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com, Eric Norlin, Doc Searls, Technorati Founder and CEO David Sifry, Reuters Consumer Media Senior VP & General Manager Steven Schwartz, Halley Suitt, and David Weinberger. Most of them have invented somne new-media technologies, innovatively adapted those technologies, or successfully started companies based upon those technologies and innovations.

Due to a scheduling conflict, I could attend only the first few hours of the Syndicate conference (I blogged just the opening sessiont of this conference). Most of the speakers and attendees whose names are hyperlinked above can better report about this conference than I can. Nevertheless, I was there long nenough to experience how new ideas were flying throughout, aided by speakers who broke the Fourth Wall of the stage and let the audience participate and by wireless Internet access throughout the conference hall, which let attendees and speakers check facts, check on each other, and all participate even more. It was exhilerating, and I came away with many new ideas.

A few days later, I flew to Editor & Publisher and MEDIAWEEK magazines' Interactive Media conference in Las Vegas. It would be quite unfair of me to call its attendees ludderati or Luddites. The Luddites were a social movement in the early 1800s that objected to technological change and tried to smash new technologies. By contrast, the 300 or so attendees of the Interactive Media conference were executives who owe their positions to technological change and are trying to embrace it. They've spent most of the past eight to twelve years putting their printed publications online. For examples, you can now read The Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, or Newsweek online, hours before those periodicals appear in print. The online versions sometimes even contain hyperlinks to source materials, though most don't.

In 1998, the attendees at these two conferences had been on roughly the same level of sophistication about technology and new-media theory. However, the Interactive Media attendees are still at that 1998 level, while the Syndicate attendees are now eight years' more sophisticaled. The difference was so striking it shocked me.

One of the few Interactive Media attendees who is as sophisticated as any of the Syndicate attendees is Forbes magazine Executive Editor and Forbes.com Editor Paul Maidment. Read his story about how out-of-date the conference's attendees were, if you don't believe me. He leads it with something he heard:

"I don't know what to do, but I am ready to do it." That was the quote that raised the biggest chuckle at the recently concluded Interactive Media Conference, Editor & Publisher's annual gathering at which the U.S. regional newspaper industry's panjandrums stare transfixed into the onrushing headlights of online publishing. Trouble is, it was a self-knowingly nervous giggle.

I remember that quote. It was one of three incidents I particularly remember from the Interactive Media conference. Here are the other two:

The first was when two college students were interviewed on stage in front of the attendees. They were asked what websites they had browsed that day from their personal computers and also what books they'd recently read. The students said they had browsed no websites from personal computers, but instead did their browsing that day from their mobile phones. They also said they hadn't lately read any printed books except college textbooks, except they had recently bought and downloaded several ebooks onto their PDAs.

That they used their phones rather than PCs to browse surprised the attendees, almost all of whom design their websites for PCs. Similarly, the attendees were flummoxed that someone who read ebooks ("The convenience and portability of having all those books at hand," one student replied. "I can read them whenever and wherever I am").

When the conference later held a panel about publishing to mobile devices, it mentioned that most mobile phones in the U.S. can be used to browse the Internet, and asked the attendees for questions. The opening question came from an executive who announced, "Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I had heard that it's possible to browse the Web from a mobile phone and I had someone show me how. I could figure out how to type the 'www' but couldn't figure out how to type the '.' in Web addresses. So, isn't all this concern about mobile phones way too early?"

Only in the minds of her and most of the 300 other attendees, despite the evidence before them, I thought.

The second incident was orchestrated by speaker and Innosight consulting company Managing Director Scott Anthony. He presented a 30-second video and asked the attendees to count in it the number of times a basketball is passed among a trio of people wearing white who were weaving among a trio of people wearing black. Most of the 300 attendees counted anywhere between 12 and 16 passes. But Scott then asked how many had seen a person wearing a gorilla suit walk across the screen and wave at the attendees. Only about a dozen of the 300 attendees raised their hands.

So, here was a conference about a changing environment, but most of its attendees weren't able to perceive an obvious incongruity — a real change — in a 30-second video. That was Scott's point.

Outside research indicates that only about 10 percent of average people see the gorilla in that video (an ape easily seen in this still image). That means that at least 30, not only a dozen, of the 300 attendees should have seen the gorilla. Moreover, this conference's attendees are people paid by their companies to perceive, understand, and deal with change. Shouldn't more than a dozen or 30 of the 300 Interactive Media attendees have seen the gorilla in their midst? I think that most of the attendees of the Syndicate conference would have.

You won't find much blogged about the Interactive Media conference because its organizers decided not to provide its attendees with wireless Internet access (reportedly because using the Internet might distract attendees from hearing the speakers — a remarkablly Industrial Era policy in an Information Era where people routinely multitask. Moreover, why should a concert about interactive be interactive? Go figure.).

With the exception of not providing wireless, the fault in Las Vegas wasn't Editor & Publisher or MEDIAWEEK magazines'. It was the attendees. They're so driven to do what made sense to them in 1998 that they don't question whether that makes sense now or how things are changing.

There are many executives in the newspaper and magazine industry who are as sophisticated about technology and new-media theory as the Syndicate attendees, but most of them no longer attend the annual Interactive Media conferences. I can understand why (perhaps they correctly don't think they will learn anything), but the people who do attend and the industry as a whole lose by those people's absences.

All this tends to confirm the quote Paul Maidement reported. The attendees might know that their businesses need to change, but they don't know how and probably won't be able to perceive the answer if they saw it. This drives deep to the heart of why newspapers and magazines have failed to adapt to the Internet beyond about 1998.

I'm still in shock. My thanks to the conference's organizers for letting me speak on the panel entitled What's Wrong with Media. I'll probably attend next year's Interactive Media conference, but I've more than enough reasons to question why.

[I earlier this week wrote that:

The radical changes the newspaper industry needs to implement arise from a more true understanding by that industry of why newspaper readership began declining well before the Internet was opened to the public; about why one billion people worldwide have gone onto the Internet after it was opened to the public (they didn't do it to read traditional media on computer screens), and about why all that plus the misnamed and illusionary 'fracturing' of media audiences requires semantic solutions.

At the root of that problem is a misunderstanding about what the New Medium actually is; a misunderstanding by almost all companies that broadcast programs or that publish newspapers or magazines.

I've long been reluctant to explain this misunderstanding only because I'll need a long post to explain it. This is that post, a new version of my 1998 essay What is New Media? (which is currently being taught in the journalism, film, technology, and game design courses at several universities in North America and Europe). It's 3,200-words long, but I consider it the most important thing I have ever written except for the original essay. I need to have this new version online because I plan to refer to it in future postings, specifically those about what radical changes that media companies need to implement.]

Misunderstanding 'New Media'

A newspaper isn't a medium, nor are newspapers media. Magazines aren't media nor is a magazine a medium. Television isn't a medium nor is radio nor are radio or television stations media. A website isn't a medium nor is the Internet media.

Companies that broadcast programs or that publish newspapers or magazines are having problems understanding and adapting to why and