The Future of News

When comedian Jon Stewart showed-up on a Pew Center survey last year as the 4th most admired journalist — tied with Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper — it was no laughing matter for journalism. To their great credit, Pew studied the content of The Daily Show for an entire year and compared its news agenda with that of mainstream outlets. Strangely, their findings suggest that other than its satirical and comedic style, it was hardly different at all. It had a greater focus on politics, provided no coverage at all of some big events like the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and targeted Republicans for ridicule more than three times as often as Democrats. Oops, scratch that last one as a difference — there was that recent Harvard-Pew study showing that on network evening news, twice as many stories about Democrats were positive, while twice as many stories about Republicans were negative.

So it seems like Jon Stewart’s show is just like the mainstream media, only more entertaining. It may not fit Modern Journalism’s definition of news, which requires a serious, authoritative, quasi-scolding style, but who gave them the right to define what news is? In fact, cable is introducing us to a whole range of acceptable news styles including crusading (Olbermann, O’Reilly), sensational (Van Susteren, Grace), and drop-dead gorgeous (the foxes on Fox). Who knows? Maybe Couric would be doing better if CBS let Katie be Katie. Being serious all the time is no way to attract friends, nor is it a way to attract viewers.

It sure seems like NBC is beginning to recognize that local broadcast’s days are numbered, as indicated by the planned November launch of a 24-hour local cable news channel by their NY affiliate. NBC local media President John Wallace attributed this move to local broadcast’s “slow-growth,” “eroding and aging” audiences, and the “perception” that it might not be a “sustainable business long term.” Translation: he thinks local broadcast is dead — when all media converge onto the Internet, the networks will no longer need to run their profitable prime time programming through local broadcast stations, leaving affiliates’ self-originated local news as their most obvious business to cling to.

Unfortunately, NBC has not factored in how the New Media are changing news audiences’ habits. Also dying with local broadcasting will be the importance of metro area-wide news. It had never been a consumer choice, but a limitation of broadcast technology. Now with the Internet, viewers will begin to consume more news that directly affects their lives – news of family and friends, their neighborhoods and communities, local shopping, kids’ schools, local roads, vocations, and avocations. So, just at a time when consumers will be losing interest in metro area-wide news, NBC will be offering a lot more of it – 24 hours worth. In football terms, NBC is going wide when they should be going deep (H/T: Lost Remote).

While News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is disdained by many journalists, the names he is called often reveal more about his accusers than about Murdoch himself. He is called a “conservative” by those who are liberal. He is accused of wanting to tart-up the Wall Street Journal with London Sun’s “Page 3″ girls by those who insist newspapers must be serious and humorless. We are warned about the dangers of Murdoch controlling editorial opinions among those who believe journalists must never defer to their business owners.

When Slate’s Jack Shafer denied Murdoch was a conservative, but a political opportunist instead, he had it almost exactly right. Yes, Murdoch tends to support candidates of any party if he thinks they might win — or hedge his bets in case they do. But, he’s simply acting as a “businessman” in these instances, and it is the fault of politicians, and not Murdoch, if someone like Murdoch feels he has to play this game in order to prevent government from infringing on his business plans. Actually, Murdoch’s cold, calculating, profit-minded, dispassionate political behavior is a plus for consumers. He is focusing on giving consumers what they want, not what politicians or journalists want. Why would anyone have a problem with that?

Whenever the AP and its member newspapers meet, the elephant in the room bears an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. These members created the AP more than a century ago to save money by pooling their reporting resources. Members pay substantial fees and share their own stories with other AP network papers, and in exchange get news from distant places dirt cheap. This worked fine as long as there were just a handful of AP papers in each town and local audiences had no other way to get this news — to readers it still felt like their local papers had valuable, exclusive content well worth the subscription fee. But all that changed once the Internet developed and readers could get the same AP news from a multitude of places, rendering each paper’s national and international content much less valuable. Actually, it’s a lot worse than that. Members had grown so dependent upon the AP that most have been eliminating their out-of-town reporting capabilities while the AP has expanded into a behemoth, now with more than 4,000 employees and 240 worldwide bureaus. The AP is growing, while its members are shrinking.

In other words, the AP monster has turned on its creators and is now taking their money while putting them out of business. Last September it was announced that the AP signed a contract with Google News giving its original wire stories prominence, while reducing traffic and presumably online ad revenues at AP members’ own sites. And now the AP is turning on its creators once again, this time launching a program to make its stories available on iPhones, preempting its members’ necessary efforts to restore their ability to generate and deliver their own, valuable original content. But still, AP members don’t get it. Lincoln Millstein of Hearst Newspapers said AP’s new plan provides “a big benefit for users, and a great opportunity for providers of local news and advertising.” We await a coherent explanation for what exactly that opportunity is for providers who don’t happen to be the AP.

