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New media

Just read: Breaking News: Sex, Lies & The Murdoch Succession

murdochbookI’ve just finished reading Breaking News: Sex, Lies & The Murdoch Succession by Paul Barry. This is an excellent book – I highly recommend it. It documents the facts of the dreadful phone hacking scandal and contemplates the future leadership of the new split News businesses. The author, Paul Barry, extensively documents his sources. His writing style is that of informed reported more than commentator.

Anyone criticising this book as a hatchet job against the Murdochs would be wrong. It is well-researched and well-written. There are no cheap shots against the Murdochs. There don’t need to be since the evidence relating to the phone hacking is damning.

Breaking News: Sex, Lies & The Murdoch Succession documents how News Corp. has leveraged its power to the detriment of the community which it serves and how the company has not held itself to account to the same standard it uses when targeting politicians it does not support.

 I highly recommend it – especially to newsagents.

While the book does not cover the Australian News Corp. assets in any substantial detail, the book informs the reader of practices engaged in by company representatives in the UK. This information coupled with the obvious bias of the News Corp. press here makes an urgent case for diluting the concentration of media ownership.

One only has to recall the coverage in the News Corp. newspapers here over the last few years hunting down the Labor Government of the day and their lack of interest in the latest travel federal politician travel rorts scandal to realise that they are not fearlessly pursuing the truth – unless it suits their agenda.

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Media disruption

Pot, kettle SMH

I am in the US and have been impressed with mainstream media handling of the horrific broken leg suffered by Kevin Ware on the basketball court on Sunday. The Sydney Morning Herald went to Twitter to note that the gruesome injury was all over social media. They should have checked their own site. The Age website had the video. Meanwhile, most mainstream media outlets here in the US did not show the injury. Instead, they reported the shock and seriousness of the injury by showing the reaction of ware’s teammates.

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New media

Trendsmap shows the hot Twitter topics

trendsmap.JPGClick on the image to see the trendsmap from Friday night showing that in AFL crazy Melbourne the Heath Shaw betting scandal story trumped every other topic.  Trendsmap is a real time mapping of local Twitter trends.  It provides an excellent, and fascinating, perspective of what is on the minds of Twitter users.  If you look closely you can see interest in carbon in the background.

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Media disruption

Follow me on Twitter – for the federal election

We have added a follow me on Twitter button on the top of this blog. This is not entirely accurate since I do not post on Twitter all blog posts, not many at all in fact.

I decided to add the link because of something I am doing for the federal election campaign. I am posting a series of questions about small business which I would like to see put to all politicians.

While I have been registered with Twitter since January 2008, I have been sporadic at best with my tweets. It was after the first week of the campaign that I realised that I should do something to get small business questions out there.

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New media

Newsagents worried about free daily newspapers

The Sunday Herald in Scotland has a story about the possible impact of a recently announced free afternoon newspaper on newsagents. The UK newsagent association (NFRN) is holding meetings of members and with the publishers to discuss the lost of sales and customer traffic caused by free newspapers.

As data from Dr. Piet Bakker – published here just a few weeks ago – shows, free daily newspapers are growing. Even though Australia is behind Europe and the US, they are gaining traction. These free dailies provide publishers with an easy sell to advertisers and are being used in many situations to boost advertising sales for the paid for product. It makes sense. In Europe especially publishers have been very successful maintaining revenue through by launching free daily newspapers.

While it’s natural that newsagents will complain to publishers about the impact of these free newspapers, my view is that our energy is better spent expecting the move and adjusting our businesses today accordingly. Free newspapers are not new, we have seen them growing for the last five years. This is change we can prepare for today. Indeed, it is change we ought to have been preparing for long before now.

We need to rely less on newspapers for traffic and revenue. This means we need to build traffic from other categories. It also means we need to adjust the layout of our businesses and focus on higher margin traffic generating product toward the front of our shops. While publishers will resist such a fundamental change – given that newspapers have always had the best location in our shops – they need to allow us to respond to market trends just as they are through acquisition of online businesses, moving their product further outside the newsagent channel and by launching free newspapers.

The newsagent channel in Australia was created by publishers to serve their needs. In 2007, newsagents must put their needs ahead of publishers. Tough decisions face us and we must be businesslike and swift in making them.

For the record I am not advocating that newsagents get out of newspapers, rather that they invest real estate and labour in newspapers according to their anticipated return to the business.

