What’s good for Yahoo isn’t necessarily good for the newspaper consortium, and so I read with interest the press release from Yahoo touting the milestone of driving “100 million visits to consortium member web sites.” This milestone, while seemingly significant, is a net positive only in the sense that Yahoo can move pure eyeballs to the newspaper sites, but the point of local media is to garner LOCAL eyeballs.

IBS has had a distribution arrangement with Yahoo for years for local news created by its partners, and Yahoo has similarly been able to deliver visits from outside the markets these stations serve. The GM of one large market station — an IBS client — once told me that during a month when there was a major news event in his market, 70% of the traffic to his site came from outside the market. “I can’t sell that to local advertisers,” he said.

So while this consortium of newspapers and Yahoo pat each other on the back, I simply ask, “What’s the strategy here?” Inevitably, it’s an archaic pageview strategy that suits the network and Yahoo in terms of national and perhaps regional sales, but it’s a net liability for any of the members’ local media efforts. I’d be a fool to turn away national ad dollars, but my concern here is the extent to which this lulls the staff into thinking they’re actually doing anything. Moreover, the inventory crunch is significant, and one that demands more, more, more in terms of page views.

Since the beginning of this, I’ve been on the record as saying the consortium benefits Yahoo far more than it does the members. Now that the first year glow of HotJobs has worn off, I wonder if others will begin seeing it the same way.

A noteworthy event in the new media world took place this week with the launch of a daily webcast by The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. Noteworthy, not because it was another webcast, but because Jeff Jarvis and Michael Rosenblum have been involved. It naturally has gotten press in both the blogosphere and elsewhere, and this has not gone over well with the people in broadcasting. We get all defensive when a newspaper tries to do television, and this tends to bring out some of the worst kinds of condescension.

The basics are these: The paper hired Rosenblum at the behest of Jarvis, who took various members of the news department through his VJ boot camp. Rosenblum is a lightning rod in the local television business — mostly among photographers — because they feel he’s trying to take their jobs away. This is all couched in deep concern for the “quality” of television news, but it’s really just fear in the guise of anger.

So when Lost Remote writer Don Day went after the webcast as being just another boring newspaper webcast, it brought out comments both helpful and hurtful. Despite the negative tone of some of the commenters, people from the paper got in on the conversation and took the criticism as constructive. Good for them.

As webcasts go, this one isn’t bad, and it’ll only get better. The evidence suggests these things don’t “work” in terms of gathering an enough audience to justify the expense, but let’s wait and see. I was pretty pumped with the efforts of the Roanoke Times, but that didn’t last. The problem, I think, isn’t the quality; it’s that the web audience for news isn’t best served by this method. I can consume the news (at work) a lot quicker myself than by having somebody read it to me. Besides, there’s that “audio in the cubicle” thing.

But the issues of whether it’s good or not and whether it will work for the Star Ledger or not are overshadowed, in my opinion, by this continuing mindset that only broadcasters can do television or do television right. This is called contempt prior to investigation. Let’s see what happens in Jersey before passing judgment.

The first comment in the Lost Remote story was from someone impersonating Michael Rosenblum. It was taken down by the site’s manager, Cory Bergman, something he rarely does. Michael is a friend of mine, so consider the source here, but I’m pretty sick of the embarrassing levels to which some of these illiterate and ignorant people will stoop to vilify a guy who’s changing the way television is being created. And those changes are making the big time, too.

Mark Glaser wrote today about a simple kicker story that made NBC Nightly News last Saturday. It was a story about a little penguin that was created for the Web by an experienced NBC producer and an associate producer. That’s right, a producer. Not a cast of union thousands. Just a producer. Romenesko hit the angle of a web story moving to Nightly News, but Glaser’s article points out something even more significant.

The penguin story began as a web package created and reported by “Nightly News” producer Clare Duffy. She and an associate producer on the show shot, wrote and edited the piece a few weeks before. As she had done in several other web stories, Duffy narrated and even appeared in a short standup.

Even more remarkable: Though Duffy has been producing for “Nightly” for years (and even appeared in on-air crosstalks when she worked in Moscow 18 years ago), she began shooting and editing only this spring, after a few weeks of on-the-job training, and in addition to her usual day job as a traditional “Nightly News” producer.

So here we have a producer (of all people) shooting, writing, editing and appearing on camera, and it made it to NBC Nightly News! Oh, the immorality of it all!

Folks, get over yourselves. In a few more years, we’ll all be doing video the same way. Those who refuse will cling to their Betacams all the way to the bottom of the tar pits.

I was fortunate enough to participate in a panel discussion and Q&A session over the weekend in Washington, D.C. at a conference of the country’s public radio news directors. The topic was blogging and how NPR stations can use blogging to help connect with the people formerly known as the audience (TPFKATA). Attendees represented every level of acceptance regarding the importance of the Web in their news lives, and this made for a sometimes heated give-and-take.

