Dorian Benkoil senior consultant at Teeming Media. An award-winning journalist and editor, he was a foreign correspondent for AP and Newsweek, and international and managing editor for ABCNews.com. At ABC News he moved to the business side, handling sales integration and business development, before joining Fairchild Publications as General Manager for their Internet division, becoming editorial director for mediabistro.com, then a consultant for Teeming Media in New York. He graduates this year with an MBA from Baruch's Zicklin school of business. Learn more about him at Benkoil.com or his blog - MediaFlect.com.
Robert Cauthorn is a journalist, former vice president of digital
media at the San Francisco Chronicle, and was the third recipient of
the Newspaper Association of America's prestigious Digital Pioneer
Award. He launched one of the first five newspapers web sites in the
world and is generally considered to have delivered the first
profitable newspaper web site in 1995. Cauthorn has been in the middle
of the transition from old media to new and is recognized as
frank-talking critic when he believes newspapers stray for their
mission. In mid-2004 he became the president of CityTools, LLC a new
media startup based in San Francisco.
Ben Compaine has divided his career between the academic world and private business. He was a journalist when manual typewriters were considered state of the art, but also led the conversion of his college newspaper to cold type. He has started and managed weekly newspapers. His dissertation at Temple University in 1977 was about the changing technologies that were going to unsettle the landscape of the staid and low profit newspaper industry. Since then he has focused his research and consulting on examining the forces and trends at work in the information industries. Among his most well-known works (and the name of his blog) is "Who Owns the Media?".
Vin Crosbie has been called "the Practical Futurist" by Folio, the trade journal of the American magazine industry. Editor & Publisher magazine, the trade journal of the American newspaper industry, devoted the Overview chapter of executive research report Digital Delivery of News: A How-to Guide for Publishers to his work. His speech to the National Association of Broadcasters annual conference was one of 24 orations selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the reference book Representative American Speeches 2004-2005. He has keynoted the Seybold Publishing Strategies conference in 2000; co-chaired and co-moderated last year's annual Beyond the Printed Word the digital publishing conference in Vienna; and regularly speaks at most major online news media conferences. He is currently in residence as adjunct professor of visual and interactive communications and senior consultant on executive education in new media at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and meanwhile is managing partner of the media consulting firm of Digital Deliverance LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut.
About this blog
Two forces have shattered the news media. Technology is the first. Although media technology is undergoing its greatest change since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg first inked type, for more than ten years now the news industry has mistaken new technologies merely as electronic ways to distribute otherwise printed or analog products. Estrangement is the second. The news media has lost touch with people's needs and interests during the past 30 years, as demonstrated by rapidly declining readerships of newspapers and audiences of broadcast news. How we rebuild news media appropriate to the 21st Century from the growing rubble of this industry is the subject of this group weblog.
Two pieces of seemingly unrelated news hit the online world about 24 hours apart. However, the first may weigh heavily on the second.
Number one was the announcement yesterday (June 2) from AT&T signaling the end, for now at least, of unlimited wireless broadband. As of June 7 most 3G iPad users and all buyers of iPhones and other AT&T connected smartphones will have to pay for data based on usage. Unless grandfathered, from now on it will all be metered.
According to most reports (the New York Times’ David Pogue among them), most smartphone users should come out ahead by under either of the two plans. AT&T itself calculated that 65% of its subscribers use less than 200 mb of the lower price option (half the cost of the current unlimited plan they have) and altogether 98% use under the 2 gb limit of the higher price plan. But for the newer iPad, optimized for streaming video and more accommodating for watching You Tube, will these parameters stunt their use?
The matters if we probe the implications of the second news item, an AP story under the headline “Publishers see signs the iPad can restore ad money.” It began: “Good news for the news business: Companies are paying newspapers and magazines up to five times as much to place ads in their iPad applications as what similar advertising costs on regular websites.”
