Tag: media

R.I.P. E&P

epAdd another surprise that’s not a surprise to the long list of publications that died in 2009: Editor & Publisher, the No. 1 title serving the newspaper industry itself, is folding at year-end.

E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.

On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.

I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.

Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.

If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.

I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.

And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.

In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.

I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.

Dallas Morning News restructures, Armageddon begins

If this were April 1, I’d write it off as a joke. But this close to Christmas, it might be a sign of the Second Coming.

The Dallas Morning News has reorganized; the people who generate editorial now report to people who sell ads.

Under the plan, editors of sports, real estate, entertainment, auto and travel now report to sales managers – who have been given a new title: General Manager.

In The Dallas Observer, a news blog, the extensive report includes an interview with Editor Bob Mong – who has been given a new title: Pimp.

In that interview, he told The Dallas Observer: “There’s no journalist in our organization who will allow a business person to cross the line. It just won’t happen. I’m not going to allow it to happen. [Managing editor] George [Rodrigue] isn’t. [Executive sports editor] Bob Yates or [Lifestyles deputy managing editor] Lisa Kresl won’t. But I think it’s an attempt to go to market in a different way.”

Look, I know thookerimes are tough for newspapers; I’ve written about little else since I started this blog. And coming from the B2B world, where editors are expected to be as rigid as Silly Putty, I know it’s possible to operate on the up-and-up without a huge barrier between sales and edit.

But perception is reality. And it’s already near-impossible for newspapers to operate without the perception that their coverage has been bought. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t strengthen the paper’s case when editors get their annual reviews from sales managers. The reality is that journalists have always had the dominant voice in newspaper decisions. That needs to change; the voices of journalists and advertising folks need to be heard together. In a 167-year-old institution, I don’t think you can achieve that by simply turning it upside-down and saying, “OK, the ad guys are in charge.”

If advertisers think there’s a chance they can influence editorial decisions, then that’s what they’ll try to do. And when a news executive puts himself in the position of saying, George Rodrigue would never let anything like that happen,  he’s one unforeseen circumstance away from becoming a liar. It’s an untenable position.

Further, I don’t believe this kind of change addresses the real problem that newspapers are having. They aren’t losing ad revenue because advertisers have suddenly decided there’s something wrong with the product. They’re losing it because advertisers have decided there’s something wrong with the medium.

You can’t directly measure the full response to a print ad, and advertisers now live in a culture where everything can and must be measured. They’re spending more money online, and the funding for those initiatives has to come from somehwere. It comes from print.

If anybody should know this already, it would be the DMN’s advertising staff, which is in constant contact with its customers. But instead of taking on the real issue of delivering advertising response, they’re going to try to satisfy advertisers through more interaction with the content side of the business. So they, just like the journalists, are in denial. They’re going to fix the wrong thing, and I suspect they’re going to do it poorly.

It’s true: Newspapers have to reinvent themselves. But this isn’t reinvention. It’s not innovative. It’s not courageous. And it’s not the prelude to a long and prosperous future. It’s rolling over and submitting. It’s giving up.

Here’s how BusinessInsider.com reported it:

More on AOL: It’s new content strategy is dead wrong

A week ago, I wrote about the futility of AOL’s rebranding unless it figures out how to become more relevant to its audience.

This week I have to write about the futility of AOL’s effort to become more relevant to its audience.

The centerpiece of that effort, according to PaidContent.org, is a three-pronged approach to generating new content:

1.

Hire lots of journalists. It’s good news that AOL is trying to generate original content, and I’m pleased that it’s using trained content professionals – of which there are plenty available. It has a staff of 3,000 journalists, according to PaidContent, which puts it into the top tier of U.S. news-gathering organizations.
2.

Use algorithms to predict what stories people want to read, and then assign these to the journalists. The objective is clear. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hopes that by giving people content they want, AOL will become the content place to go.