Given the small size of the community of “news fortune-tellers,” it could be said that an industry conference was held this morning at the Bean Bag Café on Divisadero Street in San Francisco when Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter and yours truly convened at a table for two. Many of you may be familiar with his excellent blog, “Reflections of a Newsosaur,” whose fans include me.

Speaking of small communities, we spoke of small communities, and in the process clarified some of our thinking. I said that a key success factor in the future of news will be the ability to gather like-minded audiences, preferably those who represent particular advertisers’ best prospects. The Newsosaur agreed, but added that not all like-minded audiences participate as full members of communities. Some will merely visit a site that appeals to them, grab the info they want, and go. Others will linger, develop an attachment and loyalty to the site, get to know other members of that web site’s community, and perhaps even participate in comments or content. Not all “levels of membership” will have the same value to advertisers. Now there’s a newsosaur who can dodge a few New Media meteors, I thought. And so, unity was miraculously achieved among all attendees of the first News Fortune-Tellers conference.

In his new book “Media Madness,” James Bowman makes a fascinating link between the core reader benefits of news and the scandal-obsessed journalism of today. He writes that a key motivator for consumer newspaper purchases is the vanity of knowing more than others do. Since we tend to assume that the privileged rich, powerful, and famous have access to knowledge the rest of us don’t, much of modern journalism has devolved into the questionable and narrow practice of digging out the “hidden truths” allegedly known only to elites.

The problem with this line of thinking among readers and the journalists who pander to it is that it fosters an unhelpful cynical attitude among the public that makes our country more difficult to govern. It has spawned what The Guardian’s Martin Kettle has called “punk journalism,” which “smacks of something bordering on journalistic fascism, in which all elected politicians are contemptible, all judges are disreputable, and only journalists are capable of telling the truth.” This scandal-obsessed journalism also tends to distort news by focusing on these allegedly “hidden” stories instead of those that are more visible and provide more representative perspectives. Might modern journalism’s failure to show us the world as it truly is be the greatest scandal of all?

Can we talk? Almost from the very beginning, the Associated Press (AP) has been a greedy deal among newspapers at the expense of their readers. It started innocently enough as a group of New York newspapers pooling their resources to get news from Europe faster. But soon, it degenerated into an anti-competitive scheme resembling a cartel, with AP member newspapers at times banding together to snuff-out would be competitors by denying them membership. Worse still, it created an unhealthy culture in which newspapers viewed themselves as collaborators, not competitors. It’s not a daily miracle that virtually every mainstream outlet covers essentially the same news items – it’s an AP-created culture in which papers refuse to compete for readers by offering different stories.

The AP formula worked for newspapers prior to the Internet because even though papers nationwide were printing the same stories, local readers could only get this material from their local newspapers. But now that readers can get this news from just about anywhere, local newspapers are now seeking to withhold news they would have shared with the AP (e.g. original local stories) so they still offer news that would otherwise be unavailable to their readers.

Does this mean that newspapers are now poised to compete on the basis of providing original content that cannot be found anywhere else? Unfortunately, some habits are hard to break, as shown by a group of Ohio newspapers that have essentially formed their own AP-like cartel, to deny the AP of stories they will instead share among themselves. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s reader rep Ted Diadiun defended this new arrangement, writing “we don’t compete for readers with the newspapers in Cincinnati or Columbus, except in the most tangential way, and never did.” That may be true of the past and present, but it may make little sense in the future. If there is, indeed, a market for pan-Ohio news, which in itself is questionable, each of these newspapers ought to be pursuing it at the expense of its fellow Ohio newspapers. The future of news will be about every news outlet fighting for itself to satisfy their audiences. News outlets will no longer be playing on the same team. (H/T: Lost Remote)

For about a century, one of the most inefficient functions in U.S. business has been advertising. Legendary department store founder John Wanamaker captured this frustration best in his famous remark “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The primary beneficiaries of these inefficiencies have been ad agencies, many of whom (and let’s be honest) have earned a great deal of money for not much work and with even less accountability. With fees typically based on a percentage of ad spending rather than on actual business results, agencies have had the perverse incentive to encourage higher and higher programming production costs, and higher and higher ad rates to cover them. So, it is understandable that ad agencies have not been all that anxious to push their clients toward the Internet, which threatens to end these cozy deals.