One man (”I’m a news director, man!”) was especially antagonistic. Jeff Jarvis, who was on the panel with me, wrote about it after the session for his blog.

Terry and I were almost through with opening tap dances when a hotheaded curmudgeon in the third row interrupted — which is fine; we like conversation — to go on the attack and save the world from these horrible blog people. He spat out all the usual lines, including how terribly busy he is being a news director (his italics) and how this is such a nonsense and a bother. My favorite sputtering: “I have a job. Do you have jobs?”

…I have decided I’m not going to waste my time anymore with lazy, rude, self-important, self-delusional, intellectually dishonest, closed-minded curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change. It has all been said before. I see no reason to waste my time, nor that of everyone else in the room. My new policy has been that I’m going to fight curmudgeonliness with curmudgeonliness. I told this fool that if he didn’t want to see the opportunities to do things in new ways, fine.

And then we proceeded with a very nice discussion of practical questions about blogging in news organizations, a discussion that continued later in the day. Everyone else I heard wanted to explore these new opportunities and had plenty of questions and doubts to deal with — as well they should — as well as experience to share; they welcomed change or at least know they couldn’t scare it away.

Meanwhile, the curmudgeon acted like a child sent to the corner and refused to look forward at the panel for the rest of the event. My goal was to get us past the growling as soon as possible and onto a substantive discussion. That is, I think, how to deal with curmudgeons. You can always find reasons not to do things. Then fine, don’t do them. Far more interesting and useful is to explore what might happen if you do them.

This man was saying out loud what we’ve all felt at one time or the other, and I suspect he’ll change his tune in the seasons ahead. But it gives me a chance to repeat a theme that you’ll always hear from me — in media, the Web is your TOP priority. This statement is debated even within companies, and I’ve seen it played out in strategic decisions by media companies over the last few years. In the minds of many managers, it’s a hard position to embrace, when the overall bottom line is how they’re being graded. “I’ve got bigger problems than the Web,” one manager shared with me, which was a polite way of saying “thanks, but no thanks.” This is a very dangerous place to be.

The problem with this thinking is that we’ve crossed from a place where the Web was adjunct to our primary purpose to a place where the Web is now determining how we think and behave in the “real” media world as well. And that says nothing about how the people formerly known as the advertisers are continuing to move money to the Web.

Why has this happened? It’s the consumers, baby. The appetite for unwashed, news-as-a-process is enormous and so much so that it eats away at the foundation of our “finished” news products. Few people wait for the 6 o’clock news or the morning paper to get their news anymore, and smart managers are feeding this appetite hoping to actually drive traffic to their offline products. That’s the right strategic approach.

TMZ.com built a TV show this way.

And I’m hearing more and more from the sales side that agencies are buying online and asking that offline be included as “value added.” Even though research clearly shows that TV is still the cat daddy in terms of advertising, a chink in that armor is revealed anecdotally in the day-to-day trenches of web sales.

As money shifts and consumers shift, what choice do we have but shift with them? None. The Web is our top priority. There is no downside to experimenting and creating online, but there is a huge downside to the opposite, for smart internet pureplay entrepreneurs are already taking nearly 60-cents of every LOCAL web advertising dollar.

A lot of experienced news people — whether broadcast or print — feel like they’ve been baited and switched, that they were trained and hired to do one thing but are now being required to do something else. That’s understandable, but it’s also completely irrelevant. We all need to just deal with it and turn the page.

(Originally posted in today’s AR&D Media 2.0 newsletter)

I hope that from time-to-time you are able to step back from the chaos that seems to be enveloping the media world of late to think about the remarkable opportunities that are before us. We’re living in a new Gutenberg moment, and I hope we don’t miss the forest for the trees.

From a memo to Tribune employees by Sam Zell and Randy Michaels:

What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works. Supply and demand are not in balance, and that manifests itself in two ways:

1. We are not giving readers what they want, and
2. We are printing bigger papers than we can afford to print

First, our publishing business — and to reiterate, it IS a business — needs to retool itself to a customer-centric model. We have now reviewed dozens of reader studies done by Tribune over the years, and they present clear and consistent findings. Readers want:

* Unbiased, honest journalism
* LOCAL consumer and community news
* Maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats

Some of our papers do some of these things well, and some of our papers do them better than others. But, ALL of our papers need to improve in this area. We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we WILL respond to what they say they want.

From an interview that Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer did with the Washington Post:

What is your outlook for the future of media?

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

10 years?

Yeah. If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point. . . . If we want TV to be more interactive, you’ll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it’s sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. . . .

Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We’ve already started to see that certainly in the online world, but we’ve just scratched the surface. . . . I always take my favorite case: I grew up in Detroit. I went to a place called Detroit Country Day School. They’ve got a great basketball team. Why can’t I sit in front of my television and watch the Country Day basketball game when I know darn well it’s being video-recorded at all times? It’s there. It’s just not easy to navigate to.

While these thoughts are terrifying, they are at the same time, exciting. Many print people are dismissing Balmer’s predictions, and I agree that those who make absolute prophecies tend to be wrong far more often than they’re right (2018? I’m not so sure). They point to the fact that free dailies are going like gangbusters in Europe, and that global newspaper circulation is trending upwards. We’ll see.

Regardless, these are incredible times in which we live.

I’m coming up for air from a few days of writer’s block, and I think it’s because there’s just so much to write about these days. The moment I start concentrating in one area, something even more compelling pops up. The bane of bloggers isn’t a lack of things to say; it’s having too much to say.

So I’m just going to go through some things quickly, beginning with the networks getting together to offer a video-on-demand service that encourages people to not use TiVo. The point? They want those same people to watch the ads! Call me a nut, but this is too little, too late.

The business of The New York Times offering an API for its content is intriguing and smart. I hope it sends a message to other companies, and while I fully endorse the concept, it’s still about keeping users inside the walls of The Times. We’ll see.

One of the brightest minds in media, Jack Myers, took a shot at media company ownership this week in his Media Business Report. I’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, but Myers is above my pay grade, so his commentary carries significant weight.

…most executives remain committed to outdated and dangerous mass-media-dependent economic models. Media companies today - even the largest digital media companies - are in danger of following the railroad industry model and becoming Industrial Age mass distribution vehicles rather than Relationship Age™ interactive brand and human connectors.

Nice, and absolutely spot-on.

The L.A. Times painted a chilling picture of the future of television in an article called Broadcast Networks Under Siege that examines the shocking ratings’ declines in May.

Broadcasting, simply put, isn’t casting broadly anymore. As the sweep suggests, the TV networks are losing not just their viewers but also their sense of specialness. They’re becoming just the lowest numbers on the multichannel dial, rather than the last outposts of mass culture. It’s true that this evolution has been happening for years, but this year a tipping point was reached, a Rubicon crossed. Broadcast exceptionalism — its supposed immunity from the market forces afflicting all other media — is finally dead.

Right, and the problem is that tipping point is, while acknowledged, problematic in terms of reacting, because we’re deep into a cycle of expense reduction. Broadcasting still makes a lot of money ($70 billion last year?), and more eyes are focused on salvaging that than actually responding to technology and changing consumer behavior. It’s a tough place to be.

Finally, there’s this gem from Robert Lichter in the American Journalism Review:

“I think there’s a feeling that journalists have overstepped their boundaries,” he says. “People don’t look on [journalists] the way journalists like to view themselves – as the public’s tribune, speaking truth to power, standing up for the little guy. They don’t look like the little guy anymore. They’re part of the celebrity culture.” Increasingly, he says, “people like the news but hate the news media.”

Go read the whole article by Paul Fahri. It’s filled with lots of good stuff that I’d love to comment about. However, I’ve got this writer’s block, see?

I spend a great deal of time challenging my assumptions, as most of you know. It’s a part of the pomo in me, I guess, but I find the practice useful in times like these, especially in the world of media. And I do a lot of this at 30,000 feet. Perhaps it’s the view. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Perhaps it’s how insignificant I feel up there among the clouds, for insignificance is a fine form of humility that helps keep me balanced.

To be a television broadcaster, one requires a special license. Those suckers are scarce, so it stands to reason that everything about TV would be determined by those in TV. It is, after all, their little corner of the world.

To be a newspaper, one needs a printing press or a ton of cash. That makes newspapers scarce, so it also stands to reason that everything about the newspaper business would be determined by those in it. You wouldn’t go to Kroger to ask how to run a newspaper, right?

But that’s all different on the Web. The Web and all its intricate applications were created by the tech community. Every piece of software solves a problem that the nerds of the world have discovered, and since the only license you need to create things for the Web is one’s own creativity, the growth and development of the Web and its applications has been at light speed.

It’s into this world that traditional media companies have come to do business, but here’s the fundamental problem: we want everything done our way, and that’s not necessarily the way of the Web.

In the early days, the Web consisted of static sites built by static HTML pages. This was the era of the browser, when people “traveled” from point A to point B to “discover” the world that was out there. AOL made it easy by putting a form of “everything” inside its walled garden, but eventually, most people grew tired of the training wheels.

Search basically supplanted browsing, but traditional media companies never adapted. We stayed put, and so began a serious disconnect with reality. Since we liked static sites (they served our needs well, thank you very much), we saw no reason to move on, and when the Live Web came along with its unbundled content and interactive applications, we were trapped in the past. The extent to which this continues today is remarkable, especially since the Web has now moved past search and into the world of subscribe.

So here are a couple of fundamental mistakes that most media companies make in their assumptions:

One, we don’t actually “browse” websites, and we never have. The browser sits on your desktop and brings documents or portions of documents TO YOU. These documents may reside in code form on distant servers, but your browser doesn’t “go” anywhere; it brings everything to you.

This is such an important web fundamental to understand, because it will help you recognize what’s taking place in the unbundled world of the Live Web. Our browser can now bring a little from here and a little from there, all depending on what we want, and this understanding will be critical as the Web moves to its next iteration, the Semantic Web.

Two, the Web is no respecter of sites — all are just points in the maze. Just because you’re a big, bad media company doesn’t mean that you have any special place online. There’s nothing special about your URL that makes you different than any other URL, in the eyes of the Web.

The algorithms that Google uses to rank sites respect the amount of content that is “under” that URL, but they also deeply respect inbound links, because that is viewed as more important than just size. Yahoo may be an enormous “site,” residing on multiple servers, but its URL is just a URL, and the structure of the Web treats it no differently than any other. This is the central factor in Google’s use of the entire Web as its platform. More URLs are better than just one, so Google encourages the growth and development of sites, and monetizes them for builders and owners through its brilliant Adsense program.

The above is part of why I keep encouraging the NAB and other organizations to bring the tech community into its conferences about the future. We’re blinded by our online business models, but the nerds of the world — those people who actually built the Web — aren’t so encumbered, and it’s about time we started listening to them.

A Business Week article caught my attention, because it speaks so well to an ongoing issue that I encounter with media companies. The issue is whether it makes more sense to run digital operations from a centralized unit or to give freedom to individual properties to do their own thing.

Each has its merits, but I’ve always come down more on the side of local control. That’s because I think all of the flexibility for making money exists there and that nobody knows a market like the people who work therein.

The Business Week article looks at new strategic moves by Best Buy that the company believes will better equip it stores to handle the current economic uncertainty. At the crux of the decision is moving control of many things previously dictated by the corporate offices to the hands of the people running the stores. This has had a rather significant impact on business.

Lately, however, the employees at this store (Baytown, Tex) have noticed a different stripe of shopper: Eastern European workers from cargo ships or oil tankers, temporarily docked at Baytown’s busy port, are spending their precious shore hours scouring the store’s aisles. They take a 15-minute cab or shuttle ride to stock up on iPods and Apple laptops priced cheaper than back home. To speed their shopping, the Baytown Best Buy has moved the iPods from the back corner of the store to the front, paired them with overseas power converters, and simplified the signage. Since the changes were made over the holidays, cash register receipts for the boat workers have ballooned by 67%.

This moving around of stock would not have happened in a paradigm of top-down control. As a result, Best Buy’s “centricity” strategy is producing projections of healthy revenue growth at a time when the price of gas is soaring.

This is a fascinating look at a company that is trying to shift control over certain things to the local level, and it’s exactly what media companies need to be doing as well. Any corporate media strategy that forces, for example, a certain kind of niche vertical on all of its properties without regard for their local relevancy is sacrificing localized niche revenue opportunities in the name of uniformity. That kind of thinking may have worked at one time, but today, its value is certainly open to debate.

Let’s give control of how we make money online to the people in the best position to know where the money is and how to go about getting it.

In the beginning was the newspaper, and the newspaper was with the people, and the newspaper was the people. And the people, being people, needed a place to put announcements of a legal nature in order to self-govern, so they chose the newspaper. This made sense at one time, but the model continues today, despite two important facts: One, the newspaper is no longer with the people, and, two, there are much more efficient ways to handle such things. Today, the “legals” section remains one of the last, highly profitable (and exclusive) branches of what’s left of the money tree that used to be the American newspaper.

Over the last few years, attempts have been made to remove the exclusive nature of these announcements from the newspaper industry, and the voices are getting louder. In Pennsylvania, a bill is moving through the state senate that would allow such announcements to be distributed through free, community papers, and the slight opening of the door to non-exclusivity is not going over well with Pennsylvania newspapers.

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer says the opposition is framing their argument as one of public access. Deborah Musselman, director of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, told the paper, “The idea was that people have a right to know what their government is up to,” adding that the bill would “make it a lot harder to know what your government is up to because you wouldn’t know where to look to find the information.”

Um, okay.

There’s been some name-calling in the matter, with newspapers being referenced as a “cartel,” and the free dailies being called “junk mail.” There’s a whole lot of money at stake:

Local governments now must place legal notices in a “newspaper of general circulation” in a county. The bill would expand that to include “community papers of mass dissemination” that are distributed free through the mail or delivered by carrier to all households in a political subdivision.

“Right now, the legal-advertising law grants an exclusive monopoly that doesn’t recognize that there are other bona fide options out there,” said Jim Haigh, a consultant to the Mid-Atlantic Community Papers Association, which represents 300 free papers in seven states, about half of them in Pennsylvania. “We are just looking for fair competition.”

