“Newspaper Industry” Items

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.

Pagination and a Look Into the Future of Newspapers

In 1999 I was asked to contribute to a book about pagination being published by the Society of News Design and the Association of News Editors. You can download the entire book from here.

At the end of the article I made some “bolder, out-on-a-limb” predictions:

  • Design as a unique job function in newspapers will slowly dissolve into other editing responsibilities.
  • Editing will encompass more than the technical aspects of copy editing and take on more responsibilities for the entire infopacks.
  • Computers will automatically handle most of the routine production responsibilities, freeing editors to do lust what we have always wanted them to do – make journalistic choices on behalf of their readers and the community.
  • Most, if not all, maps and charts will be produced by software. There will be fewer artists at newspapers doing “art work.”
  • The presentation of information will be of such importance for the organization that the senior editor with such responsibilities will report to the publisher.

I like my final paragraph:

Newspapers are on the verge of freeing themselves from the limitations of their production equipment. While I would not predict the end of newsprint as we know it, the era of print-centric delivery is coming to an end. We need to look beyond technology to find the solutions to organize and motivate our workforce for the new millennium. If we are successful, this is the last pagination book you will ever read.

Technology and Pagination

In 1999 the Society for News Design and the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a book about how managers could more successfully integrate new technologies into their newsrooms.  This project include a number of chapters from the leading technologists in the newspaper industry, including:

  • David M. Cole
  • Heidi de Laubenfels
  • Olivia Casey
  • Ed Kohorst

While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid. 

I wrote about Embracing Change when it came to future technologies. There were a few 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