“Future” Items

State of Newspapers on the Web, 2001

A 2001 report by the research company The Yankee Group has some very interesting observations about the future of the print media in the online world.  From the summary:

Our Interactive Consumer (IAC) Survey 2000 reveals that online consumers are going to the Web in search of news content. One quarter of online consumers rank looking for national news as one of their top three activities online, and 35% visit their local newspaper online at least daily or once a week. While newspapers have been subjected to harsh criticisms in regard to their online strategies over the past few years, they have a lot to bring to the table in the online world, especially when it comes to serving their local communities.

A very optimistic view of the ability of many newspaper publishers and companies to leverage their content into a new medium.  The report correctly, in my opinion, highlighted some of the challenges that newspaper companies face:

  1. Commoditization: The immediacy and dynamic nature of Web content has pushed journalistic deadlines to seconds rather than minutes and has made news so readily available that not only is it “old” as soon as it is posted to a Web site, but it has become a commodity. We are reaching a point when consumers can get their news whenever and however they want it. This poses a significant threat to print newspapers because consumers have more sources to turn to for their news than ever before.

  2. Sluggish Migration of Newspapers to the Online Channel: Although some newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News, which started publishing its Mercury Center site (now known as bayarea.com) online through AOL in May 1993, are considered by many to be Internet pioneers in the newspaper industry, others have been slower to develop their online strategies. The Newspaper Association of America estimates that approximately 10% to 20% of all daily newspapers still do not have an online presence.

  3. Cannibalization of Subscription Revenues: One of the most serious charges levied against online newspaper editions over the past few years is that of cannibalization. By offering news online for free, newspapers–so the theory goes–are in effect cannibalizing and killing their print sales channel. In addition, most of the content offered in the print edition is also offered online. Given this situation, why would consumers choose to maintain a subscription to the print edition when they can receive the newspaper online for free? This argument has also fueled speculation that the Internet will cause the demise of the print newspaper industry.

Interestingly, the report didn’t write much about the cannibalization of advertising revenues, especially classified advertising.

Electronic Newspaper of the Future, 1992

One of the more innovative folks in the design universe was a professor from Spain, Dr. Juan A. Giner.  Giner was at the School of Journalism  at the University of Navarra. In 1992, he asked several folks for their thoughts about electronic newspapers.  This is before the Internet.  I think he was using some of the information for a research paper and for a presentation at the Summit Meeting of Editors and Publishers, a European conference, I’m guessing.

Here’s what I wrote, the conclusion of my thoughts, sent via FAX:

They have information to sell, regardless of the form it takes to reach the reader. Unfortunately, only a few see the road ahead; too many are looking behind at the road they have just traveled.

If the current leadership fails in understanding the market place or fails to adjust to the needs of the news consumer, then the consequences will be two-fold:

• Many more companies will go out of business.
• Many more companies will be bought by those who understand the needs of the marketplace and replace those publishers and editors who do not.

The future will belong to the quick and smart. Be neither quick nor smart and you’ll be out of the game.

It was fun to think about the future.

Looking to the Future: 1986 to 2001

In the past, journalism conventions serving management and editors, such as the Associated Press Managing Editors conference, were major events.  Hundreds of participants, dozens of panels and speeches.  So important that the APME published what the called the “Red Book.”  This was a record of the proceedings so those who could not attend would learn what was discussed.

In 1987, the Red Book reported on a panel held in Cincinnati, OH, on “Newspapers After 2001.”  The panel was tasked to look ahead 15 years.  Among the participants:

  • James K. Batten, president, Knight-Ridder, Inc.
  • Louis D. Boccardi, president and general manager, The Associated Press
  • John J. Curley, president and chief executive officer. Gannett Newspapers
  • Katherine W. Fanning, editor, Christian Science Monitor
  • Jeff Greenfield, media critic and columnist, ABC
  • James Hoge, president, New York Daily News
  • C.K. McClatchy, president, McClatchy Newspapers
  • Burl Osborne, president, Dallas Morning News
  • Eugene C. Patterson, chairman and chief executive officer, Times Publishing Company, St. Petersburg, Fla.
  • William O. Taylor, chairman and chief executive officer. Boston Globe
  • Chris Urban, Urban and Associates 

Reading over this edited transcript of the discussion, I was struck how little the panel got right. In fact, I think most of them missed the speeding “technology bus” that was about to crash into their newsprint based business and scatter their profits and employees to the wind. There was discussion about the declining readership — one panelist suggest the industry encourage literacy — and the fragmented advertising market. There were a couple of notable mentions of technology.  Here’s one from Kay Fanning:

We’re being increasingly bombarded by trivia and through the progress of technology it will get worse and worse. With all the world coming to our back door in terms of satellite communications and transportation, the link-up of the global stock market, all aspects of computer networking, newspapers will need a content that offers the citizen a pathway through this hail of trivia. That content will require more substance, more quality, offer more understanding rather than just a lot of information. I believe in the simple bromide of the better mousetrap. If we have a quality that is relevant to the citizens and to the public interest we can easily raise the numbers from 40 to 60 percent. 