Haigh argues that community papers would do a better job of getting the word out. They are sent free to every household in a community, while newspapers require a paid subscription that not everyone has.

The bill has the support of associations representing municipalities and schools, which long for cheaper ad rates.

“We are always looking for ways to get the message out to more individuals, but at the same time to save money,” said Holly M. Fishel, research director at the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors.

Whether this bill passes or not is just a blip in the overall disruption of the mass media model. I’ve yet to hear of any broadcasters getting into the fray, and that’s interesting, because eventually there will be a digital version of all of this. The technology exists today for law firms, school districts and municipalities to publish these themselves, to be aggregated by a smart third-party, and there’s no reason that couldn’t be any local media company.

That’s oversimplified, to be sure. These types of announcements are a part of our various branches of government, so they cannot be considered lightly. There are issues of accessibility to digital media by ALL members of the community, tampering with the announcements, and questions of governmental control of the Web — all things to be seriously weighed and discussed.

But this is another attack on the classifieds armor that used to be a primary revenue support for local newspapers, and it’s hard to believe this one will end pretty either.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

The Senate, with the full blessing of our two Democratic candidates, is about to put the skids on the FCC’s decision to loosen cross-ownership rules, whereby media companies can own both a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Damn those big media people, huh? They want to control the voices in our communities, so we can’t let them narrow choices “for the American people.” Word.

Given the realities of the current media conundrum, however, this strikes me as a bit like waving off the RMS Carpathia on its journey to rescue the survivors of the Titanic. I mean, really, folks; who cares if big media is owned by one person? It’s all drifting slowly into the sands of yesterday anyway.

The issue is over independent and varied voices, which is a BIG part of the disruption in the first place.

Odd that I find myself actually siding with Kevin Martin.

Sometimes a simple choice of a word can make all the difference in how we think. John Morton, the dean of American newspaper analysts, writes for the American Journalism Review (Enough is Enough) that by relentless cost-cutting, newspapers are committing a form of suicide. He calls cutbacks “wrongheaded” and “shortsighted” and believes they threaten the future of the industry altogether.

He writes that the days of “exceptional profits” for media companies are over, and he worries that the brand name and reputation of papers needs protecting as we move forward.

Mr. Morton has been around a long time, and there’s certainly room for his position in the broader discussion of media disruption. It’s true that when push comes to shove with public companies, the bottom line is all that matters, and adjustments by cutting staff, while not easy, are a necessary part of survival.

But John Morton’s thinking about the suicidal nature of such cuts is colored by questions over the validity of the disruption:

All these reductions are a response to two years of declining revenue and profit and a perceived shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

Perceived shift? Perceived? That’s not a slip of the pen keyboard, I suspect, and it underscores the difficulty of accepting change in the culture of skepticism that envelopes most newsrooms. After all, if all of this is just a “perceived shift,” then it’s not really real, right? Advertisers aren’t really moving money to the Web, and consumers aren’t really getting their news and information online, right? It’s all just a matter of perception.

Or not.

Articles like this one by Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation tug at the heartstrings of anyone who has been around media very long. What’s happening to newsrooms is sad. Every day seems to bring more bad news. The CBS O&Os laid off scores of people yesterday, even high-priced anchors, because business has gone south. Newspapers have been buffeted for several years now, and it’s taking its toll.

Osnos writes of the morale in newsrooms as if comforting an old friend.

…the real problem is something deeper, I sense. It is a belief that no matter how good your work, how thoroughly reported and influential, it isn’t going to matter in protecting your newspaper. Because of the revenue declines and cutbacks, the mood of proprietors and managers, on the whole, is near panic. Outstanding work by their staffs, the newsroom has become convinced, isn’t going to make a difference in the outcome of their institution. The effort at morale-building in the stream of front office memos announcing departures, the cheerful exhortations to survivors to do great work, only adds to the cynicism that pervades.

News people are by nature skeptics, and given to grumbling. One of their missions is to find fault. Self-criticism in newsrooms is standard, and so is defensiveness when the criticism comes from outsiders. None of these characteristics are at issue. The problem is that the prevailing mood of a declining and deteriorating industry is so pervasive and so discouraging that it reinforces itself. “What’s the point?” is a debilitating attitude, and it is very difficult to reverse.

What’s happening hurts, but I believe it’s the same necessary kind of hurt that comes with the death of a loved one. And I think we would all do well to think of it as such.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified the five stages of grieving, and they are as appropriate for this situation as any.

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

We’re past denial, although who can argue we went through that? We’re also past the anger phase. Professional news people lashed out at anybody they could tag, beginning with the blogosphere. That’s gone now, as is the stage of bargaining. If we could do this… If we could do that… Sorry, folks we can’t talk our way out of this one. Besides, to whom does one bargain for justice anyway?