The story noted that “early evidence suggests the iPad is at least offering publishers a way to get more money out of advertisers.” Perhaps prophetically, though, author Andrew Vanacore hedged his bets, adding two graphs later: “Still, a lot will need to go right for publishers before the iPad and imitator tablet computers become a significant source of income.”
The seeds of what may not go right comes soon enough. Describing why iPad applications such as USA Today’s can justify higher ad rates than the standard online ad, Vanacore replays this scenario: “A reader can click on Courtyard by Marriott's USA Today ad and then with a flick of a finger scroll through images of the hotels' updated lobby design. Another tap and a high-definition video appears, full of happy hotel guests.”
But wait. With AT&T’s new data limited plans, this simple “tap” will generate perhaps megabytes of “high definition” video. Will tablet users want to eat up precious data usage on a Marriott ad. When the pool was bottomless, well, so what. With the pool is emptying fast, then perhaps not. At least, not as spontaneously.
AT&T’s new data plans are likely to be mimicked by other carriers eventually. Some or all might hold off initially so as to gain a short term competitive advantage. But they know AT&T is right. The spectrum for data is finite and when any commodity is free it get overused. Some mechanism is needed to ration it.
Every decision has consequences. It’s not unusual for some to be unintended. Matt Richtel, in his report describing AT&T’s data plan announcement, closed his piece with this anecdote:
“Mike Lapchick, an AT&T customer in Chicago, said that he tended to use his iPhone mostly for e-mail, and that he would probably see his data bill drop in half to $15.
“But Mr. Lapchick, who is the chief executive of a company that makes software used by Internet retailers to allow consumers to zoom in on product images, has another concern. As unlimited data plans go away, it could prompt cellphone users to watch their intake.”
He may not have realized it, but Lapchick could have been describing every media business that has hope that iPad and its competitors' forthcoming tablets may just have been blindsided by AT&T without being aware of what hit them. At least not yet.
According to a piece from The New York Times this week, “No topic is more hotly debated in book circles at the moment than the timing, pricing and ultimate impact of e-books on the financial health of publishers and retailers.” It goes on to says that publishers are concerned about making e-editions of their trade books available the same time as the print edition.
Amidst the uncertainty of how to treat the e-books is the fear of cannibalization of hardcover sales. “If you as a consumer can look at a book and say: ‘I have two products; one is $27.95, and the other is $9.95. Which should I buy?’,” according to Dominique Raccah, chief executive of Sourcebooks.
I’ve been delving into the nuances of book distribution and marketing since I wrote a book about the subject in 1978. And, typical for anything about the book publishing industry, notably missing form this article, and most such discussions, is an examination of the economics and the retail marketplace.
First, for bestsellers, at least—which is what this article focuses on—the real retail price of a hardcover fiction is not about $25 or $30 but the 40% discount price charged by most major outlets, including Amazon and B&N. Thus, the real price difference for most consumers is roughly $15 to $18 for the hard copy vs. $10 for the e-book.
Second, the article does have one data point—that Amazon is paying the same price for the e-book as the hardcover. Assume that is 50% off list. So that from the publisher’s position, it gets the same revenue no matter which format. And it saves the manufacturing cost. And it gets no returns! What’s not to like?
Third, this discussion would be enhanced by knowing how author royalties are being handled these days. If the author is earning a royalty based on a percentage of the revenue the publisher receives, then it is at worst a wash whether it is a percentage of the physical book or the price the e-book distributors pay. And to the extent that books are price elastic, the $10 e-book price point could potentially increase sales, thus resulting in greater revenue.
The difference between the business model needs of the legacy media and the new Web based media has t do with network externalities. This economic concept holds that the value of the services increases exponentially with the number of users of the service. Think telephone networks, fax, Facebook. In all these cases the value is in other users. For the traditional media there are few if any network affects. The value of the content of the Boston Globe to be is neither increased nor decreased for me as circulation does down—or up. Twitter, on the other hand, becomes more valuable as more users can get access to posts or me to the potential posts or more and more other users.
I’ll come back to this at the end.
The construct of network externalities struck me while reading coverage of the annual media conference sponsored by small investment bank Allen & Co. for 27 years usually generates news just because of who attends: the top executives of the big media companies, the young stars of the Internet challengers, investment bankers, some politicians, academics and a few outliers, like a sports star. Though the sessions are closed to the media, there are enough leaks to keep the scribes busy,
Most years the gist of the news is about who might be acquiring or merging with whom. This year, in the midst of an economic slump that puts the kabash on merger activity, much of the chatter was about business models. Media companies that for decades—or centuries—thought they knew where their revenue was coming from are in a quandary about where they might be getting their next dollars or Euros.
Thus the latest theme is the insistence-- from New Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, IAC’s Barry Diller, Liberty Media’s John Malone, Disney’s Robert Iger, among others -- that the free content gravy trend must end. Consumers are going to have to learn to pay for content online as they do in print or via cable, for music and movies. The legacy media have been struggling with the online model for years now—so far with limited success to show for their all their studies, experiments and worries.
But for me, the more fascinating discussion was the one of the business model for the new guys, like Twitter and YouTube. Diller reportedly told one session that he did not see how Twitter could make any money, despite its growing visibility. It has something north of 4.5 million accounts, but only a small fraction actually post anything.
What business model might work for Twitter? It has been highly successful in attracting users and in generating “buzz.” But so far it does not have a business model. It is operating on $55 million of venture capital.
A report on the Allen & Co conference, says that apparently some of the smartest media and Web executives could not come up with a model that would work to generate revenue without undercutting the network externalities that have been so crucial to Twitter's adoption.
Barry Diller, a media industry veteran, commented "I think it's a great service. I just don't think it's a natural advertising medium." John Malone, a cable industry pioneer and savvy media investor, voiced a similar view. Twitter would be hard-pressed to sell advertising on its messaging service without alienating users. He added that Twitter's best bet is to simply get people so addicted to the service that they might eventually pay fees. Malone claimed that Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors, was thinking along the same lines, applying that model to YouTube, another media property that is wildly successful as measured by use, but still quite unprofitable. Buffett told Malone he would pay $5 a month to continue using it (that’s easy to say for the second wealthiest man in the world).
So here we have publishers and programmers and cable operators not only worried about their tried, if not quite true, business models in the face of declining circulation or viewership, unable even to see a healthy financial outcome for the new players that are growing exponentially, at the same time they achieve millions of users. Can it be that bleak?
So, finally, back to network externalities. The reason why a subscriber fee as a revenue source is a dangerous road for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or YouTube and the like is that any sort of charge, even a nominal one, is likely to lop off a substantial portion of its user base. This is the "Penny Gap.” – the experience that getting a user to go from free to any sort of payment, even a penny, is, in the online world, harder than getting a paying subscriber to pay more.That is, going from free to one cent a month would see a larger drop off in users that a service charging $1 riaisng its price to $2. The Penny Gap effect sets the network externality model in reverse. As some users drop off, the service becomes less useful to the remaining users, they are less enamored with it and drop and so it spirals down. Thus, services that thrive on network externalities need to proceed very cautiously—as their founders and managers presumably understand.
The folks who run the Web sites of legacy media, whether the online sites of the newspapers or newer sites like Hulu, do not have this issue. The value to me of my local newpaper—or its Web site—does not depend on the increase or decrease in the numbner of subscribers (except indirectly in the form of maybe more or less content as it generate more or less revenue).
The Penny Gap issue remains. Though media execs are calling for an end to free content as a way to save their franchises, so far no one has been willing to make the move, as they fear it will have a greater impact on the ad revenue than user fees will bring in. When The New York Times abandoned its subscriber Times Select pay tier, it made the decision that it could make more from advertising to large numbers than from a combination of subscriber revenue and lower advertising dollars.
The lesson is that the legacy media folks are going to have to solve their business model problem with a different solution than the one that might be best for new content Web sites like Twitter.
A college classmate, Peter, who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked me what “my take” was on the changes in the media world, referring to the de facto demise of this home town Ann Arbor News.