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Media disruption

The bridesmade you take for granted

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. I think that’s how the saying goes. It’s how newsagents are feeling today having received the wonderful looking Bridesmaid’s Best Friends magazine / book by Wildfire Publishing and distributed through NDD. This $12.95 title is set to remain on our shelves for ten months. Our commission is 25%. This is more book than magazine. The commission ought to be double – 50%.

While some newsagents will sell this title, many will not. The long shelf life and lack of time in newsagencies to police the long shelf life mean many will cop the ten month penalty and return the title in October. If Wildfire and NDD want ten months of shelf space in my shop they need to pay me for it. Since there is no such arrangement I am returning the title next week.

I’d like to see all newsagents who do not expect to sell Bridesmaids Best Friends in the next month return the title next week to NDD. We ought to make a statement to the distributor and publisher that we will not be treated this way.

Newsagents need to think of themselves as the bride and NOT the bridesmaid who is taken for granted.

Thanks to John Rees for tipping mo off about this title. I’d missed it this morning.

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magazines

Placeblogger lists hyper local news sites

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Courtesy of Jay Rosen’s Press Think blog I have found Placeblogger, a new place where you can “discover, browse, and subscribe” to over 700 local blogs. It launched January 1 and while only US blogs are listed at the moment it’s well worth a visit.

What’s a placeblog? Here’s what the site says:

Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term “citizen journalism,” or journalism done by non-journalists.

MNSpeak is the best example from the Placeblog top 10. It publishes news which mainstream media news sites and newspapers are unlikely to cover or at least cover in the way it does. These local news sites are the future of news with newspapers and mainstream websites moving to more blended coverage.

Back in 2005 we had a half hearted crack at creating a local news site, called local news daily. We built the site in Drupal and sought out retired journalists to get us going. One thing led to another and we let it slide. Maybe the time is right now to get newsagents engaged in the Local News concept. Hmmm… In the meantime, check out Placeblogger and see what they’re up to in the US. It’s exciting.

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Blogging

INMA Newspaper Outlook 2007

blog-inma.JPGNewspaper Outlook 2007 in an excellent report by Earl Wilkinson, CEO International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA). It confronts issues some newspapers have difficulty reporting in their pages (especially Australian newspapers) – the process of transitioning their revenue model from one based purely on print to one based primarily online with some print model. The US$195 report is compelling reading for newsagents as it 75 pages of evidence that the foundations on which newsagencies were created in the 1800s have shifted. As Wilkinson writes:

Unfortunately, the transition will be most painful for the people who are least informed about the over-arching trends in media industry: the editorial community.

I’d replace “editorial community” with “newsagents”. Newsagents don’t feel the change, certainly not to an extent to accept it as real. Not here in Australia yet at least. Newspaper sales are strong. Enough are experiencing growth for newsagents to be confident.

As this report indicates, the future for newspaper publishers is away from paid for copies and the traditional model. Wilkinson says that the “destination is clear”:

Internet-First
Local Journalism
Always On and Interactive
Core Product Smaller
Lower Profit Margins

Wilkinson sees a newspaper outlook in 2007 based on publishers moving more investment from traditional product to online and achieving more profit from online. Newsagents must listen to this message. While I don’t expect them to stump up the US$195 for the INMA report, they must take note that here is a respected executive from publisher circles saying that the game we have played for decades is over, it’s a new world and investment in your business must reflect this.

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Citizen Journalism

Newspapers to become bit players in media shake-up?

Graeme Samuel, Chairman of the ACCC, delivered an interesting speech at the Broadcasting and Media Congress this morning looking at the flurry of changes in media ownership. Much of what he discussed was about distribution. He started talking about how it was (is?) with the newspaper landing on the doorstep but quickly moved to the smorgasbord of options we have today. He is right to observe that the “Internet has turned distribution on its ear”. He said Australia will get a faster broadband service. This will increase the pace of change. Toward the end of the speech, Graeme Samuel asked a question which goes to the heart of newsagent concerns – “How relevant will it be to have two major newspaper publishers?” While he was talking in the context of media regulation and ownership changes, my interest was more one of how much the question sounds like game over for newspapers – certainly in terms of diversity and relevance.

It’s another reason newsagents need to plan today for this world where newspapers are not the habit they are today. Newsagents need to sit at the table with newspaper publishers with this perspective of a dramatically changed world and to have business plans which pursue traffic and margin outside the sale of newspapers (and magazines).

As Samuel told the audience this morning, the ACCC has published a discussion paper which provides guidance as to how future cross-media merger proposals might be assessed.