I did like the comments from John Curley about improving the visuals of newspapers to make them more appealing:

Presentation is part of it too. Color, graphics, and our ability to do more in that area will be important. I don’t mean to pick on the Cincinnati Inquirer, since we own it, but in yesterday’s paper we went 11 pages in the Life Section without a graphic or photo. and a lot of the contents suggested that there could have been some there. I don’t think that is atypical of most newspapers, and it’s a weakness in a lot of our newspapers too.

Curley was the first editor of USA Today, hence he knew about color and graphics. USA Today was launched four years earlier, in 1982. in 1988, the American Press Institute had a major design seminar looking at the future of newspapers. It was called Design 2000.  Details are elsewhere on this site.  Lots of graphics and color in those prototype newspapers.

TV News’ Future

Also at the convention was Lawrence Grossman, president of NBC News. He gave a talk on “Television News After 2001.” He was sort right when he said:

My thesis is that if you look 15 years ahead to the year 2001, it will be much like what we see now in television news, just as when you look back to 1970, television news was basically like what you’re seeing now.

But take that out a few more years and he was very, very wrong.  He got a few things right.  It was an interesting read.

Michael Bloomberg on Newspapers

Michael Bloomberg, president and founder of Bloomberg Financial Markets gave a keynote speech at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 1997.  His speech was about the future of electronic devices and he spent a lot of time talking about newspapers and whether there’s an electronic solution that would make consumers give up on print. [That’s why I’m posting his speech]. An excerpt:

And if we are going to build consumer products, if our businesses are going to grow and let electronic devices replace newspapers they are going to have to provide the same functionality. Now another answer to the problem would be don’t let radio and television become the substitute for newspapers. But find some way to make newspapers more valuable, more economic. And if you think about it, it is a very easy thing to do. Right now we go and we chop down an awful lot of trees in Canada, we haul them to the mill, we grind them up into paper, we put ink on it, we deliver it to the comer newspaper stand or the newspaper boy or girl throws it on your doorstep. You read it once and you throw it away. It is a phenomenally inefficient thing screaming for a technological solution.

Bloomberg also so the coming of streaming television:

No matter how many times people tell you that broadcast is here to stay, the feet of the matter is it is not here to stay. It is so compelling to be able to get what you want, when you want it, independent of everybody else that we are going to give you video on demand no matter what it costs and no matter who’s axe gets gored and people will try to protect their industries. They will try to protect their jobs, but the feet of the matter is, if you look at the public, the public has the interest in getting a movie they go to Blockbuster, they want to see it when they want to see it. The public even goes to the comer movie theater to see it when they want to see it. The public wants to be able to jump over commercials, which is going to be a very big problem. Who is going to pay for all of this? The public wants to be able to stop that football game for two minutes when the phone rings or when the diaper needs changing. And we are going to have to deliver those kinds of products, those facilities, those attributes for television.

His speech had some good visionary moments.

The Future: Embracing Change

In 1999, the Society for News Design published a handbook for editors about dealing with pagination and technology. I was asked to write a chapter about “the future” and embracing the changes new technology would bring.

Some of the things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

Here’s the opening to the chapter:

Firing up her monitor with a verbal “log on” command, Kate gets ready for the daily meeting with her fellow editors and a managing editor at The Republic.

Almost instantly, her monitor is on the “virtual network” and eight images of her co-workers start to appear. Three are at home; two are at remote or shared offices. One is on the road with his team covering a live event. The rest are at the paper’s head­quarters building.

After discussing reports from the teams that worked the previous “info cycles” – each cycle is four hours and there are teams working around the clock – Kate and her fellow editors start the business of producing material for The Republic.

She doesn’t have a computer in her house, only a 27-inch flat-screen that is about one inch thick and connected to The Network. Everything is on The Network: broadcast entertainment signals, written communications and voice messages.

It was a fun assignment.  Thank you, Olivia Casey.

The Future, a 1997 Memo

This is a memo I wrote to fellow executives at the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette in early 1997.  It outlines some of my views on the importance of online services and about the reorganization of a newsroom to have a great mix of skills among editors.

The overall direction that I see journalism [and journalists] heading in the next five to 10 years is one of multi-skilled individuals. These will be the people that will succeed and prosper in the next century. In a sense, we will be going back to our roots – the small town publisher/editor/reporter/ad salesman – to find models that put more responsibility for all aspects of journalism in the hands of the source. If good journalism is good story telling, let’s put all the story telling tools into everyone’s hands and give them the access to information to help tell their stories.

I’m pleased that I was right on some of the points I raised, albeit a bit too optimistic.

Convergence and the Corporate Boardroom

In early December 2002, I published an article for Poynter Online based on a speech I gave at the opening of Newsplex, a prototype newsroom of the future, at the University of South Carolina. Newsplex was a cooperative project between private and public media organizations and academia at the USC’s College of Mass Communications and Information Studies.