If you’ve been on vacation in Bali and didn’t want to pay the $15 a day resort Internet fee, the shut down of the 45,000 circulation News will make this the first city to lose its newspaper. The plan, according to owner Advance Publications, is to completely shut down the operation, lay off all empoylees, then start fresh with two new companies that will need far fewer staff. One, a Web venture called AnnArbor.com, will have some original reporting but rely substantially on reader input and community forums. A second company is described as a printing company that will publish a twice weekly newspaper fo some sort. Advance is also cutting back its daily newspapers in Flint, Saginaw, and Bay City to a thrice weekly schedule.
Types of organizations eligible for non-profit status under IRS 501(c)
My take, I wrote Peter, is that I suspect new players will see it as an opportunity to pick up the slack. They will enter with a different expense base. Maybe no single one will totally replace today's version of the newspaper, but in aggregate they will cover whatever territory for which there is a demand, e.g., an entertainment paper-- probably ad supported. More local stuff online. More stuff you can view on iPhone-like devices or Kindle-like. We’re in a period of fits and starts, but if there is a market there will be big guys or entrepreneurs who will fill the gaps. At the premium end there is the example of the for-profit (they hope) GlobalPost.com. The low end may be the for-profit (they hope) citizen journalist new AnnArbor.com.
But what about the not-for-profit model, a proposal popularized by an op-ed piece in The New York Times last month? An academic study being prepared for publication in the Journal of Media Economics this summer (I’ll post more details in July) looks at the fortunes of nonprofits in the magazine business. It notes that “nonprofit” can take many forms, both legally and as operational models. Many not for profits rely heavily on advertising revenue, just as their for-profit cousins. The study observes that they can be just as susceptible to economic downturns as for profit publications.
Indeed, at a small conference I attended earlier this month, I pointedly asked Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute whether the general downward pressures facing the newspaper industry had affected the St. Petersburg Times. That paper is something of the poster child for the non-profit model. The paper is controlled by a foundation set up by the late Nelson Poynter. If the paper has a surplus – the nonprofit term for profit—it declares a dividend. This is turn is the primary source of support for the many good program of the Poynter Institute. Edmunds had to admit that the Times is indeed taking a hit from the same forces felt by all newspapers. It has made staff cuts in its newsroom to help keep up profit. Even so, dividends are down. The Poynter Institute has a comfortable cash reserve for now. But the larger point is that the Times as well as the Institute are not immune to the forces and trends in the industry or the economy.
Philanthropic organizations—even the wealthiest—cannot defy gravity. Harvard, the richest of universities, is having to make major cutback because its endowment—line the financial markets—shrunk 22% ($8 billion) between July and October 2008 alone.
So let’s suppose that a newspaper does indeed have a billion dollar endowment behind it. To generate income it must invest that money somewhere. The more aggressively it’s invested, the more money for the newsroom. If invested in Treasury notes, the endowment is safer—but it may be short changing its mission—essentially leaving money on the table that could be used for journalism. So it takes a moderate course of investment. And suppose that lets the endowment generate a 5% return devoted to newspaper operations. That would be $50 million initially, a nice subsidy to keep up salaries, news bureaus, staffing. But what happens, as it has this past year, if the invested funds lose 20% of their value—well under the markets overall financial loses in the past year, thanks to our hypothetical endowment's conservative portfolio.
Now, with an $800 million portfolio, if it still drew 5%, it could only add $40 million to its income. What’s a publisher to do? Just as advertising and circulation revenue are falling, so is the endowment income that could otherwise prop up its finances. True, it may be better off than its fully for- profit brethren. But it will inevitably need to make cuts: in personnel, in travel, in salaries—the same types of cuts we hear about weekly.
So not-for-profit is not the solution, endowments are not the solution. What is?
As I wrote to Peter, there is not a solution. We have left behind an either/or world for one of many options. There is opportunity for non-profits, such as the well established Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting or the new Pro Publica. The entrepreneurial for-profit sector is represented by a new model with GlobalPost. The Detroit newspapers are leading the way (or were pushed) for daily newspapers in hybrid online and print. Advance Publications is trying out another for profit model in Ann Arbor.
