And, in so complaining, he put his finger on a major problem with journalism as it’s practiced. Amid all the tit-for-tat accusations, running around trying to dig up, follow the latest, get the scoops, journalists too often forget to explain to those who desperately want it what the story at its deepest levels is really about -- which also would serve to tell the reading/listening/viewing public why they should care. That kind of depth, of course, doesn’t get the quick pageviews, nor is it the kind of investigative journalism that tends to win Pulitzers and other prizes. In a business sense, it’s not the kind of journalism that will pay for the resources it takes create it. But it is a big public service that can accrue pageviews (on pages carrying ads) over time. And there are ways to “monetize” it beyond the pageview-ad formulation. (partnerships, re-branding, syndication, books, new sections ... that would be another blog post.)

Not that it’s easy to explain something like this crisis. A lot of people tasked with explaining what’s going on probably themselves don’t understand, and good journalists are trained not to let their grasp exceed their reach. Heck, some of the smartest professors I had in business school seem at a loss to completely explain what’s happening in the economy right now. (One wrote an email about the opposing views of who’s to blame, without answering a question I asked about whether models he taught us projecting increased value as debt is taken on were still valid, or formulations for calculating risk should be changed). And, the ones who can explain it all to us -- smart MBAs who do financial modeling -- are, after all, ones who helped get us into this, with the very financial models they created or followed. They’re likely to earn a lot more than the ink- and pixel-stained wretches working in newsrooms. Then, again, there’s a few of those folk who have a bit of free time at the moment. Maybe they could write a little something for the papers, even help come up with some graphics and videos to explain it all.

Even without the business justifications, though, the explanation would be worthwhile and a public service.

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.

So, on the surface, it seems a great idea to charge $4.95 for three on up to $9.95 for seven magazines per month. But there are a few of reasons MagHound won’t work upon launch -- and they have largely to do with how this isn’t like Netflix:

* MagHound won’t have all the most desirable magazines. At least one major publishing house hasn’t signed up, nor have a few of the lesser that nevertheless have desirable titles.
* Unlike Netflix, fulfillment won’t be in 1 or 2 days. It’s more likely weeks. And even longer when fulfillment is from a house other than Time. One reason to subscribe to something like this is because, say, you hear about a hot story in Vanity Fair or Foreign Policy, and you want to get the mag shipped to you pronto to read it. But those magazines may not be available, and the won’t get there while you still remember why you wanted them.
* For Time, it’s not as winning a model as for Netflix, because it doesn’t buy the magazine once and then get to use it time and again for the price of two stamps, plus logistics and handling. Plus, postage for a magazine is horribly expensive compared to the sublimely engineered DVD packages Netflix devised.

If people wanted digital editions or a Web site, mobile edition, whatever-- which Time might consider offering at a discount, or they would offer some other digital access -- for an all-you-can-eat price, it might make more sense. (Oh, wait, that was called AOL.) Or if print-on-demand could be handled on a mass-customization level, where magazines were printed and bound quickly (and I mean like TODAY) as they’re ordered... but helas.

In theory, I love the concept. Get any magazine I want, for one subscription price. I’d of course prefer even more to get whatever I want at the Chris Anderson price of “$0”. Or at least the immediate gratification of click and BLAM, it’s here. (Even Amazon doesn’t take a week.) I hope MagHound refines its model before September and gets closer to what people really want in 2008.

Of course, we will know in the long run, when some media historian looks back on this time from 20 years hence. But that doesn’t help today’s decision makers. That is why the research of University of Chicago economist Matthew Gentzkow published earlier this year in The American Economic Review is so helpful.

In this highly data driven paper with the typically academic title, “Valuing New Goods in a Model with Complementarity: Online Newspapers,”, Gentzkow blends consumer data from the Washington, DC market with newspaper operating results to address three questions: What is the relationship between print and online versions on 1) the demand for either diversion, 2) on the welfare of consumers, and, crucially, 3) on the impact of charging consumers for the online product?

With 30 pages of assumptions, explanation and calculations, Gentzkow makes a well substantiated finding that, The Washington Post would have been better off charging a modest sum for its online version (on the order of $6.00/month) until about 2004. After that, however, the growth in online advertising expenditures crossed over to affirm that it is significantly more profitable to set a zero price for the online edition when one factors in even a small transaction cost for online payments. He suggests that his findings are robust enough that they would likely apply to other big city newspapers.

Along the way, Gentzkow upends the early assumption that the print and online versions of a newspaper were complements. Applying a more sophisticated demographic model than had been used in the past, which simply looked at newspaper readers and online readers, Gentzkow concludes that the substitution effect is “nonnegligible." He does add that ”it is “small, however, relative to some earlier predictions.” In other words, real but not likely “to threaten the survival of print media,” at least right now.

Gentzkow further quantifies the “consumer welfare benefit” created by having a zero consumer price for online newspapers, which he put at $45 million annually for The Washington Post’s market. For the 2000-2003 period that came at the expense of Washington Post Co. stockholders, as he calculated it lost money by giving away the online edition when it could have made a profit by charging for it. (Among the factors here is that, as substitute products, by charging for online, some print subscribers would have continued with their subscriptions instead of switching to the online offering). Starting in 2004, however, the Post was more profitable with the free online version that it would have been with an online use charge

Having seen considerable discussion about whether The Wall Street Journal would be better off making its online version free, as the The New York Times has done Gentzkow’s approach is another data point (a rather large one at that) to reinforce the advertising supported model, for mass market newspapers, at least. There are numerous instances, however, where a consumer-paid model will still be needed. In the magazine business, for example, advertising revenue for many of the mass audience magazines, such as People or TV Guide, can be 50% or more of total revenue. But there are many niche publications, such as The Nation or Weekly Standard, that are highly dependent on subscriptions for the bulk their revenue. It is likely to be the same for niche online sites.

Jack and Cathy say there's never been more of a need for editors, people who can sift through the clutter. But I guess you'd better also have your multi-platform boots strapped on if you want to work for them managing "content."

Griffin delivered a speech about the multi-pronged "360" publishing and marketing initiatives of Merdith. 360, pardon the pun, seems to be the new black. Bravo networks last week talked about their 360 marketing strategy at the Promax/BDA television promotion show, and everyone's drawing circles with arrows pointing at each other into their PowerPoint presentations these days.

Not that Griffin's wrong. He showed an impressive mix of content targeted at women, participation by them, editorial products, ad opportunities and more. He's clearly a strategic thinker. He said the Meredith list of names, consumers who can be marketed to, at 85 million strong, is the best in America.

Griffin also emphasized that magazine advertising is up (he didn't mention that it's limited to a few categories of magaiznes), distinguishing magazines from print, in general. He wondered aloud why newspaper companies, including USA Today, are talking about getting into the magazine business.

Richard Stengel, the Managing Editor of Time, wrote by way of explanation:

"The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as Time's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys.

"This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy." (my emphasis here)

Heady stuff for those of us who blog, who read blogs, who have recognized that the significance of YouTube (perhaps about to become the generic term for any user-content video sites, the way TiVo is often used to mean any sort of personal video recorder) just more than just silly pet tricks. Another cause for urgency for change for traditional media.

° 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.

• 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: