As the past contracts, the future may grow

The weekend brought several thoughtful posts about the print industry in crisis. I’ll look at them as a tableau of dealing with the past to tapping the opportunities of the present and then envisioning a future.

First, dealing with the past. Alan Mutter reports that ”Newspapers eye extreme cuts as crisis grows,” Specifically, Mutter says, people inside print organizations are telling him 2009 will be the year when whole daily editions of print newspapers vanish.

“In the best of cases, publishers will continue aggressively nipping and tucking at staffing, benefits, newshole, and the footprint of their circulation areas. In the worst cases, some newspapers will be shut down - or endure only as skeleton-staffed online operations.

“In one of the most startling of the potential initiatives, an amazing number of publishers of all sizes are giving serious consideration to eliminating print editions on certain days of the week, according to private conversations with operators who requested anonymity.

“Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions, which typically carry the least amount of advertising, appear to be at the most risk.”

(Update: Also see Mutter’s additional post ”Where extreme cuts may come at papers.")

It is unlikely that dropping editions—and the resulting cost savings—will forestall significant staff reductions next year. As Mutter reports, quietly released NAA figures show news revenues dropped like a rock in the third quarter of 2008 and the final quarter promises be worse. Growth in online revenue that many organizations have banked on seems unlikely in the current economy and unless news organizations radically improve the way they sell advertising and deliver it to their Web users.

What a conundrum. Still, a print only or even a “print mostly” organization can simply watch itself shrink into oblivion as Web access and usage grows while environmental concerns about paper, plastic covers and energy costs grow. Better to focus online—the opportunities of the present. Mark Potts argues established news organizations still are not committed to online with the focus and scope that is necessary.

Here’s Potts in ”What It Takes”:

“How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or Facebook? Damn few.

“How many newspapers have a department devoted to fixing and painting news boxes? Just about all newspapers of any size. Now, how many have any staff devoted to thinking about how to optimize their site’s placement in Web searches? Not many.

“How many newspapers have an advertising production staff that can churn out a good-looking ad for any advertiser? It’s essential, of course. Now, how many have anybody thinking about new forms of Web advertising that take advantage of tools like search, widgets, Flash, interactivity, data-mining, etc.? Very few.

“How many newspapers have copy desks that work hard at presenting news to readers in a clear, understandable form? 100 percent. Now, how many have even one staff member whose job it is to find ways to place the newspaper’s content on other Web sites, for maximum visibility and to create incoming links? Or to aggregate content from multiple sources into a one-stop local news portal? Almost none.

My own conversations with newsroom editors confirms what Potts is saying. Many top editors don’t recognize how quickly Web dynamics are changing, much less what they might do to respond. Other editors do recognize new requirements but are slow to shift resources amid cutbacks and protracted discussions of what print to let go of.

Potts’ post suggests an important question for news organizations that are going to drop the print newspaper one or more days per week. You cannot stop there. Assuming these organizations do not also cut staff, do they have a strategy and a plan for effectively using those resources to make their online operation more successful? Are they ready to take the news to users rather than relying on those who happen to stop by? Are they ready to fully exploit Web developments on the horizon including mobile locative media and the semantic Web?

Potts outlines some ways to get there. Now.

A third post, from Charles M. Peters offers a vision of a future. Peters, President and CEO of The Gazette Co., is making the effort to become a true denizen of the Web and his Complete Community Connection blog reflects a willingness to put thinking out for comment rather than standard corporate practice of huddling behind closed doors before announcing a plan.

Peters argues that he and the rest of the news industry need to develop a new mindset:

Newspaper executives from around the world are trying to implement new business models. However, it is hard to implement a new model with an old mindset. Many are trying to arrange the concepts for a new ecosystem of local information. What I hope to do here is share my thoughts, and connections, as we explore these new frontiers.

Peters also offers one of the most astute descriptions I have seen of the awkward state of the culture of news organizations:

As we work to develop this new game, or business model, within our own company, conflicts arise.  Those who see the future, but can’t articulate it, are frustrated.  Those who see the future and want to make it happen quickly are very frustrated by those who don’t even perceive the need for a new game.  Those who don’t perceive the need for a new game are frustrated by all the commotion.

Key to Peters’ thinking is the idea that news organizations must move away from a product focus.