He’s wrong. This is the kind of thinking that puts Jon and Kate Gosselin in our faces day after day, week after week, month after tawdry month. It takes variety out of the news cycle, just as Wal-Mart’s unceasing desire to stock only the best-selling SKUs limits the variety of what you can buy at the world’s largest retailer.

When someone says, “I want more stories like the one about Jon and Kate,” they aren’t really saying they want to hear more about the Gosselin family. They’re saying they want information that makes them feel the same way they did when they heard it (for better or worse), and that makes them feel as informed as they did when they talked about it at work the next day.

People can tell you what was important to them yesterday, but they don’t know what’s going to be important to them tomorrow. Media have not succeeded until now, nor will they in the future, by giving people what they want so much as by giving people what’s new, important and interesting.

The real function AOL’s journalists could serve is to present information that is new, important and interesting. AOL has hired the journalists but it’s about to screw up in deploying them.

3.

Get advertisers more involved with content. This isn’t unique and it isn’t new. It’s just one more effort to help marketers bludgeon their target audiences into submission. Hey, I’m a marketer and I still can’t stand the thought of this. Everybody on one side of the equation is doing this, and everybody on the other side of the equation is trying to tune it out. Creating more and more advertorial microsites – no matter how well intentioned some of them will inevitably be – is not the big-internet business model of the future.

In fact, this is the very reason why social media is so hot right now: because social media lets users find the information they want. AOL’s model is to deliver the information, fire-hose style, right down the user’s gullet. It may generate some short-term revenue, but it won’t make AOL relevant or desirable.

It will do the opposite.

None of this is to say that AOL’s plan is evil or particularly dreadful. I think it’s pretty typical. But that’s why it won’t work. AOL is trying to distinguish itself by doing what every other large media company is trying to do. For a company in trouble, that’s a formula for failure.

The great search engine standoff

Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers, and I quote him regularly. He’s been a source of clear thinking and wisdom for me since long before blogs existed.

But in today’s blog, he writes about News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s idea to control how news content is indexed on web sites. He got it wrong. He writes, in entirety (and you’ve got to admire Godin’s brevity):

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

If Murdoch were just another blogger, or just another guy with another product to shill, I would agree with Godin. But Murdoch owns one of the largest news-gathering organizations in the world. And here’s the point that Godin misses:

When search engines index vast troves of original content, such as Murdoch’s News Corp., the impact is synergistic:

  • It drives traffic to News Corp.;
  • It provides the kind of top-of-the-charts, original content that makes a search engine valuable;
  • It provides a large class of users with the kind of content they’re seeking.

Here’s the nuance; there is less and less original content of the kind that News Corp. produces. Anyone who has ever used the Web has had the experience of following one good link after another to find they’re all connected to the same piece of mediocre content. The money dedicated to generating high-quality content has evaporated; it’s down by more than $1.5 billion in the U.S. newspaper business alone – not to mention all the other businesses that pay content providers to create information that people want and need.

So anyone who wants this kind of content to continue, must make some kind of investment in it.

When search engines index to content like that provided by Murdoch’s company, they profit by selling sponsored search results in the space around it.

But the news organizations’ only means of profit from this activity is to sell advertising around the content. But advertising isn’t selling – nor is it expected to significantly recover. Further, a portion of the money that marketers no longer spend to advertise in newspapers and magazines has been reallocated to the paid search function of search engines.

So why shouldn’t they pay for the right to index high-end content?

The attention that search engines generate is doing less and less good for newspapers and other free-content websites. If News Corp. can’t sell ads around its content, it has no reason to care if search engines promote the content.

So Godin has it wrong. He supposes that news media get the larger share of value in their relationship with search engines. In fact, to the consternation of anyone in the news business, it’s the other way around.

Further, the search engines may be able to extract even more value. Right now, one search engine is much like another. But if one could brag that it’s the only search engine to index the world’s largest news generators, that might make a difference to consumers. I know it would to me.