The result will be an evolving stew of print, online, mobile, video and audio news sources—international, national, local and hyperlocal. For profit and not for profit. From existing well known media companies, from nonmedia players, from entrepreneurial start-ups. Those that will be successful and those that will prove unsuccessful.
When I teach about marketing, the most important word I emphasize is the word “some.” I tell them not to think in terms of “People want more news” or “People are willing (or unwilling) to pay for…” Market segmentation is about “some." “Some people” want. “Some people” will pay. Some. The digital technologies here and still emerging make it far more efficient to provide news, entertainment, whatever, to each of us in more forms than at any time in history.
If the major reason for the American daily newspaper industry's demise were its stories contained too many dangling participles, then the industry could more easily comprehend its situation than instead hearing that the reason was it had violated the Principle of Supply & Demand.
The understanding of economics, particularly media economics, has never been its strong suit, except if the topic is how many tons of newsprint to buy, how many points a major stock market dropped, or how cut expenses to match revenues. Most newspaper publishers, editors, or journalists tends to equate economics as solely the science of government financial policy, household spending, Wall Street speculation, and petroleum pricing. They don't understand or have forgotten that a major branch of it is the behavioral science of Microeconomics - the study of how individuals make decisions to allocate their time and activities.
The main paradigm of microeconomics is known as rational choice theory or rational action theory, which states that individuals choose the best action according to their preferences and what constraints of supply, demand, time, and access face them. In it now lays the demise of American daily newspapers as we know them.
How did the American daily newspaper industry violate the Principle of Supply & Demand by failing to adapt the industry's core product to a radical change in consumers' supply of news and information during the past 35 years? To understand how, both start and end at the roots of the newspaper industry.
Start in the European city of Strasbourg during 1605 when the world's first newspaper began publication. It used a technology developed there 164 years earlier by the metalworker Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented a device for producing innumerable copies of the same text. (Please keep that concept in mind, because it's now moldering the newspaper industry). The Supply & Demand equation for accessing daily changing information was then quite the opposite it is today: Consumers had little or no supply of daily news until the daily newspaper. So to produce newspapers, this adaption of Gutenberg's book printing technology spread quickly worldwide.
Some modern critics of newspapers say the industry is leaden and 'doesn't think outside the box.' They probably don't realize the historical irony that underlay their criticisms. The core of Gutenberg's technology was a box containing lead type whose impressions could print innumerable copies of the same thing. In that core is the inherent limitation that it produces the same edition for everyone. Although in the 19th Century steam and later electrical power speeded Gutenberg's technology and the introduction of offset lithography during the middle of the 20th Century eliminated its use of lead, the analog technology used to produce today's daily newspapers is still Gutenberg's. Indeed, today's analog printing technology still has the same limitation that it had in Gutenberg's days - it produces the same edition for everyone.
That technological limitation delineated the newspaper industry's editorial and advertising practices during the past four centuries. Because each edition had a finite number of pages and was printed by analog technology had to produce the same for everyone at once, newspaper editors had to select stories according to two criteria:
Ignorance isn't bliss to the dying. Witness the pathos of American daily newspaper companies. Most have finally begun to realize that the deterioration of their businesses isn't cyclical but grave. Yet few, if any, understand why. Almost all grasp for the reasons.
Some attribute their grave condition to advertisers suddenly switching huge portions of spending from print to online - an excuse that ignores more than 30 years of declines in those newspapers' printed editions' circulations and readerships. Some others attribute their deterioration to not having transplanted their content into online quickly enough -an excuse that ignores not only the dozen years they've spent transplanting it but how their online editions are now read even less frequently and less thoroughly than their printed editions.