“We cannot continue to focus on products. Products are just nodes on the network, promotional flags to local intelligence, in context.

“So, the game is changing from a reliable cash-generating franchise focused on broadcasting authoritative snapshots reflecting the community to an entrepreneurial “elegant organization” to provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together.

“And, we cannot define these communities.  As an individual, my interests are not easily discerned by my geographical location or demographics.  So, I am looking for a way to keep up with friends, neighbors, certain local organizations, and certain local issues, while getting the overview of key issues that an editor thinks I should know.  We need an elegant organization of information to make that happen.”

Peters doesn’t stop there. He has begun to envision the new tasks to be performed within news organizations to shape and carry out this mission. The Community Liaison tops his list, and, guess what? It’s the CEO.

He closes with a list of questions that each person in the organization can ask him or herself going forward.

1.  Do I understand that I am a participant in an organization trying to create tools to be used “with and by” the communities we serve, to allow the individuals in those communities to know what they want to know so that they can have the power to do what they want to do?

2.  Do I acknowledge that I will get to participate in the creative evolution of my job, key tasks, reporting relationships and organizational mindset as we evolve into a new C3 organization?

3.  Do I want to?

What a great list for the conversations about change in your organization. It’s a piece of the future you can start on today.

Link: Zell reconsidered

Before you join the stone-throwers who are pounding Tribune’s Sam Zell for his comments about the dismal sales record for Pulitzers, read Alan Mutter’s ”One exec’s savvy take on the news biz.” (Now, if only Zell and Lee Abrams or anyone else could come up with some coherent solutions.)

A future for news

Jeff Jarvis has come up with a thoughtful and comprehensive summary of the emerging news landscape. Read the entire post. Then reread and discuss it with your newsroom. Link to it from your web site and invite comments about what your users think is important for your Web site.

I’m going to start today with Jarvis’ first bullet point, because I think all flows from here:

“The next generation of local (news) won’t be about news organizations but about their communities. News is just one of the community’s needs. It also needs elegant organization. News companies and networks can help provide that. The bigger goal is to provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together. News will become a product of the community as much as it is a service to it.”

As more people discover their ability to create community online, it follows that they will identify and prioritize common problems (the way news editors and editorial pages have done), explore solutions (the way news organizations were supposed to) and join together to push for change (editorial page, again). Does online community, then, replace traditional news organizations? It’s not an either-or equation. Instead, the successful news organization must reinvent its relationship with its community. Among other things, Jarvis says, communities will still need dogged beat work and investigative reporting. As the new system for news emerges, traditional news organizations can lend structure and coherence to the network.

Jarvis rightly points out that the power of the news organization of the future may lie more in its unique contribution to the community network rather than on the scope of its original news report. Speaking specifically about investigative reporting, Jarvis says: “In a link-and-search economy, you must create unique content with strong value to get attention and audience.”

This is a call for news organizations to focus on the emerging landscape, identify their critical roles and go for it. I have described a key obstacle to significant change in newspaper culture: the reluctance, even inability, to identify and let go of outdated practices. With many organizations now consumed day in and day out with the business of multiplatform production amidst downsizing, it gets harder to see how the typical newsroom can plot the survival it needs today and the future it needs yesterday.

At best, Jarvis summary offers your organization ideas for plotting a future beyond the next layoff. At least, it offers a template for plotting your own ideas about the future role of your organization in a community that is still being defined.

Your thoughts about the role of your news organization in emerging online communities? Please share them in the comments.

Join an open conversation

Way back in the day, when I was a newspaper ombudsman (The Oregonian, 1996-1999), I was stunned to learn how much our critics felt we left out of the newspaper when I, like most of my colleagues in the newsroom, wanted them to admire what we put in. We were capturing crime problems in local neighborhoods, for example, but missing community discussions about why crimes were happening and what citizens could do about it. We were capturing the angst of youth, but failing to give young people much of a role in the discussion.

The issue wasn’t so much to be nice or to be fair, although those are good things. The issue was to be relevant, to create a news report that was meaningful to people where they lived. That’s usually a very different place than the newsroom. Sure we would give regular people a starring role in our newspaper movie, but only if they followed our script.