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Media disruption

Media disruption forecast in 1931

Thanks to Rob Curley, speaking at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna last week, I discovered this quote from William Allen White, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and publisher, in 1931:

“Of course as long as man lives someone will have to fill the herald’s place. Someone will have to do the bellringer’s work. Someone will have to tell the story of the day’s news and the year’s happenings. A reporter is perennial under many names and will persist with humanity. But whether the reporter’s story will be printed in types upon a press, I don’t know. I seriously doubt it. I think most of the machinery now employed in printing the day’s, the week’s, or the month’s doings will be junked by the end of this century and will be as archaic as the bellringer’s bell, or the herald’s trumpet. New methods of communication I think will supercede the old.”

William Allen White, April 21, 1931
in a personal letter to Lyman B. Kellogg

White is right. How we access news and information will change. That it is published will not. This is why the goals of publishers do not match those of their distribution network. We are in different businesses. We must understand that if we, newsagents, are to make our own future. Not today or tomorrow but sometime soon our network will lose its value and, I suspect, be cut loose. We must pursue new customer traffic generating models for the future while ensuring the maximum return from the newspaper generated traffic we enjoy in the meantime.

The best connection I can see with the next generation of news and information distribution is through mobile access recharge. These are transactions of fractional value compared to newspaper sales. Today, we make between 18% and 25% on the sale of a newspaper and 5% on the sale of mobile device recharge. I’d expect the mobile device recharge to fall to 3% within the next year. While recharge generates traffic such customers are not loyal and we cannot therefore rely on them for traffic. So, in reality, mobile recharge is no replacement for newspapers.

Core to our challenge is that our channel was created by publishers. For our entire history we have looked to publishers to lead us by providing new products and partnering with us in their own innovations. This cannot continue given that mobile and other non-print distribution models do not require out network. Hence our need to find our own future.

I’ll have more to say on this at a future time. For now, I wanted to share the prescient quote from William Allen White.

Source: Rob Curley, VP New Products development, Washington Post, Newsweek Interactive.

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Media disruption

Fairfax cashing in on digital success

fairfax-ifra.JPGMike van Niekerk, Editor in Chief Online of Fairfax Media, delivered an impressive presentation called Cashing in on Digital Success at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna which ended Friday. It was impressive not only in demonstrating how to leverage excellent revenue from a popular and respected news site but also in the numbers presented as the table on the left shows. The full slideshow presentation is available online at the conference website. Van Niekerk demonstrated the many ways Fairfax is able to generate revenue beyond the traditional banner ads. He listed examples of rich media, over the page, half page, leader board, TVCs and sponsored links and went on to say that their problem was lack of inventory.

What I would like to see from Fairfax and the other publishers who presented at the conference is the income and net return per employee and by capital compared to the print operation. Given that publishers must be driven by share price it is the return which will guide them to the tipping point where the success of the online model, with a lower cost base, forces significant contraction of the print model. Please don’t misunderstand my interest – I am not wanting to talk newspapers down but rather have a better “heads up” when considering capital expenditure related to the sale and distribution of newspapers.

As publishers like Fairfax continue to drive their online operations, newsagents, too, must aggressively pursue new traffic and revenue opportunities. Every day we continue to perform the same tasks with the same revenue model is another day lost to the changing world and to our more forward thinking competitors.

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Media disruption

Publishers plan for life after newspapers, so should newsagents

blogifra.JPGAs the IFRA Beyond the Printed Word conference wound to an end this afternoon in Vienna I was left with more questions than when the conference began. Publishers I talked with see a rapidly approaching cliff in terms of print sales and ad revenue and some are rushing to find replacement revenue. Some openly say that the paid (over the counter or subscription) newspaper as we know it will be dead, in Europe at least, in a matter of years and will be replaced with an entirely new premium print model. They are the early adopters of new models. They are balanced with others who are yet to treat an online presence other than a poor cousin to the print edition.

Back to the questions I arrived with: Is there a common strategy being adopted by publishers to find sustainable online revenue? Who is doing it well? Will online provide the revenue the shareholders in publishing firms are used to? Do the publishers get it that they are no longer newspaper publishers but, rather, media companies? Is there a place for the current distribution system (newsagents) in their thinking about the future? Do publishers really understand the Internet? Is there a revenue model which can work?

In hindsight the questions were naive in that this is all very new and publishers are learning as they go.

I saw heard about some excellent initiatives – Naples News is one, demonstrating what a newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 can achieve. What they are dong is way advanced on any Australian news site. They created this within a year. Core to their success was them taking the online move seriously from the top down and driving change. Check out their restaurant reviews and sports scores – yeah, the sports side of the side is truly amazing. The power available to the reader makes them the expert thanks to smart organisation of data.