I think what Osnos is describing is textbook depression, and that’s the stage that we’re in now. Television may not be as advanced as our newspaper friends are, but it’s there just the same. “What’s the point?” is the behavior of an industry depressed.

But look what comes next? Acceptance. That’s where we need to be, because minds who have fully accepted that those nostalgic days are gone and are not coming back are minds that can actually move forward. It’s the darkness-just-before-dawn syndrome.

As my friend Gordon Borrell likes to say, “Things are very positive where I work.” Indeed. Growth is on the web side, so let’s all get on board the Cluetrain. Historians will write what they must, but we’ve all got work to do.

There are some real jewels in this five question interview of Richard Honack, Assistant Dean, Chief Marketing Officer and Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

One of the first things newspapers need to do is step back and look at the world around them to realize that their customers are not waiting for “news” that happened on a deadline-driven cycle. The majority of “news” customers are past “what happened”– they want to know “how it happened.” The days of the “Front Page” have been gone for a few years. We live in a “nanosecond” world and newspaper buyers now read the paper for comfort when they have time. For the most part, the majority know the news, scores, stocks and anything else deadline-driven almost instantaneously on their mobile phone, computer or 24-hour cable news channel…

…to the owners and publishers who still consider themselves “newspaper people” one can only say, “Change or go out of business.” They need to accept the fact that they play a different role in the global communication world. There is still a need for newspapers but in a different form, frequency, etc. The Internet works 24/7/365 and that should be the core from which the newspaper, magazine, news services, etc., fall out in a given period…

…If you think like a “newspaper person” you get “newspaper think.” If you think like an “information provider” with assets that can provide new products or services you start to think about technology, real estate, creative services.

Excellent stuff and spot on for broadcasters as well as newspaper people.

Professor Honack is appearing at Strategic Leadership: Making Radical Change Happen May 12-15, 2008, in Chicago

Your favorite network executive and mine, NBC’s Jeff Zucker, on print reporters:

“The thing they want is for the [TV-news] business to die faster [than the newspaper business], because that’s what makes them feel better.”

Yup. That’s what they want. Deep, huh? Now you know.

As I travel around the country meeting various people in the local media world, I continue to be amazed at the denial that exists towards the disruption of mass media’s business model. I think upper management certainly understands by now and middle-level managers are beginning to get the message. But at the street level, denial is the norm, which leads to ignoring reality, avoiding doing anything about it, and the ignorant assessing of blame.

A new blog popped up last week that bears watching, even if only for a short season. Young Broadcasting Laid Me Off is a place where former Young employees can post about themselves and hopefully find a job somewhere. It’s an interesting concept, but there aren’t a lot of posts so far.

It’s presented anonymously, but clearly the creator(s) had some connection with Young in the past.

We want to help. We’ll post your resume, a YouTube clip of your resume, whatever you like. We’ll break it into categories, and then publicize it so employers will have a one-stop shop. Why are we doing this? We started our careers at a station now owned by Young, and without those people, our careers wouldn’t be as rich as they are today. We want to help.

The company has cut its workforce by 11%, with much of the blame for sagging stock prices placed on its decision to play chicken with NBC over KRON-TV in San Francisco a few years back. There is a sense, I’m sure, among those employees laid off that Young was a particularly poorly run company, and so the tendency is to the blame management and complain all the way to the next job.

The company’s history and how it was and is run are irrelevant, however, for the forces that led to this reduction-in-staff will impact everybody in local media sooner or later. Young’s problems may have put them to the front of the line, but they are not the exception, as many would have us believe. My colleague Jerry Gumbert notes that we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of these kinds of sites in the months and years ahead, and I certainly agree with him.

If you are currently employed in local media — regardless of the format — now is not the time to point fingers or make the assumption that your job or responsibilities are safe, because your company is well-run. Local media is in a full-blown business disruption, and the handwriting is on the wall — diversify your skill set for a digital world or find another line of work. Do it now while you’re still employed. There is no “us versus them,” worker versus management conspiracy. That archaic notion is foolishness, because the disruption doesn’t care whether your company is well managed or not.

The two-person local TV team as the industry standard is dead. Actually, it’s been dead for a long time. Sooner or later (and later is actually sooner than you think), the preponderance of news gatherers — whether print or broadcast — will be fully-equipped, versatile multi-media journalists. That is not a guess; it’s an absolute certainty.

One of the most refreshing discussions I’ve had in recent years was with a publisher who had finally reached a point where he could say, “I don’t believe the money is coming back (using traditional media means and methods).” The numbers are headed in the wrong direction, friends, and they’re not coming back.

Deal with it.

Once you can turn the page on that, then you’ll see the insanity of insisting that the way it’s always been done is the way it will be done.

