“Newspaper Industry” Items

Founding Memos for PAFET

The technology consortium was the brainchild of James Rosse, chief executive officer of Freedom Newspapers, which owned the Orange County Register. His idea, which he pitched to fellow CEOs, was to gather similar sized organizations to discuss and share information about the technology that was affecting the newspaper industry. The first meeting of this yet-to-be-named organization was on Nov. 8, 1993 at Freedom Newspapers’ office in Irvine, CA.

Here’s how Rosse saw some of ways the various companies could work together:

List of Possible Forms  of Collaboration
This list has been prepared by Jim Rosse solely to stimulate discussion and is not intended to represent a proposal for joint action. The items are ranked roughly from those requiring the least to those requiring the most collaboration.

  • Comparing notes on technologies in which we are individually involved or interested.
  • Creating a technology newsletter internal to the Consortium with production costs shared among members.
  • Hiring a specialist (consultant? more than one?) to work for the Consortium whose job it would be to scan emerging technologies, collect information about them, and report it succinctly to us according to our individual needs
  • Negotiating a Consortium membership in the MIT Media Lab or similar group or participating in the Knight-Ridder effort in Colorado.
  • Representing Consortium members in dealing with third parties regarding Consortium interests in new ventures
  • Facilitating joint ventures in new technology projects among two or more Consortium members.
  • Creating an entity to carry out investment  activity  in new technologies on behalf of the Consortium.

Eventually the consortium would do most of what Rosse envisioned.

In this file are follow-up memos, including a discussion about the group’s name:

I am writing to let you know what has been going on to take Pafeot to its next stage of development. I have talked with several of you, but time has not permitted nor did I think the matters justified extensive consultation. It seemed less important that we dot all of the i’s and cross all of the t’s than it is just to get started with something we can shape as we go along.

You will be pleased to know that the acronym “Pafeot” now has an alternative interpretation – Primarily Affiliated For (the) Exploration Of Technology. Now if we can just think of an easy way to explain its pronunciation (“paf” with the a spoken as in “hat”, and “fet” for feat with the e spoken as in “set;” in combination, “pafet.”).

Eventually the word Primarily would become Partners

 

1995 Online Service Research Study

In early 1995, PAFET conducted a consumer online market research survey to establish baseline information in order to measure the development of the consumer online market. This document summarizes the goals, approach and results of that study.

[PAFET stands for Partners Affiliated for the Exploration of Technology. In 1994 six media companies [mostly a bunch of newspaper companies] created this research consortium to learn about and evaluate technology that could impact media and support the creation of new businesses and services.]

Some of the highlights of the study:

• The level of familiarity with online services among PC owners and online subscribers is lower than expected. Despite online services’ aggressive subscriber acquisition efforts and heavy media attention given to these services, almost 1 of 4 PC owners considers themselves to be “not at all familiar” with online services.
• Current online users still represent a niche market, that can be characterized as young, affluent, highly educated, and predominantly male. However, improved presentation of online content (via graphical and multimedia technology), faster transmission speeds, better content and lower prices are attracting more mainstream consumers.
• The demographic profile of online subscribers using the Internet and those who do not is very similar.
• Accessing or subscribing to multiple online services is not uncommon among current online service users. One of four online service users reported regularly accessing at least two online services.
• “News and information” remain the top reason non-online users subscribe to a service. The research results showed that, among current online users, the primary reason they chose their current service was for “news and information.” Among those who canceled a subscription within the past six months, “lack of use” and “lack of information” were cited most often as the reasons for the cancellations.

The study’s questionnaire and research methodology were designed by Maritz Research (Los Angeles, CA), PAFET Operating Committee members, and market research directors and managers at each of the newspapers included in the study.

Also included with this post is the presentation made by Maritz Marketing.

A Blueprint for Building Online Services, 1995

Where to start? That was the question many newspaper publishers were asking in 1995. At least when it came to creating a digital / electronic version of the print newspaper.   The Newspaper Association of America’s [NAA] New Media Department published what they labeled as the first in a “series of executive strategy reports” to help companies get “on-line.”