I don’t know if even Rupert Murdoch has the juice to take on Google. But he may be able to set the big search engines against each other. I don’t know if he’ll succeed in getting paid by one search engine and in locking out the rest. But to me, like it or not, it sounds like the kind of clash that isn’t likely to go away without creating some kind of change that affects everyone.

Here is more background on the issue:

Murdoch no longer alone in desire to block Google

Murdoch wants a Google rebellion

Bing not likely to outbid Google for news

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely

What is the world’s smallest deck chair?

aol-logo-4It’s the period in Aol. As in, America Online’s new branding effort, which changes the company from AOL to Aol. – but doesn’t make it any more relevant in a post-internet-service-provider world.

Seriously, this isn’t like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; as AOL and Time Warner complete their de-merger, it’s like replacing the rubber pad on a leg of a deck chair so it doesn’t scuff the deck.

I don’t understand why Aol. even exists anymore, except that it’s too big to go away quietly. The services it provided in the early days of the Internet – everything under one roof like a well-lit mall in an otherwise under-developed part of town – have all been superseded by a wider variety of offerings on the well-developed ‘Net.

Its search engine has dropped out of the top tier and offers no unique user value that would separate it from any others.

And I’m always startled when I find myself exchanging e-mails with someone who still has an address at the aol.com domain. Actually, it’s not an exchange; any e-mail I’ve sent in the last few months to the few Aol.-users I know has bounced back to me. Just this morning, I printed out a document and put it in an envelope with a stamp, because the Aol. user’s address rejected the attachment.

aol-logo-3Yes, Aol. has a brand problem. If you’re an investor who bet your retirement on AOL-Time Warner, the brand represents broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. For pretty much everyone else it represents obsolescence.

aol-logo-2That’s obviously not what the folks at Aol. and its branding agency, Wolff Olins (of the Omnicom Group) are thinking.

In its coverage (linked above), The New York Times quotes Sam Wilson, managing director in the New York of Wolff Olins, the branding agency Aol. has hired. The Times writes:

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

aol-logo-1The article also quotes Aol.’s CEO (or is that Ceo.?) Tim Armstrong:

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

What will surprise me is if Aol. can provide the Internet community with a reason to exist other than its legacy – something about which the online world is notoriously indifferent. To me, the dot looks a lot like the head of a nail, a coffin nail maybe – which might be enough to keep the deck chairs from sliding around as the ship continues to list.

Some inside dope on ‘New Moon’

There’s a new movie out today that seems to be of special interest to girls between the ages of 11 and 16. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, but it’s called New Moon. If it doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a short clip that’s been running on TV. (I just can’t see this too many times.)

There haven’t been so many young girls screaming so loud and so long at the same time since the historic day Justin Timberlake went solo.
Am I just grumpy, or has their screaming gotten shriller since the days of The Beatles? I’m anticipating that by the time the third movie of the Twilight series comes out, their youthful larynxes will combine with my aging eardrums to reach the effective pitch of a dog whistle.

And what’s there to say about the 50-year-old women who stand in with them and scream in solidarity for the bare-chested hunky young actors? They have more in common with John Leguizamo in To Wong Foo With Love Julie Newmar than Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie. Other than that, and the fact that I’m glad they aren’t hanging out near my son’s school, I’m pretty much speechless.

The cast has about 9,000 young, attractive people in it. So as the pre-opening hype machine was working, you could tune into any talk show – morning, afternoon, evening or late-night – and be assured of seeing a different cast member with his own, personal shrieking harem. (In fact, if Turkish sultans had elicited this kind of audible reaction from young women, the word ‘harem’ would have a very different meaning today.) With every last cast member apparently booked onto every one of these shows, there hasn’t been a minute of spare airtime in the last two months for other important stuff like John and Kate’s divorce, Afghanistan war policy, or Lindsay Lohan’s VD.

At least the movie has started its run now, bringing the inevitable decline to the 9-and-a-half weeks of hysteria (until the Blu-Ray comes out – I’m guessing just in time for Valentine’s Day).