The conference is proof that publishers the world over are taking the online challenge seriously and that print circulation marketing today is more about delaying rapid decline than achieving growth. I know there are publisher executives in Australia who disagree with me. Let’s check in in a year, two years and five years and see if I am right. If we follow the US and European examples sales will fall. However, I accept that our marketplace is different so who really knows when the inevitable change will hit. The keys are broadband take up, lower cost wireless devices and peer pressure. My plea to Australian newspaper publisher executives is – don’t get newsagents investing beyond what is absolutely necessary in and chasing paid circulation growth. Newsagents themselves need to ensure that every capital investment is for their future and not just to help publishers tread water.

Newsagents are middlemen. This makes us servants. We are not part of any publisher’s online strategy. I’m okay with that. Publishers need to do what is right for their shareholders. For our part, newsagents need to see the future and act now. We need to break out of being middlemen. We need to get smart about online. We need new revenue streams and they need this now for it will take years to change the habits of consumers.

Just as publishers have come to conferences like Beyond the Printed Word, so, too, should newsagents congregate and discuss their life after print. This is the biggest challenge in the 120 years our channel has existed.

While I am leaving the conference with more questions than when I arrived I have a better understanding of how publishers see the online opportunity and some of the strategies being employed and for that I am grateful.

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Citizen Journalism

What do 16 year olds think of online newspaper sites?

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It’s a brave conference which gets 16 year olds on stage to critique newspaper websites. That’s what happened this morning at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna. This team of bright 16 years shared their views, warts and all. Here is a selection of their comments:

Ads get in the way of content. They don’t like clicking on a video and having to watch an ad before the video. (You could hear the gasp when they said this.)

Pop up ads are annoying.

Most banner ads are not appealing.

They don’t like sites with too much colour, too much animation or swirling fonts.

Sites need to be easier to navigate.

It is frustrating having to register to get the content you need.

As soon as you are sent to another site, when you click a link, they quit.

Having a dating service on a news site is degrading. It’s useless.

They have a preference for proper news sites as opposed to citizen journalism.

Sites chasing young people should be designed by young people – they can tell when a 40 year old is trying to design young.

Not much interest in using mobile phones to access news. (more mutterings from the audience given many are playing in this space.)

I can’t do the hour long presentation justice here.

Some key take-aways for me were that peer pressure drives site traffic. When asked if they would switch to another social media site most of the 16 year old panel said no unless their friends switched. The big surprise was their strong reaction of advertising and their dislike for paying for anything. This is a huge challenge for any online content site chasing this demographic.

How does this connect with Australian newsagents? Well, we’re chasing this market and since they are buying fewer newspapers than the generation before them, their insights will help determine what we need to do in-store to be attractive to them.

This was an excellent session, most invaluable.

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Citizen Journalism

Newspaper publishers chasing web 2.0 and a revenue model

ifra.JPGI’m at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna along with 450 representatives of newspaper publishers from 41 countries. Everyone is here to talk about how newspapers can make money from online plays and retain (and even grow) shareholder value in this rapidly changing world.

Day one has been kind of a show-and-tell event with publishers presenting what they have done. For me, the most interesting presentation today was by Mikal Rohde of Schibsted Sok AS in Norway. In just over a year the Sesam search engine developed and launched by this publisher has become the hit of Norway. In a globalisation sense it gives me heart that there are some who can beat giants. They are playing in a space few other publishers play in yet it is a logical place for a publisher because what is a search engine but an aggregator of content?

From an Australian newsagent perspective, what is most important about day one is what has not been discussed that much – that print is old news. Some people on the floor talk as if print is already buried. No, it won’t go away but, boy, will it go through some changes. Everyone at the conference is focused on moving the publisher brands born in print to the online world and while many speakers discuss how their online strategy is supporting their print model, the reality is that profit will determine how this plays out.

Newsagents need to understand that newspapers will not be the traffic driver to our retail businesses in five years that they are today and even less so in ten years. This is why what we spend on our infrastructure must change not only to draw new traffic but also to de-emphasise newspapers and to not provide them the most expensive real-estate in our stores.

I was surprised at what some companies have achieved with very small teams. Some excellent sites and services have been established with teams of ten or less – in businesses employing thousands in their print operation. I was also surprised that most of the companies so far are talking about almost single online strategies. Okay, these single sites have depth. I would have thought that is they were looking to replace a significant portion of print revenue they would need many online strategies. Connecting with an online consumer is not a once a day event to get the purchase and leave them be as is the case with a newspaper. For many, online consumption is 24/7 while with others it is many times a day through many channels – hence the need for publishers to break out from behind the masthead and connect through these channels.