From the opening section:

Where to start in choosing an electronic newspaper publishing platform depends in large measure on the company’s broader goals. With that in mind, and in deference to the non-wired, there are several valid goals that may propel news operations into interactive media.

The report was titled “Opportunities in Anarchy: A blueprint for building online services”. It is an interesting look at recent history.  There are examples from some of the newspaper digital pioneers. And there is a list of newspapers that were on the World Wide Web as of May 25, 1095. The list fit on a single page.  It was authored by Melinda Gipson and overseen by NAA New Media Department Director Randy Bennett.

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.

Leveraging Web Sites for Newspaper Ad Sales

In 2005, the Newspaper Association of America [NAA] asked the Digital Futurist Consultancy to undertake a research and communication project to help newspaper companies better leverage their digital sites [the Web] to sell more advertising in their analog editions — the print product. The project was done by Howard Finberg and Leah Gentry, industry associates and friends from way back. Leah was a digital pioneer at the LA Times while I was working in Phoenix.

Here’s a taste of what we wrote for the NAA magazine, Presstime, about the project:

“Leveraging Your Web Site for Ad Sales,” a new NAA report, highlights ways newspapers can make better use of their Web sites to attract and service advertisers.

The report, produced for the Association by The Digital Futurist Consultancy, www.digitalfuturist.com, examines whether newspapers are using their sites to promote print advertising, to share their marketing and pricing data, and to provide customer service to new and existing advertisers. The report’s findings include:

  • 55 percent of the sites reviewed have an area for marketing the print edition.That still leaves lots of sites without any marketing information for potential advertisers.
  • 60 percent provide visitors with advertising rates and information about deadlines, terms and ad sizes.
  • Less than 10 percent provide a self-service area for advertisers. The report defines self-service as the ability to schedule and upload an advertisement.

We were proud of the report and saddened by the missed opportunities.

To read the full report just follow this link to the PDF.

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.

PAFET Review of Media Landscape, 1994

The PAFET Operating Committee had several tasks. The most important was to keep the Strategic Committee, i.e. the Big Bosses, abreast of technology and changes in the media landscape. One of the tools we used was a report [monthly at times] that could be distributed across various “C Suites” and lower in an organization.  Here’s what I wrote about the first edition:

The purpose of the Pafet Review is to keep you abreast of the changing alliances and their potential impact on the media industry. The report is prepared by the Yankee Group under the direction of the Operating Committee.

In the future, the committee plans to add more analysis. This analysis will not only include broad implications, but also the impact of the changing landscape upon Pafet’s mission.

Media Companies Launch Consortium

This is the official launch of PAFET, Partners Affiliated for Exploring Technology. It was a consortium that hoped that by exploring technology together, these companies would benefit from shared knowledge in the creation of new businesses and/or services.

“Our purpose is to maintain and strengthen our competence in collecting, packaging and marketing information, making use of the best of evolving technologies available. As a group we can invest in research on new information technology that larger companies are pursuing,” states James N. Rosse, president and chief executive officer of Freedom Communications, Inc., who will be the first chairman of the PAFET management committee

Presstine Magazine Covers 2000 Design Project

The industry publication Presstime covered the results of the API’s design seminar in its October, 1988 edition. The article’s lede:

Two dozen movers and shakers in the field of newspaper design pondered the substance and form of 21st century newspapers at the American Press Institute’s annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar.

The round-table seminar, conducted at the institute in Reston, Va., Sept. 11-13, used as a focal point hypothetical front pages dated 2000 and beyond that were designed by participants and posted on the walls of the seminar room.

Ironic, isn’t it: “posted on the walls…”

I got a mention for my presentation on the future of graphics:

Howard I. Finberg, assistant managing editor of The Arizona Republic, said the overwhelming majority of editors he questioned predicted graphics will play a greater part in newspapers in the year 2000. But this priority seems to shrink when talk turns to money: The editors told Finberg they would spend 70 percent of any extra funds for reporting and editing, and only 10 percent for graphics.

Sad and not surprising.  Given the visual nature of the Internet, would newspapers be in a better position today if they had invested in something other than words? Just wondering.