Finally, something really important that you may not have realized about this unheralded movie: Its release coincided exactly (give or take 36 hours) with the actual new moon in the lunar cycle.

Coincidence? Or proof that President Obama is a disciple of Satan?

All the news that’s fit to buy

The New York Times, according to one of its own, is close to deciding whether to try charging for online content. If you assume that the best way to bolster the future of news is to figure out how to get people to pay for it online, then this is important – and a good thing if The Times does, in fact, try charging for content.

The only way to get people to start paying for content is for a few leaders to simply take the leap and start charging. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is implementing a plan to do so. Having The Times follow would only be good for the movement.

Can it work? That’s the big debate in media. Many think content wants to be free. Others, like myself, think consumers want it to be free primarily because they’ve been trained that content comes cheap. What nobody knows is how much people will actually pay, or whom they would pay, for real journalism.

If the news is to find its footing again – that is, if anyone is ever going to figure out a 21st Century business model by which journalism can flourish – the starting point is knowledge of the true value that journalism has to its end users. This is something that’s been obscured for the past 150 years.

Will consumers place enough value on it that they are willing to pay the full, unsubsidized cost of sending  investigative reporters to do what they do (and defending against the inevitable lawsuits that are a byproduct of their work)? It would be nice. It would simplify the quandary of media executives, who are now gathering in solemn charrettes in search of a bew design for profitable media.

But the truth is that nobody knows. We don’t know what a newspaper would actually cost if paid for fully by readers? Or how its mission, staffing levels, range of focus and intensity of reporting might be adjusted over time to reflect the market-based measure of its value. How would it be distributed? How often would it be published? Who would its readers be?

None of these questions can be answered until enough media simply jump in and try to find out. Until now, few (the Wall Street Journal being the only one of any critical mass that I can come up with) have taken that risk. If The New York Times is getting ready to give it a try, desperation in the business may be reaching some kind of tipping point.

I’m fully confident that real journalism has a significant societal value. The problem is that it’s always been paid for indirectly. Once that value is untethered from the indirect means by which media have always monetized it (that is, advertising), then the real work can begin to right-size the industry and focus efforts where they deliver the most value.

There is real risk that the result would be even more “circular media,” in which celebrities are first manufactured and then covered by the same media organizations as if they were of real consequence  (Jon & Kate and Lindsay Lohan represent two train wrecks in which the front of the train has crashed into its own caboose).

But I’m more optimistic than that. I have enough faith left that if news businesses got serious about charging for the news, they would eventually achieve market balance – knowing how much to spend, and optimizing that for the best impact, as defined by consumers.

I’m hoping the Gray Lady of New York is ready to give it a try.

Condé Nast shocker: A hard move, but smart

cover_modernbride_190In a move that startled almost everybody, Condé Nast is closing four magazines: Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride.

At some level, though, this shouldn’t be a surprise; the two bride titles are simply maids of honor to Brides magazine – also owned by Condé Nast. Elegant Bride, with 150,000 total circulation is a niche magazine for those who plan to buy luxury weddings. Modern Bride, with 335,000 total circulation, is positioned as the hip, fun and stylish magazine in the segment. Brides is simply the No. 1 with 340,000 total circulation and, notably, a network of local/regional bridal magazines.cover_brides_190

Once upon a time, this kind of segmenting made sense.  It assured the perfect fit for every possible advertiser, and many of those advertisers – given a little incentive  – could find reason to buy into multiple titles.

I don’t have any idea how many of its bridal advertisers are still buying in multiple titles; I’m sure it’s a lot – but I’m also sure it’s not as many as a few years ago. Much of that piggyback revenue will be hard to replace. That’s why company executives needed a third-party consultant to tell them what they already knew: In today’s environment, it’s no longer economical for a magazine publisher to serve a category both horizontally and vertically.