I learned of these omissions, not by waiting for people to call and complain. Instead, I went looking for trouble, hosting and joining conversations around Portland and by strong-arming and sweet-talking other journalists to join them as well. Knowledge grew. Perspectives changed. And, key to change at that time: Journalists find a wider circle of sources upon which to draw. They get more comfortable with the untitled people and their unfamiliar points of reference and the important linkages of community. They let others write parts of the script.

These insights have stuck with me for more than a decade now. They have been refreshed by my old-journo efforts to learn about digital media and the untitled people and important linkages of the online world. They hit me hard last week when I joined a different conversation, an online conversation occasioned by a closed-door meeting of news industry executives hosted by the American Press Institute and the McCormick Foundation. The “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis,” apparently consisted of a couple of presentations by business experts (and, yes folks, the business outlook in the newspaper industry is dire) and a pitch by API for its Newspaper Next program (a useful approach to innovation that has not caught fire in the industry). You can read API’s report here and a follow-up by Amy Gahran on Poynter Online here.

The gist of the main presentation at API, by turnaround expert James Shein, is that there are five stages of industry decline and much of the news industry is in the fourth stage, crisis. The fifth stage is dissolution. Ominously, says the API summary, “failure to take action at any point on the curve means the enterprise inexorably moves to the next point. As an organization moves down the crisis curve, it will find executing a recovery plan more difficult, and will have less time to do it.”

Another Shein comment that resonated: ”The biggest hurdles to progress the industry’s senior leadership, including some of the people in this room. I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes.”

That’s pretty ironic, given an array of “fresh eyes” that were outside the room having an online debate keyed to the summit. One of the news executives in API’s invitation-only session was Charles M. Peters, president and CEO of The Gazette Company. Peters decided to try to blog the session live via CoverItLive on Twitter. Peters, who had never live blogged before (I have and I can tell you it is very demanding, at least at first.) What ensued was a lively discussion about moves the industry might make to rescue itself. Peters has posted an initial summary here and plans to write up highlights and I’ll post links as they come up. The transcript, all seven hours, is here.

What struck me about the online conversation was how similar it was to what I saw way back when as an ombudsman. This time, of course, I was outside with the untitled people and their unfamiliar points of reference and the important linkages of community. I didn’t presume to have answers—I don’t think any of the 30 plus people in that online conversation did. But there was a wealth of ideas. Some might have been worth a try by one of the organizations represented inside the room. Some might have sparked even better ideas inside the room.

The people inside might be playing the role of journalists in the newsroom—unwittingly trapped in their own self-reinforcing conversations with one another, failing to see the value of difference and change. Above all, failing to see a crisis in their growing (rightly or wrongly) irrelevance. I wondered how many of the ideas from outside they’ve already heard, dismissing them—like the newsroom often dismisses community suggestions—as too small, too different, too....

A lot of small and different could turn into something big. My idea in the conversation was that each company might take on responsibility to push one big experiment and then quickly share results with the others. Journalist (and Twitter friend) Tim Windsor said it well after API canceled a news conference because its meeting had failed to reach a consensus. There “shouldn’t be consensus,” Windsor said, “But a steady rain of divergent ideas to try.”

Peters attempted to bring his fellow executives into the online conversation. I believe it was displayed for a time on a screen in the conference room but it didn’t sound like the room layout or conference format encouraged engagement. I think it would be better for the executives to join online conversations and networks and participate in them regularly, if they are not already doing that. As I’ve said before, I have learned from blogging and being on Twitter that you only really understand how the Web works when you are there. You only learn the power of the network once you join it.

That’s another small suggestion, and one that demands time and attention—both in short supply right now in the news industry. It’s time well spent for those who want to build tomorrow’s news organization. Hard to say how people will be getting their news five years from now. But you can bet it will be on some Web not yet imagined, not on dead trees. If you understand how it works now, you’re that much more able to keep up. If you don’t bother, you’re that much farther behind. Shein’s curve may apply: The farther behind you get, the bigger the solution must be and the smaller to time available to find and implement it.

Here are two additional posts about the API meeting that I found interesting:

Jane Ellen Stevens offers a ”10-Point Road Map for API Execs”
Steven A. Smith gives a newsroom editor’s perspective in ”The secret API meeting: Do we laugh or cry?”