My topic was convergence and the changing media corporate culture. I talked about how before convergence can succeed in the newsroom, it has to be adopted in the boardroom, where major cultural and business changes are also needed.  Here’s a taste of the article:

The bigger issue isn’t whether we can change the corporate culture of the boardroom to embrace convergence. Rather, it’s the need to focus on learning and adjusting the characteristics of the entire organization.

With education we can affect the learned behaviors of the media industry’s leaders, its journalists and other workers.

And when I talk about the media industry leaders, I am not talking about just the people who sit in the boardrooms. Leadership includes managers and staff members, who actually can be more influential than their bosses.

Membership, Instructions and More for API Design 2000 Seminar

I’ve uploaded a collection of memos about the American Press Institute’s J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar on the future of newspaper design. The collection starts with the invite / acceptance letter in April 1988. 

On July 21, API sent out the important information about the  seminar — a memo outlining a task for each seminar participant: design a front page of the future.

Each member is being asked to create a front page of the future, including content mix and design elements. These front pages (which will become a part of this year’s post-seminar publication) will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black, one of the most active and acclaimed publication designers in the United States, and discussed during the program.

There is also a schedule of events and information about discussion groups and the final round-table.

Here’s a look at the seminar schedule:

  • Monday, September 12:
      • 8:30 – 10:00 – “Newspapers in a Visual Society11
        Speaker: John Lees, Partner, Herman and Lees         Associates, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.
      • 10:15 – 12:15 – “The Front Page”
        Speaker: Roger Black, President, Roger         Black Inc., New York, N.Y.
      • 2:00 – 3:30 – Study I: “The Future for Newspaper Graphics”
        Speaker: Howard Finberg, Assistant Managing         Editor, Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Ariz.
      • 3:45 – 5:15 – Study II: “Color”
        Speaker: Nanette Bisher, Assistant Art Director, U.S. News and World Report, Washington, DC.
  • Tuesday, September 13:
      • 8:30 – 10:00 – Study III: “The Impact of Technology”
        Speaker: David Gray, Managing         Editor/Graphics, Providence Journal Company, Providence, RI.
      • 10:15 – 11:45 – Study IV: “The Role of Tomorrow’s Newspaper Designer”
        Speaker: Marty Petty, Vice President/Deputy         Executive Editor, Hartford Courant, Hartford, Conn.
      • 12:00 – 1:30 – The membership will be broken into small groups to discuss in greater detail specific issues raised during the seminar.
      • 1:45 – 3:30 – The membership will return to the API Round-Table to hear reports from each group detailing observations and any conclusion.

One other important document: the discussion leaders biographies.

The end product of this seminar can be seen in this slideshow.

 

Looking at the Local Marketplace Providers, 1996

The PAFET group [see item about its founding] commissioned the technology consulting group, the Yankee Group, to look at competitors in local markets. In other words, look at who could compete against newspapers for viewers and advertisers. Here’s a touch of the overview:

PAFET has asked the Yankee Group to research the variety of institutions providing localized, Web-based consumer information services.  The firms were researched from two perspectives: investment opportunities and partnership opportunities.

  • Local content/city-based
  • Enhanced Yellow Pages
  • Other (combination of both camps/directory services)

On-line services such as AOL’s Digital Cities and Microsoft’s Sidewalk were not covered in this effort. 

We evaluated these companies on a series of criteria which were in turn weighted according to strategic importance. These criteria included positioning in four main categories:

1. brand/marketing/sales,

2. corporate and competitive,

3. content and services, and

4. technical

 

The report gives a snapshot to the time when newspaper companies knew there was danger ahead. How much they were willing to act is another matter.

10th Annual Interactive Newspaper Conference

I was a speaker at the Editor & Publisher magazine’s 10th Annual Interactive Newspapers Conference in Atlanta, Ga. My speech was recorded live on February 18, 1999 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Here’s a bit of what I said at the start of my speech:

I made a presentation to our managers at Phoenix Newspapers a couple of weeks ago, and I sort of titled it “Armageddon” and whether, when we lose all, some share of classifieds in the next three years, what impact will that have on the bottom line. And if you look at the latest research from Forrester, they predict, on industry average, a 7% reduction in bottom line figures. If classified continues going the way it’s going then seven percent of us won’t be here next year, unless other things happen.

Another couple of interesting statistics is that in less than a dozen years, in 10 years, everybody under 50 will be computer literate. We’re all basically computer literate here; and obviously, the generations coming behind us are all computer literate. And even scarier is that by 2010, everybody under the age of 21 will not have known a world without the Internet. To us, some grey hairs [old folks] in the room, along with myself, is that we can remember, hot type and cold type and all that. And we remember when the Internet first took off.

This transcript is sometimes hard to read since the transcriber didn’t catch all of the jargon. However, it gives you a taste of what we were talking about in 1999.