But perhaps ad agencies are finally beginning to accept the inevitable, at least based upon what the NY Times witnessed at at a recent leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Attendees listened intently to the nation’s top agency executives, who berated the industry and urged them to “stop wallowing in self-pity and get on with the challenges ahead.” They even listened to Google CEO Eric Schmidt paint a rosy picture of underappreciated opportunities the new environment will create, something that will not ring true to the audience, but most certainly is. U.S. manufacturing has become more efficient by opening its doors to automation, and U.S. business practices did the same through IT. Advertising will now take its turn, and the U.S. economy will be the better for it.

I’ve long suspected that Academy Awards and Pulitzer Prizes had something fundamental in common. Often, they are bestowed upon those who most loudly voice or exemplify how their industries like to think of themselves, rather than those who most please the people who should matter most — their audiences. This year as Exhibit A, may I present to you Steve Pearlstein, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist who seems to have a knack for barking-out all the dogma journalists like, but has sent the newspaper business to the dogs.

Pearlstein’s rant that “there’s too many newspapers…too many news organizations…it’s just too fragmented,” is simply laughable in an era when the unstoppable Internet has only just begun to fragment the news business. His concern about needed “economies of scale…to pay for the software necessary to maintain a good web site” shows a stunning ignorance of the ultra-low cost economics of online distribution, not to mention that so many online applications and services are now available free. His insistence that “we will have customers, they will pay more” is questionable at best, given that those who can afford to pay more are also the most attractive targets for advertisers. Then after saying that localizing business news is a bad thing, he qualifies his statement with “I am not saying that local is not important…But too much local news is not sophisticated.” Such is the type of sophisticated business analysis now worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

With NY Times weekday circulation down 4% and the WSJ’s flat-to-up, it begs the question “why?” There’s no better place to start seeking an answer than by examining the front pages of the two papers above the fold. That’s where readers get their first impression and potential newsstand buyers get their final sales pitch. The contrast between the two papers could not be more stark.

Today’s WSJ front page above the fold resembles a web site’s home page. There are more than 20 headlines to choose from, all with page numbers that resemble links, directing the reader to jump back and forth between the front page and articles within. This is a paper that wants to spare the reader the trouble of turning through every page hoping to find articles of interest.

On the other hand, today’s NY Times front page above the fold features only 3 stories, and what a bunch of yawners they are! If you don’t happen to be interested in Zimbabwe, stricter rules on mortgages, or a female Muslim educator, you will not be engaged. The way we read news is changing. The WSJ is trying to keep up with it, while the Gray Lady is not. Perhaps the circulation numbers simply tell the tale.

In touring DC’s new news museum, John Podhoretz sees clues as to why so many Americans disdain journalism. He wonders what displayed items like an East German guard tower, a slab of the Berlin Wall, and wreckage of the World Trade Center’s broadcast antenna have to do with journalism, and scolds the field for confusing the significance of the subjects they cover with the act of covering them. Podhoretz comments, “they wrote about government; therefore, they were equivalent to the government in importance. They reported a war, and their act of reporting a war came to loom as large as the war itself.” This all amounts to an “unearned grandiosity” that has been grating on their audiences.

Actually, I think the problem is even worse than that, with many journalists now confusing the power of the subjects they are covering with their own power. This identification with the center-left consensus of the power elite leads to center-left-leaning coverage which repels non-center-left readers. Worse still, it precludes them from performing their most important function according to Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers — attack government, forcing them to defend themselves, particularly when they encroach upon individual rights. The future of news is all about journalists creating communities of the like-minded. To succeed, they will have to like their like-minded readers, and dislike those in power who their like-minded readers dislike. (H/T David Strom)

Rupert Murdoch may be the biggest threat to today’s mass media news outlets, but the future is not about mass media — it’s about multitude media. The Internet will be the great fragmenter, breaking mass audiences into thousands, if not millions, of specialized news audiences. In politics, we will see sites that appeal separately to groups from far-left to far-right. We will see separate news sites for just about every vocation and avocation. And that’s not to mention the fragmentation that will happen geographically, all the way down to the hyperlocal level. “Segmentation” will be the new “traffic,” as advertisers scramble to reach exactly the right audiences, yielding enormous productivity gains in advertising efficiency and effectiveness.

Unlike Murdoch’s News Corporation, Time Warner’s AOL seems to think the path to future news leadership does not require mass media leadership first. They are launching fragmented sites, some of which are creating their own non-AOL-branded identities. They include AOL Money & Finance, celebrity gossip site TMZ, technology-focused Switched, hip-hop site BlackVoices, Web trend tracker Urlesque.com, and male-oriented Asylum. Each offers advertisers a more or less “pure play” to reach specific audiences. The company formerly known as America Online is looking very much on-target.