Spot Us: Re-connecting the public to local journalism

Spot Us, which officially launches today, is a Web site where people, including journalists, propose reporting projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, and members of the public vote with their pocketbooks on which ones get done. The project is the brain child of journalist David Cohn and is funded with a grant of $340,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

The process is simple: People offer story tips and journalists propose stories, pledges of contributions to pay the reporter determine what stories get done, and the stories are distributed via the Web.  Here’s the New York Times writeup.

Example: A pitch from one reporter to explore “How safe are San Francisco Bay beaches and water a year after the Cosco Busan oil spill?” carries a price tag of $445 and it’s about 75 percent funded. Another pitch—“When The Longevity Revolution Hits Your Town.” A three-part series—is asking $330 for the reporter and has a ways to go.

I like Cohn’s idea because it:
-- Tests the notion that people will pay for journalism, one story and one small contribution at a time. This approach reduces the cost of journalism to its essence—a transaction between an information-seeking collection of people and an information-finding journalist.
-- Injects community priorities into a decision-making process that has been dominated (and not always to the best effect) by a professional class of journalists. In a way, the process gives journalism access to a broader group of community sources and a way to gauge which issues are most pressing. As more people in a community vote for certain stories—and perhaps reject some journalist pitches—journalism gains a window into community concerns and priorities.

Spot.Us is piloting in the San Francisco Bay area, and by definition, the experiment is local. The model might work at a national level too—I cannot count the times I have been willing to contribute a few bucks upon reading a really good New York Times investigation even though I do not want to subscribe to the newspaper. But I think the local focus promises the truest test of the ability of the model to work and to create journalism that reflects community concerns and taps a local market of freelance journalist expertise. Cohn says the project is committed to local journalism and San Francisco is just the start.

Local news organizations can be part of the effort as well. Most stories will be available for publication at no charge. A contribution of 50 percent assures first publishing rights to a story. A contribution of 100 percent assures exclusive rights.

Spot Us, like any big experiment, is bound to engender skepticism, especially from established news organizations. But Spot Us seems like a worthy partner for organizations that are now struggling to cover local issues. I hope some Bay Area news organizations will join the promising experiment.

Update: Amy Gahran addresses skepticism about community funded journalism here.

On the other side of the burning bridge

On the ”NewsHour” Wednesday night, Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma looked tired. Very tired. But his smile was the smile of a winner and rightly so—Yemma, a longtime print journalist, gets to march toward a media future without a ton of newsprint strapped to his ankles.

The Monitor announced earlier this week that it would drop daily print publication starting in April, build up its Web site and publish a weekend edition. Rick Edmonds of Poynter Online details the changes here and here. My own initial thoughts are here.

Editors may focus on why the Christian Science Monitor’s plans are not immediately relevant to their world regional or daily newspapers. There are big differences. The Monitor doesn’t draw much advertising. It has expensive national distribution. It gets a multimillion-dollar subsidy from the Christian Science church ($12 million this year to be reduced with the shift to digital).

I would focus instead on this key difference: More than any traditional print news organization I am aware of, Yemma and the Monitor crew have a chance to envision a Monitor (dot com) that could be viable five or 10 years from now and make it so.

Howard Weaver, the Vice President News for the McClatchy Company, once drew on the image of a bridge afire separating traditional news organizations from their future:

“My current metaphor for our business is this: We have to move, and we can see a secure spot for ourselves right across the river. The good news is, there’s a bridge; the bad news is, it’s on fire. There’s time to get across, but not to [screw] around. I intend to get to the other side before the bridge burns up. Who’s coming with me?”

Reading this now, I see the flames rising and I wonder whether Weaver or anyone else can really see a “secure spot right across the river.” It has been more an article of faith than a proven business model that the future—that is, the future revenue to pay for future journalism—resides online.

Liberated from print, journalists at the Christian Science Monitor have a chance to define that ground across the river.

I fear, increasingly, that able and dedicated editors in many newsrooms are not getting that chance. Instead, their job seems to be propping up the flaming bridge for one day, one week or a few months at a time while the future races farther ahead.

Consider:
-- Buyouts in 2006 and 2007 cost newsrooms valuable experience and institutional memory. Bad enough. Now layoffs increasingly take the new hires—predominantly the young, digitally saavy journalists newsrooms need to shape a viable future. In Spokane, innovative leaders Steve Smith and Carla Savalli saw this non-future very clearly and left. Just today, I scratched my head when I saw several online producers would be part of the latest round of layoffs at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.
-- Tribune’s much publicized newspaper redesign efforts have a decidedly 1998 feel to them. They may slow readership losses but they are unlikely to staunch the bleed of advertising. How much does tinkering with print take away from moving more aggressively online?
-- Progressive editors talk about a goal of 50-50 effort for print and online effort in their newsrooms. But even in 2008, they’re hard-pressed to tell you even 25 percent of their staff time goes beyond print.

Mindy McAdams recently reported: “Yesterday a journalist who (still) works at a big Florida newspaper told me, ‘Last year we were trying to shoot as much video as possible. This year, we’re trying to save the paper.’ “

That is sad. And scary. It heightens my fear that we are at or close to a tipping point where demoralized news organizations will stop trying to innovate and will simply man the waterhoses while their owners stoke the fires of the burning bridge.

Update: Here’s an interview with Yemma about plans for the Monitor.

Monitor: Daily “paper” no more

The venerable Christian Science Monitor is going to drop daily print publication beginning in April. The Monitor will publish a print weekend edition.

This sounds like an inevitable (and thus smart) move for a newspaper that, as Poynter’s Rick Edmonds points out, bears significant printing and national distribution costs while attracting little advertising. The Monitor relies on subscription payments and it receives a hefty subsidy from the Christian Science Church ($12 million this year).

Ken Doctor argues that the math for this transition still doesn’t work without a subsidy. Doctor captures the Catch 22 in which most traditional print organizations find themselves:

“Today, dailies can look at similar arithmetic to the Monitor’s: How much do I save in physical and distribution costs in greatly reducing the print product (Monday?; Tuesday? and more)? How much do I forsake in print revenue? How much can I really gain in online ad revenue how quickly?

“Written on the back of the envelope or large on a whiteboard, the answer is the same: it doesn’t come close to working. Last year, about 92% of all newspaper revenues came from print. That number is declining some, as print ad revenues tank, but no US publisher can claim more than 13% digitally-based revenues today. Newspaper companies have simply failed to make a transition fast enough.

“Within the arithmetic, publishers cannot maintain anything close to the size of newsrooms (vital content creation going forward) or size of their ad staffs (vital sales connections as local online-only revenue becomes big and real). What would be needed to flip the switch: subsidy.

“Sure, we can call it investment, deferment of profits, whatever. But really, what we’re saying is stopgap funding is needed to let journalism companies get from here to there, from this mainly print today to the mainly digital tomorrow. The conversation, amid the rising newsroom toll, has got to move to where that funding can come from. Otherwise, the circulation declines we saw yesterday will gain even more velocity.”

It remains to be seen whether news companies will make that investment. Certainly, debt-sadddled companies such as Media News, Tribune and McClatchy may not be able to afford the reinvest limited revenues. Even independent news companies (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, for example) and the privately-held (note the Newhouse retrenchment in Newark) are pulling back.

Our newsrooms will be even smaller. The leadership challenge then is daunting. Newsrooms have become largely reactive —managing layoffs, reorganizing staff and cutting journalism and product in cycles. That may get a news organization to the next round, but how much farther? The Monitor shift may signal a more strategic approach that envisions the news operation of five years from now and builds towards it -- builds down the cost of the operation and builds up its digital capacity. While the Monitor has a subsidy to fall back on, other newsrooms may have to look to their corporate bosses for more room to envision and build a realistic future.

Weekend reading: Beyond AP

Gahran’s “what if’s” challenge existing models and suggest alternative paths. A taste:

“What if a coalition of news orgs within a state teamed up with talented technologists, database architects, librarians, search optimization experts, ad networks, and maybe even print-on-demand pros to create a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product?

“What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state—regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?

“What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?

“What if news orgs’ core offering was not a basically one-size-fits-all newspaper, but rather a statewide or regional “relevance window” service that could be tailored to meet the needs of lawyers, businesses, property owners, schools, activists, healthcare providers, parents, teens, etc.? What if news orgs became very, very structured and flexible about how they collect, collate, and distribute information? What if, as a result, citizens, organizations, and communities could easily stay better informed than was ever before possible?”

Here’s the full post, and it’s worth a read. 

Weekend reading: Link love

I am playing catch-up after a couple of weeks on the road. Here are links worth checking out if you haven’t already:

-- Scott Karp at Publishing 2. 0 argues the value of links in drawing audience. Karp focuses on traffic on the Drudge report. Like Drudge or not, the site has big traffic, and Karp argues that its heavy offering of links has something to do with that (and via its links, Drudge also is a top sender of traffic to major traditional news organization sites).

“There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well.
“But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.”

Here’s the post and a follow up.
Karp builds on good thinking about linking from Jeff Jarvis. Here’s Jarvis.

- More recently, Jarvis looks at the big picture on member discontent with the Associated Press. The money graf:

“The AP is not bad (no matter what foolish things it may have done in the blog kerfuffle recently). It’s just expensive. Papers the size of the Cleveland Plain Dealer say they pay $1 million a year. As they get more local, as reverse syndication models come to the fore, as they have to tighten budgets, the industry-supported AP syndication model is mortally threatened. Still, this isn’t about the AP. It’s about the new architecture of news and media.”

Read the full post here.

Steve Yelvington sees change ahead as well:

“It’s clear that we’re coming to a major fork in the road, one that could profoundly reshape the way nonlocal journalism is created and distributed in America. What’s not so clear is what’s down that road, or even how many forks we’re going to face.”

-- At Medill and the Readership Institute, Mary Nesbitt offers a little antidote to the woes of the industry - Incoming students!

- Innovate This offers still more reasons to check out Twitter.

Escaping the velvet coffin

“It’s going to come down to freeing yourself of the print model but not abandoning it.”—Lauren Rich Fine on the business model of the news industry @ONA08

The final panel from the Online News Association conference last week tackled the business model for the struggling print news industry. The panel comments and ensuing discussion offered a telling snapshot of the bind in which many traditional news organizations find themselves: How to you keep producing the print newspaper, which still brings in most of the revenue, while adopting strategies and practices that push more and better content online?
A big part of the conundrum, of course, is resources. The print newspaper model is very labor intensive, not particularly efficient, and increasingly costly to produce and distribute. News organizations are cutting people and other costs. An equally big part of the problem—I argue—is attitude and culture—people steeped in the newsroom of old have a lot of trouble discerning outmoded practices and letting them go so they can move on to more useful work.
The tension around the question of print was abundant at ONA. The panel on the business model focused on how to save a hypothetical local newspaper with an infant Web site. Members of the audience questioned why the panel was talking about print newspaper at all. Sorry folks, it’s way too soon to abandon the print newspaper. Instead, editors must increasingly define it as a niche product for a very specific audience (and charge that audience more for print) while moving as much journalism and other user resources online as quickly as possible.
The challenge feels something like this nightmare scenario: You are locked in a velvet coffin. Your challenge: Houdini like, you must extricate yourself gracefully, without damaging the fine, ornately carved wood or velvet lining. Oh, and you have to get out quickly, because the coffin is shrinking and its walls are closing in all around you. Any minute now, your once comfortable coffin becomes a vise from which you will never be free.
With all respect to those in the ONA crowd who were frustrated with the print emphasis, I liked the business model panel for its focus. In a refreshing move, the organizers asked panelists to look at a specific news outlet so we got more than wise generalities.
Here’s the scenario: The Hometown News is losing money on a traditional platform. Its business is ad- and circulation-supported, primarily. Less than 7 percent of company revenue comes from hometown.com. The newsroom is facing immediate cuts of 20% due to layoffs and buyouts. No new money for capital improvements and equipment. Web traffic, circulation, and credibility is stable, however blogger, aggregator and other. Public opinion of the entire brand is suffering. Hometown News publishers and editors are confused about where to invest new resources, should they get any.
Here are ideas from the panelists (based on my notes and the session powerpoint (courtesy of Amy Webb)):
Eduardo A. Hauser, CEO, DailyMe.com:
“Content creation cannot be tied to a platform. It must be multiscreen.”
- Consider separating journalism from other functions. “Although journalism and newspapers seems inseparable, they are not. Paying for journalism is different from paying for paper and ink delivered to the home.”
- Slowly increase the price of home delivery. “I suspect many people who were going to cancel their newspapers for cost have already done so.  I also suspect that the largest churn is coming from recent subscribers.”
- Examine news gathering costs. “Keep reducing the cost of the news gathering organization.  Focus on achieving the right balance between audience interest and investment in national and international news gathering.”
- Grow use of electronic editions and reduce print-on-paper and delivery. “Regional and local newspapers are losing money on select editions, not always on the entire week.  So -for example- the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions may be losing money, but the rest of the week is not. Newspapers need to find a way to create a balance between editions.  Can Hometown drop select subscriptions from home delivery and, instead, drive their readers to the web?”