It’s not about “one-man bands” or insults to your professionalism or doing more with less or those idiot managers or anything else your mind can create as an excuse. You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution, and when you’re in a lifeboat, it’s just not the right time to be moaning about how the ship would never have hit the iceberg if YOU had been in charge.

Acceptance is our quest, and once acceptance is gained, our eyes are opened to possibilities, we get excited, and coming to work becomes fun again. I have seen this with my own eyes, and it is happening in many places.

But as inspiring as that can be, the truth is that some — perhaps even many — in local media will not make the transition, whether it’s through an inability to adapt to new skill requirements or their own attitudes towards change. And I think we’ll begin to see managers confronting the reality that these people are a net liability in an environment of workflow change, so those who are shown the door are likely to be the most resistant and therefore angry and hostile.

So be it. If you can’t or won’t row, you’ll be a drag on those who are, and no smart business would keep such people around, regardless of how “important” they may be.

There may be some real “victims” in this — people who are actually incapable of making the switch, and to them I would say that Life has something else for you. The sooner you determine what that might be, the better off you and your family will be.

Every once in awhile, a simple statement in an article leaps out and grabs the throat, hollering “truth!” I found one in an Ad Age article about why newspapers are shutting down their business news sections:

Said veteran newspaper-industry analyst Ed Atorino, of Benchmark Capital: “You do get a story once in awhile about a local storeowner or a closing or something, which you might miss, but most of what’s in those sections is rip and read [wireservice copy],” he said. “With all the business news on TV and the internet, the consumer is getting it someplace else.”

This is the nut of the problem for us in all forms of local media. Unless we’re a part of the “somewhere else,” we’ll simply continue the downward slide to irrelevance.

New data from Borrell Associates show an evolving picture in the shares of local online ad dollars, and none of it is really “good” from a traditional media company perspective.

Over a three year period, newspapers have lost 17.2% of market share on average. Television has picked up share (7.6%) since 2004, and that’s due to a more focused effort by stations and the rise of online video, among other factors. But the big gainer is internet pureplay companies (34.4% market share gain), including the biggies, like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN.

Remember, this is LOCAL online ad revenues. The category, however, also includes a growing number of niche verticals and other local online sites, many of which are no doubt run by media companies — sans the brand.

Borrell Associates president Colby Atwood told me that these are interesting times, to be sure.

The acceleration in local online ad spending is giving newspaper sites some serious whiplash. Those sites are growing far faster than their print parents, but not fast enough to keep up with the market. New online advertisers are swarming out of the woodwork while newspapers continue to lean heavily on their print customers for online revenues. TV and radio sites shouldn’t get too smug, though. They are gaining share right now, but if they don’t get beyond selling Web packages to their on-air advertisers, they will roll into the same patch of deep sand that is holding the newspapers back.

Colby’s exactly right. Growing online revenues may be putting smiles on some faces, but the truth is the market is growing faster. When you combine radio, television and newspapers, the problem comes into focus (down 11%). It’s not television versus newspapers; it’s traditional media against new.

So media companies will continue to fight for a decreasing share of the local web advertising pie, while pureplays will continue to grow. This is just one of the reasons why we see opportunity increasingly as outside the media brand’s reach/frequency strategy.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter)

In the blue corner, we have Venture Capitalist — and former newspaper editor — Alan Mutter showing us that newspapers have lost 42% of their market value ($23 billion) since 2004, most of that coming last year.

In the red corner, we have reporters and photographers at the Seattle Times Company-owned Central Maine Morning Sentinel “not allowing the newspaper to print their names above articles or in photo captions, hoping to draw attention to the fact that they have not agreed on a contract since the expiration of the previous one in January 2006, and have not received raises since January 2005.”

With respect to the employees in Maine, I suggest they pick another opponent (or give me some of what they’re smoking).

Of all the paradigms being disrupted these days, none is more interesting than that of books and book publishing. We all know about how the actual publishing process is evolving, but what you may not realize is that the path from aspiring author to published author is also being disrupted.

The established institution — like so many others in our culture — is being disrupted from the bottom up and old pathways are overgrown with new foliage. The obvious new path is self-publishing, and another is that more bloggers and geeks are writing books these days. They know how to write, because their efforts are being read by people every day, and they have the reputation with potential book buyers to get the attention of publishers.

But one old path that’s closing isn’t really evident — that from newspaper journalist to author, which is the grand dream of many budding journalists, although they might not say so. It’s not polite to state up front that you’re in it for you.

Writers need to write, and newspapers have traditionally provided a tremendous vehicle for that. It’s not just the sensational stuff, like “All The President’s Men;” it includes thousands of books all along the importance spectrum.

One such man is David Simon, who was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for 13 years before a series he wrote on the Baltimore City Homicide Division, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was turned into a best-selling novel, and then into an NBC series. His second series and subsequent book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, became an HBO mini-series, and Simon was on his way. He’s now Executive Producer of the HBO series The Wire, and his life as a writer is fully established.

But he began as a reporter in Baltimore.

In an interview with the fan site Fancast, Simon observed the overgrown path, but his comments strike me as remarkably shallow for a man of his position:

The newsroom where I used to work (the Baltimore Sun) had 460 people. Now it has 300. And there are people out there who just don’t care. They’ll make more money putting out a mediocre paper than they would putting out a better paper. They know this. It’s their equation. They’re quite content with mediocrity.

And within that culture we have people that are saying, ‘oh no, we’re going to do more with less,’ which is one of the great lies of the 21st century. What it means is we’re going to less with less. And that’s the nature of what journalism is becoming.

So here we have a “famous” guy, who became famous by taking a year to write a newspaper series that brought the paper recognition and awards and rocketed Simon into the future, now using the pulpit given to him to throw bricks at the tough business decisions being made today. I find that pretty disingenuous.

Why don’t we do a cost/benefit analysis on Simon’s original series?

You see these sort of ‘we gotcha’ stories, bite sized morsels of outrage, half-assed scandals. No one is tackling big problems. That kind of ambition is gone. When I went into journalism school, which is over 20 years ago now, high end journalism seemed like it was growing by leaps and bounds in its ability to assess the most delicate and ornate contradictions in society.

You look at some of the coverage (of) Watergate and some of the examinations of political infrastructure that followed on the part of high end papers. It was very impressive and there was every reason to believe that it was (going to) become more so, that newspapers were going to become more serious and instead the opposite happened.

Look, we all wish we had the time and resources to build a career as a successful executive producer while being paid by a local newspaper, and while Simon rails against the contemporary press and actually brings his outrage into the HBO series, we all need to back off the blame game and take a look in the mirror. What real, lasting cultural change did Simon bring to Baltimore’s streets? What role did this style of making-a-name-for-yourself journalism play in the distancing of newspapers from their readers?

It’s easy to cast stones, but as the old saying goes, it’s not very smart to do that from glass houses. What we’re reaping today is partially the fault of public companies more interested in the next quarter’s profits than the role of the press in our culture, but they didn’t invent the Internet or the disruptions that are originating with the people formerly known as the audience. I believe the worship of the fame of Woodward and Bernstein is directly responsible for much of what Simon finds wrong with the news these days.

And the next David Simon may come from YouTube. Would it really be all that bad? We’ll see.

If I worked for a Belo newspaper this morning, I’d be really nervous about the company’s decision to separate newspapers and television into two companies. My bosses would be telling me that this is a good thing, because we can now focus just on ourselves and our web properties and let those TV people do their own thing. I’d smile like all good troopers smile, but when I was alone with my thoughts, this is the way they would go:

Hmm, newspapers are dying faster than TV stations, so this likely means the company wants to prepare for the inevitable. What about my stock? What about my retirement?

They said something about $750 million in newspaper revenues created by 3,800 employees. Then they said that the TV stations also do $750 million in revenues with 600 less employees. How’s that going to play out in the balance sheet? Won’t investors see those extra employees as a drag? Oh crap. I’m going to lose my job!

Wait a minute. Does splitting up mean they’re going to sell the papers? Who would buy them? Oh God, don’t let it be Murdoch!

Meanwhile, I think I’d also be a little nervous if I worked at a Belo TV station. I mean, there’ll be rejoicing that “we’re finally not going to be dragged down by those dying newspapers,” which will be followed by gasps of recognition that they don’t have newspapers as an excuse anymore. Welcome to the world of shareholder satisfaction, guys.

These are volatile times for any form of mass media, and we shouldn’t be surprised by moves like this. It’s all about satisfying Wall Street, and we’re going to have to watch and see if this “works” for Belo. If so, watch for others to follow suit.

AFTERTHOUGHTS:

• It occurs to me that Belo is actually selling the newspapers — to the public. Is anybody buying?
• Part of the deal is that the TV side will get all the debt, $1.2 billion worth. That means the newspaper side has a fighting chance to transition to a web-based business, but it saddles the more profitable side with servicing all that red ink.

Here is the latest in my on-going series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World.

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes (only people my age use that saying), but the foremost assumption of a networked media world is that the highest value goes to the people running the network, not its individual nodes. This is why we strongly recommend that clients get into the business of network building in addition to distributing their content through networks run by others. This is possible at the local level, because, well, everybody’s a sort of media company these days.

This is just one of the reasons I question the value of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, an enormous blending of Yahoo!’s reach and technology with the content and sales efforts of 19 major newspaper companies in the U.S. I’ve had several discussions with people involved in the deal, including a guy I really respect who felt I wasn’t considering all the factors. This essay is my attempt to put the details of the deal into language we can all understand, because I think there is an important lesson here for all of us, whether newspaper or television.

Understanding the Yahoo! Consortium