Back to Norway, I like that Schibsted has created their own search engine. The control this provides will prove invaluable to their future.

Live coverage is available in part as a demonstration of some of the technologies on show.

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Media disruption

More on mainstream media embracing an online model

American Business Media, an association of business media companies, has announced that it will begin broadcasting via its website edited footage of selected events they host.

The first videocast features Dan Bigman, managing editor of Forbes.com, discussing the effects of online media during ABM’s “B-to-B Meets: e-media, RSS, blogs, et al” on August 3, 2005 at Scholastic International.

This is another example of mainstream media embracing online.

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New media

Micropayments will set stories free

Few commercial news and information sites sell stories. Instead you pay a fee to access the site for a period. This is, in part, due to the cost of processing the payment. Thanks to the work of PayPal and others that is about to dramatically change.

Several companies have new technology on the cusp of release which makes handing payments of even cents easy and cost effective. This will enable consumers to purchase a full story for download quickly rather than going through a laborious registration and payment process. This will bring more traffic online and allow writers and publishers to build online revenue. It will more fully unlock the Internet as an alternative channel for selling content on a per story basis. Róbert Párhonyi, Lambert J.M. Nieuwenhuis and Aiko Pras of the University of Twente in the Netherlands have authored an interesting report on the new generation of micro-payment solutions.

It’s a paradigm shift. Whereas today someone pays me A$1.00 to buys the Herald Sun, in this new world they could take a story on page 3 and pay a few cents for it. But only online.

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New media

Sensis uses Google AdWords to poach consumer interest in other businesses

A good report on last night’s ABC TV 7.30 Report about the Telstra owned Sensis, through their Trading Post business, using Google’s AdWords and similar services from other search engines to siphon traffic to their site by posing as relating to businesses NOT advertising at the Trading Post. The 7.30 Report story was primarily about the Trading Post trying to grab traffic destined for Stickybeek, a local free classified advertising site.

Beyond the apparent appalling behavior by Trading Post management (and by association Sensis and Telstra Management) is the lack of interest shown by the ACCC which bothers me – especially since the Trading Post activity was against a micro business.

So much for business ethics.

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New media

eBay buys Skype

So, eBay has agreed to buy Skype (provider of voice calls over the internet) for between US$2.6 billion and US$4.1 billion.

This is a whole new business for eBay and with that comes challenges. Sure there will be the benefit of reading an ad and calling the advertiser with the click of a button. But it’s a ton of money to pay for that.

I’m sure the folks at eBay have a strategy. What it does for sure is it puts eBay back in orbit with the other major online players. The big get bigger and the smaller, well… Now more than even the Net is a size game and executives are tossing truckloads of cash and paper around to get big or remain big. It all looks amazing from where I sit in my small retail newsagency and software company. Interesting reading nevertheless.

If those of us in the news and information needed a ‘sign’ that our world has changed then this and the recent deals announced by News Corporation are it. We need to be building business models which rely less on over the counter news and information product.

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New media

Movies on mobile phones – download in seconds – bypasses traditional supply chain

Porto media, in a joint venture with IBM, is reportedly close to delivering kiosk based rapid download of movies to mobile phone or other portable devices. This makes purchasing TV show episodes and series more accessible and strengthens the focus on mobile device development. The device is the thing. That and fast download access.

The traditional movie supply chain: theatres, DVD publishers and retailers, free to air TV networks, DVD/video libraries, and cable TV networks are all bypassed in this model.

The traditional news and information supply chain is where there will be significant impact as content producers get closer to consumers.

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New media

Pete Townshend of The Who blogs a novella

Conflict of interest notice. As a kid The Who was my band. Their Tommy was and is awesome. I bought every version of the records (and now CDs), I saw it live on stage here in Melbourne Australia and decades later a couple of times on Broadway. I’ve seen the film countless times. They can do no wrong. Nor can Townshend.

Pete Townshend, the creative genius behind The Who, is publishing a novella through his blog and website. While Townshend is not the first to do this, he is a significant new participant in the world of online fiction publishing via a blog. The novella, The Boy Who Heard Music, is a work in progress. Townshend is blogging the novella to encourage feedback. His official website will have online from September 24.

Given the rapid change in mobile devices maybe the eBook is coming back for a second go. Amazon publishes eBook only versions – often as a means of testing the waters for new authors. This Townshend development is interesting since he would not have had difficulty getting a publisher if he wanted to go down the traditional route.

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New media
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