Lauren Rich Fine, Media Analyst, Practitioner-in-Residence, Kent State
“Create something people value and will pay for. If you don’t then you are stuck with the advertising model.”
- Push readers online. “Wean readers from print over a very long time but emphasize the pdf version. Contemplate giving away kindles and other similar devices in return for logging on at least once a day. Ultimately, a paper with(out) printing and distribution is very economic, but without readers it really doesn’t matter.”
- Redesign the print product.  Redesign front page to be highly local. Explore reducing or eliminating sections on given days and focus sections.
- Let national, international news become more of a commodity, i.e. use newswires, but try to present alternative points of view (perhaps like the magazine The Week and or online sites such as Huffington Post).
- Focus staff on Web site. Heavily promote content on the website. “Emphasize best of blogs, most viewed articles, etc. Heavily promote ability to contribute news and comments online. Use as much as possible in print with name attribution. Heavily promote a pdf version of the paper so readers remain beholden to true editing, ability to easily navigate and still browse all of the news. This also maintains all the previous ad positions. Heavily promote individual reporters; get them back in the community. Have them set up Facebook pages and put their articles in their status updates. It is all about dialogue.”
- Outsource printing & distribution.
- Attempt to let go reporters and have them rehired at non-union Web site.

Thomas Brew, Deputy Editor, MSNBC.com:
“I do believe print (revenue) can get to a place where it will sustain itself and online will be a lot more than it is now.”

- Realign resources. “HTN should spend its own resources strictly for reporting local news and information. Every other content category - national, international, major league sports, food, lifestyle, entertainment, etc. should be from syndicated content sources. Any editor or reporter not associated with local should be laid-off.”
- Merge newsrooms. “The print and online newsrooms should be combined, but not in a wholesale way. The editorial functions should segmented by media type - text, video, and images, with specialists in each of these areas producing content components that are used for print, desktop, wireless, etc. Most of the “print” journalists will be reclassified as “text” journalists.”
- Shift printing. “Printing should either be spun off as its own business that contracts with other papers for additional business or shut down and contracted out to other papers.  Either way, the capital and unionized labor tied up in the printing operations needs to be shed.”
-- Reward innovation. “Profit sharing!”

Wendy Warren, Editor and VP, Philly.com
“Once you uncouple content and distribution you can cretate all kinds of structures in the newsroom and advertising and all kinds of different products. The world is open… it makes you think anything can be invented and by the people who you have right now.”

-- Radical restructuring. “Break up the company, reduce the newsroom.” “Hometown News immediately should begin to explore dividing the company into a content-generation business and a printing and distribution business. Each of these businesses would serve current customers - but would be charged with winning new customers as well.”
- Product options: Slimmer, rethought daily newspaper, news-filled, constantly updated, free Web site, targeted microsites, some of which could be for paying customers, a free newspaper, video shows for the site, for television partners and for syndication.

I haven’t included all the ideas, as many were overlapping. Much of the wisdom of the panel, I thought, came in ideas about how to shed costs (as painful as that sounds), particularly by rethinking printing and distribution of the print newspaper. While I agree that newsroom staffing has yet to find its level in the new world—and that level will continue to decline—rethinking production and distribution promises to at once cut costs and help re-focus and perhaps energize an increasingly smaller news-gathering operation.

(Historical note: I am not the first to apply the term “velvet coffin” to a newspaper. When I was a baby journo in Southern California in the late ‘70’s, reporters for the Los Angeles Times referred to their workplace as “the velvet coffin” because it paid well and had great professional status but offered few opportunities (they felt) to break through and shine. Who knew?)