Casting away two out of three heritage brands is scary, and some observers are already beating up the company for the decision. But I’m guessing that the publishers (Modern down 21 percent this year and Elegant down 32 percent) were already getting early reports of a continued bloodbath in 2010, as more  advertisers rationalize their  purchases across a few broad-based titles per category. If Condé Nast hadn’t made this gutsy call now, then its recession would simply drag on into next year.

By consolidating all bridal business into Brides, Condé Nast undoubtedly gives up a lot of revenue, but it also reduces a lot of expense. And what it gains is the ability to focus all development efforts on the one brand that is already recognized as the industry leader and that already encompasses all bridal niches. In fact, the company has said it plans to double Brides‘ frequency to 12x.

cover_gourmet_190The recipe is pretty much the same for Gourmet – which has a rate base of 950,000, compared to Bon Appetit (also owned by Condé Nast) with 1.3 million.

The company has probably had an increasingly difficult time justifying a two-book buy to its advertisers and has been told that it needs to make their ad buys simpler and more cost-effective.

Cookie is probably a different situation altogether. It’s a lifestyle magazine for the modern mother – a category that would overlap with parenting titles, women’s titles and shopping titles (of which Condé Nast closed one, Domino, early this year). It’s a hyper-competitive cover_bonap_190category and, founded just four years ago, Cookie (total circ: 550,000) probably never had a chance to develop its own secure presence in the shrinking marketplace. Other titles in the Condé Nast portfolio include Vogue, W, Glamour, Allure, Self and Lucky.

Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend told the New York Times that the decision was simple: The four magazines were losing money and that’s no longer going to be tolerated. He also said no more closings are planned.

Which may be the truth. Today.

If only print could be more like TV in trying to be more like the ‘Net

An interesting bit of information from the TV world:

The new Jay Leno Show is particularly successful in one area: reduction time-shifting – which is the practice of watching a show at a time other then when it airs – basically through TiVo or other recording devices.

Last year, according to a report in MediaBuyerPlanner, which cites TiVo as its source, 70 percent of viewers watched NBC’s 10 p.m. programming on a time-shifted basis; only 30 percent watched it live.

The good news is that’s improved to about 50 percent watching it live and 50 percent recording it to watch later. What’s amazing to me is that half the audience basically refuses to watch the show on the network’s terms. Given the technology, consumers are telling television insiders exactly what they want and how/when they want to watch it.

That’s not to say the networks are responding like champions. But I have to say, subjectively, that bumping even a couple reality shows in favor of a talk-entertainment show like Leno’s is a step in the right direction. And maybe that’s what the audience is responding to; perhaps the reduction in time-shifting basically means, “If you give me something worth watching it, I’m more likely to watch it when you air it.”

With a blog that’s so heavily dominated by print-to-internet trends, why do I think this is worth noting?

Because it points out a huge difference between what’s happening in print media vs. broadcast. Both are struggling to keep up with the change brought on by online technologies, they’re being impacted from opposite directions.

TV is losing its audience to other activities, and has had to fight and innovate to earn every viewer that it gets. Then it can turn around and sell its successes to advertisers. This is a healthy business model.

Print media, on the other hand, isn’t being pushed by its readers – who have largely made it clear that they prefer a print product. Otherwise, readers might pay for online content; and they would certainly ask for digital editions of their favorite magazines. And if that were the case, there wouldn’t be a problem. Readers would get the product they want, advertisers would know exactly how many people see and respond to their ads, and publishers would be able to cut the Three P’s that represent the largest cost of doing business: production, printing and postage.

The problem for print is that it’s being pushed by the other end: the advertisers, who demand better accountability for the impact of the money they spend. Because you can’t measure the impact of print media as simply or directly as online media, advertisers are draining their print spend in favor of an online spend. So magazines keep trying to come up with online products, and readers are yawning.

In the end, the trouble for print is that it’s not yet figured out how to give both the audience and advertisers what they want. And it’s responding to the advertisers first. And each time, readers yawn and the medium loses more credibility with advertisers.

That’s not a healthy business model.