If a business is sick, one of the best ways to restore its health is for it to be acquired by a larger, healthier company in the same business. Such an acquiring business would already know how to succeed in that business, and have the financial resources to invest the funds for a turnaround.

Of course, that’s too complicated for America’s geniuses in the U.S. Senate, who often demonstrate their ignorance while claiming they are the smartest people in the room. Case in point is a Senate Committee trying to reverse the recent FCC ruling that allowed the new owner of the Tribune company to own a broadcast station and daily paper in the same media market. This was not a random act by the FCC, but a measure to ensure that the struggling LA Times could find an interested, experienced buyer to save it.

The Senators’ rationale — concern about increasing concentration of media outlet ownership in fewer and fewer private hands — reveals their complete ignorance of the subject. Haven’t they ever heard of the Internet, which is spreading-out “ownership” of the news into more and more hands? Haven’t they noticed that corporate size seems to have little to do with success on the Internet as the wildly successful Drudgereport and TechCrunch have shown us? On the other hand, maybe we can be grateful to the Senators. Through regulation that prevents the healthy consolidation of outlets, they are killing-off Old Media outlets faster than they would die a natural death, clearing the way for superior New Media alternatives.

OK, Mr. Murdoch, we get it. We have now noticed that the only newspapers you own in the U.S. are based in the NY area — the NY Post, the Wall Street Journal, soon Long Island’s Newsday, and various local newspapers in the 5 boroughs and nearby suburbs. Within the NY area, your papers appeal to every segmentable newspaper audience there is — the upscale and the downscale, the national and the hyperlocal, general news and business news, the urban and the suburban. Why are you not interested in being in the newspaper business in the nation’s center of power, Washington, DC? Why were you not interested in acquiring the Tribune to compete in the major Chicago and Los Angeles markets? For that matter, why not Peoria?

Since Rupert Murdoch could not be reached for comment (mostly because I don’t have his phone number), let me offer some possibilities. First, he might believe there is business value in controlling the “national conversation” and he needs to wrest it away from the NY Times. Each night the Times coordinates these top stories with the Washington Post — stories which are then slavishly followed by the TV networks, metro dailies, and ultimately local TV stations. Second, he might believe that of the nation’s two biggest news centers, NY generates more of the type of news that consumers want that Modern Journalism elites have denied them. While DC provides government news, NY is a better supplier of news of business, fashion, arts, entertainment, sports — even of the sensational and bizarre. Third, he needs to have leverage over government officials who might envy his power and try to regulate-away his ability to expand. Controlling what the national conversation has to say about them should do the trick. So, start spreading the news — Murdoch wants to be king of the hill, top of the heap. And as for New York — if he can make it there, he’ll make it everywhere.

The magnitude of this week’s changes to the opinion pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cannot be overstated. In their “Review & Outlook” section they speak of moving their Letters to the Editor page to the main editorial page in “hope this will encourage an even more spirited exchange of views with our readers, who have never been shy about disagreeing with us or our contributors.” They also give words of welcome to a new weekly column by Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, who will “[add] a prominent left-of-center voice to the pages.” Sounds like they are going out of their way to show respect to those who do not necessarily share their views, doesn’t it?

This is a major departure from Modern Journalism, which tells its practitioners that they are providing “the truth” based on facts, leaving no room to respect alternative opinions. After all, if journalists are presenting the truth, those who disagree must be “wrong” — if not stupid, selfish, crazy, mean-spirited, unhinged, or downright evil. The NY Times is the “gold standard” of this genre. But, who would want to read a paper that does not respect their views? Based on the Times’ soft circulation numbers, the answer appears to be “fewer and fewer.” Perhaps Rupert Murdoch has been inspired by Aretha Franklin, and has concluded that all his readers are asking for is a little respect (just a little bit). (H/T: Garry Rains)

This week at Pajamas Media I explore whether “fair and balanced” news is a good idea or just sounds good. Why is it not found in history? Could it be because nobody ever really wanted it? And, why do we need middlemen-journalists to tell us what the “straight-down-the-middle” position is, and where to place the fulcrum to deliver “balance”? Wouldn’t we be better off listening to a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas, then deciding for ourselves? Check it out at Pajamas Media.

The NY Times and its genuflecting, kneejerk-reacting followers on the Internet are in a tizzy that the Pentagon actually had the nerve to — brace yourself — defend its policies, and even put them in the best possible light. Oh, the horrors. Doesn’t the Pentagon know that if Old Media does not agree with their policies, they must simply and silently allow the mainstream outlets to complain until the public loses all confidence in its government?

Where did Old Media get this idea that government could not defend itself? Well, it sure wasn’t from Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to George Washington, he said “No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics.” Note the word “defense” — exactly what Jefferson expected the government to do.

And, they sure could not have gotten the idea that government could not defend itself from the “father of modern journalism” himself, Walter Lippmann. He served on President Wilson’s Creel Committee, whose purpose was to influence public opinion toward supporting U.S. intervention in World War I. Incidentally, their tactics included fabrications and wire-tapping. (H/T: Terry Heaton)

No, this “bedrock principle” that government cannot defend itself came from a TV show — a 1971 CBS brodcast called “The Selling of the Pentagon” (H/T: Richard H. Reeb, Jr.). It delivered a no-holds-barred attack on the public relations practices of the Department of Defense, charging that the Pentagon had become a huge propaganda machine selling outmoded cold-war attitudes and sheer militarism to the American people in order to win their consent for military solutions to international problems. Some charged that CBS’ film slicing and editing had distorted and misrepresented the remarks of 2 Pentagon spokesmen. When CBS President Frank Stanton refused to provide an investigating Congressional Committee with outtakes, he became an instant hero among his fellow journalists, though not of a public that might want to know the truth. Perhaps it’s time for the people to ask journalists to defend their own policies.

Just after 4:30 a.m. today, the unmistakable signs of an earthquake moved my wife and me within seconds from cuddling in our bed to huddling under a doorframe. After 30 seconds of violent shake, rattle, but thankfully not roll, we were back in our bed with the question, “where can I find out what just happened?” Instinctively, I ran for my PC, where I found info within minutes from a seismic center and additional stories as minutes passed. Instinctively, my less New-Media-addicted wife reached for the TV remote. Perhaps if it were 30 years ago, instinctively we might have run to the curb to see what the newspaper had to say.

It’s just one real-life example of how inferior Old Media really is for fresh, breaking events. TV can’t report the story until they have time to seek facts and package it all up in a TV production — and even then you have to catch the right channel at the right time to get the few facts that most of us are interested in. In the case of an earthquake, these are things like how strong it was, how close we were to the epicenter, and whether it caused loss of life or property. Who needs a reporter to verify the facts when an online seismic center or news service can deliver completely accurate info within minutes? Who needs human interest stories like the one we saw on local TV — and I’m not making this up — where a woman claimed it damaged a spring on her trampoline? In an earthquake, the principles of journalism are simply irrelevant, and the lag time required in Old Media renders their news useless. There is a major media shake-up underway, and it is all the Internet’s fault.

As Dan Gillmor points out, Princeton University will be holding a conference called “The Future of News” May 14-15th. While my blog’s name may have finally nailed the venue, Dan, my panel-mate, seems to have nailed the panel’s description. Titled “The people formerly known as the audience,” the description speaks to collective filtering and production of news by amateurs. That’s pretty different from my forecast of a multitude of voices competing in a freewheeling marketplace of ideas, featuring many topic experts who are amateur journalists. Should be an interesting discussion.

Believe it or not, registration is FREE and comes with, not one, but two free lunches. Are they trying to tell us something about what online news in the future will be like? To register, contact the Center for Information Technology Policy’s Laura Cummings-Abdo (lcumming@princeton.edu) in the very near future.

Cory Bergman directs our attention to the “Going Local…in a New Direction” panel at the NAB conference, where TV stations are urged to take a broader view of their local websites, given this category’s flat to down growth. They are being encouraged to launch products outside their core competencies, such as local ad networks, content aggregators, and hyperlocal communities.

But, you know something’s wrong when they’re encouraging businesses to do something they instinctively know not to do — get outside of their “core competencies.” And the good news is that one of those options is not — it’s just a stretch. Who says local TV can’t do a good job handling hyperlocal news? They have reporters, equipment, and tech skills. And, as I’ve written many times, hyperlocal news done right should be even more interesting to viewers — it more directly affects their lives than metro level news, which was always a choice forced upon consumers by technology, not something consumers ever chose on their own. But, there’s an even better reason for local TV to pounce on hyperlocal — when networks have cut-out local broadcasters as unnecessary middlemen in the supply chain, and all media has converged on the Internet, they will be competing head-to-head against former newspapers, online. And the only original content left, with an Internet full of the same stories at metro, national, and international levels is hyperlocal news. Go hyperlocal, young man!