Most of the print newspaper experts who diagnose these companies' condition still prescribe stale nostrums such as more consumer focus groups, subscription price incentives, more stylish typography, or shorter stories. Meanwhile, most of the experts who diagnose these companies' Web sites prescribe balms and accessories such as giving blogs to reporters, adding video, or having the readers themselves report the stories. American daily newspaper companies have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they've even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.
I'll declare the real reasons. There are but two and neither has anything to do with multimedia, 'convergence', blogs, 'Web 2.0', 'citizen journalism,' or any ancillary topics you may have heard presented at New Media conferences this millennium.
Nor is either of the real reasons advertisers' abandonment of printed newspapers. Their abandonment is a symptom, not the reason for the decline. Contrary to myopia of many newspaper executives, advertisers aren't newspapers' primary customers. Although advertising revenues may be sunshine for newspaper executives, the roots of their business are readers. A newspaper with readers will attract advertisers but a newspaper without readers will not. Readers ultimately support and sustain the newspaper business.
To understand the real reasons why the American daily newspaper industry is dying, first understand why more and more Americans are no longer reading daily papers and how their abandonment of newspapers has been wrought by changes in their own media economics. Also comprehend why the epicenter of the newspaper industry's problems in post-Industrial countries is America and exactly how grave the situation is there.
Today was the first public edition of “The Sporting News Today.” This is a free, online daily version of The Sporting News, the weekly magazine that got its start as a bible for baseball fans.
The Sporting News has a rich history, starting publication in 1886. I remember my father subscribing in the 1960s. It was thick with box scores and stats for every team and every major sport. In 1977, when the Times Mirror Co bought the publisher for all of $18 million it had a circulation of about 356,000. By the time it was sold to Vulcan Ventures in 2000 for $100 million it had a circulation of over 500,000, but it was being threatened by the successful launch of ESPN Magazine, which had 850,00 circulation within two years of its 1998 launch.
The Sporting News was sold again in 2006, to American City Business Journals. Today the circulation is about 700,000, but at an annual price of only $14.97 for a new subscription—compared to about $61.00 in constant dollars in 1978.
Like many print publications, The Sporting News has been substantially affected by online content. Daily sports news has been particularly hard hit. The Internet is made for getting late night scores, accessing the scads of stats that even casual fans crave, following teams in far-off cities—and all for little or, most often, no consumer cost.
Like most other print publications, it has had an online presence. The Sporting News Today is something else though. It is a magazine formatted for the screen. But it is not like a Web site. It involves no scrolling. It is pdf-like, though it is not read with Adobe Reader. It is not the print edition read online, as with Zinio. To me each screen looked like a double page spread in a magazine—but with no need for a gutter. I sort of felt that I had spread opened the tabloid-sized magazine. You will note that each of the “double pages” has one page number.
By offering to send subscribers an email each day, readers so do not have to bookmark anything. Just click the link.
The content is vintage Sporting News: Right now heavy on baseball, but lots on football—professional and college. There is hockey, basketball, NASCAR, tennis. Even Little League World Series coverage is promised. And, with a nod to WEB 2.0, it will offer readers the opportunity to provide their own input: “You’ll get a byline, file to an editor.” (Actually, a clever spin on “Letters to the Editor.”)
No surprise, the business model for the Sporting News Today is, for the moment at least, advertising, though it was rather light for a first edition. The inaugural issue had a full page from SpeedTV.com, three half page house ads for Sporting News affiliates and a full page promotion for the revamped Sporting News magazine, which will become a bi-weekly. (Management expects to lose 100,000 circulation from current levels to the free online publication).
I’m not a design expert—I’ll leave that to my colleagues at Innovation Media Consulting Group. But the Sporting News Today will feel comfortable to readers who like the look of print and are put off by clicking here and there for do their online reading. The layout feels modern but grounded in print. How that plays may be generational—or not.
As a final note, it may be worth pointing out that while traditional print publications are downsizing, The Sporting News Today is hiring. Indeed, I got turned on to its impending launch by Charles Apple, it’s new art director, who was hired away from the Virginia Pilot newspaper. (Has anyone seen numbers on how many print journalists have been hired by online-only ventures other than self-funded blogs?)
There has been speculation in recent years on when we will get the first announcement that a daily newspaper will shut down its presses completely and switch to digital-only. There are still some big hurdles, like portability. But should services such as Amazon’s Kindle take off, allowing readers to take their digital publications on the go, then the Sporting News Today model may have legs and encourage a general interest newspaper to give it a whirl.
I really, really promise that I will not be stuck forever on what might be seen as a crusade about the change in the editorial mix of The Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch took control. I don’t want to become the Ben-one-note on this as Lou Dobbs has become for his anti-immigration tirades.
Still, there is some news on the subject. I have written several times now about how the Journal has been devoting its front page to hot-off-the-press headlines that are essentially the same as what every other daily publishes: “Obama wins primary,” “Cyclone levels Sri Lanka.” This is a form of run-of-the-mill reporting to which the Journal brings little value added and, with earlier deadlines than most local dailies, perhaps less value.
But now comes some hard data—that’s what I like more than impressions—that does indeed confirm a substantial shift in the Journal’s editorial coverage since the change in ownership. The Project for Excellence in Journalism undertook a content analysis of the front page stories in the Journal for the four months before the December 12, 2007 date that News Corp. acquired control of Dow Jones, the parent of the WSJ and the three months following. Its finding was unambiguous:
In the first three months of Murdoch’s stewardship, the Journal’s front page has clearly shifted focus, de-emphasizing business coverage that was the franchise, while placing much more emphasis on domestic politics and devoting more attention to international issues.
The before and after change is most dramatic in several areas, as seen in PEJ’s chart I’ve cribbed here. Political news is up four fold, reflecting the intense coverage of the primaries that in the past election cycles would have received less space (if only because until recently the Journal rarely devoted more than a single front page column to any story). The full report at the Project’s Web site also compares the “new” Journal’s editorial mix with that of The New York Times, which Murdoch is keen compete with. There are still substantial differences, with the Journal devoting more of its front page to foreign topics, business and economics, less to politics.
Jack Shafer, writing at Slate’s Press Box last month, made note of the PEJ data, but chose to focus on his more generalized impression that the Journal may indeed be better under Murdoch because “it was swinging hard again in its traditional wheelhouse to produce great enterprise journalism.” He proceeds in identifying some examples, all, indeed quality reporting in which the Journal has long excelled.
This may be wishful thinking on Jack's part. I hope not. He has certainly identified some fine-- and traditional -- Journal pieces. But I'm speculating that perhaps they stand out because, as Jack notes, the primary season is over, and there had been no devastating earthquakes or cyclones for a few weeks, and the presidential campaign was in pre-convention simmer. Indeed, in the midst of these fine articles was the front page on June 4, as Obama wrapped up the Democrat's nomination. It struck me immediately as I picked up the Journal and The Boston Globe from the driveway that the Journal article was readily interchangeable with the Globe (and other dailies) articles. In my analysis, every day the Journal wastes newsprint with such headlines, photos and copy is a day lost to do the type of journalism Jack is rightly trumpeting.
I’ve mentioned before that I have great respect for Murdoch as a savvy businessman and as a risk taker who has made real contributions to the competitive landscape of the media.. My current critique is that the hot news approach is not a strategic direction that plays on the Journal’s long time strengths. To the contrary, it takes the paper on a path that daily newspapers should be trying to leave behind.
Ok. ‘Nuff said. I’ll leave this behind. If only Lou would move on from his obsession.
The Wall Street Journal's editors again flub an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the fading pack of daily local newspapers. At least the Times used the slightly more accurate "Claims" rather than "Clinches" and uses a marginally less trite photo.The Journal used the same photo as chosen by the Philadelphia Inquirer editors.
It will take the a few circulation reporting periods (March 31 and September 30) to get a feel for whether the Journal's new "look like a conventional daily" strategy is a positive or negative.
Vin Crosbie
Dorian Benkoil
Bob Cauthorn
Ben Compaine
