Category Archives: Online journalism

Post-industrial journalism across the western world plus predictions for 2013

Posted on December 19, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’ve written a comment on the Columbia Journalism School/Tow Center for Digital Journalism report on “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”  for the Nieman Journalism Lab site discussing similarities and differences between the US and Europe, and also contributed a short piece for their series of predictions for what the year 2013 will bring for news/journalism, basically suggesting we’ll see more of the same plus at least one major surprise.

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Posted in Business of journalism, Comparative media research, Online journalism

The Guardian–millions of users, millions in losses

Posted on August 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tim de Lisle has written an excellent piece for Intelligent Life asking “Can the Guardian Survive?”–a question that, given the “soft power” this newspaper, with its millions and millions of online readers, seems to exercise across parts of the industry, has ramifications well beyond the British broadsheet market. (Alan Rusbridger, the editor, and Emily Bell, the former director of online content, are both frequent speakers at “future of journalism”-type conferences.)

de Lisle doesn’t answer the question–only time will tell–but there are plenty of warning signs in his article. Leave aside some occasionally excellent journalism, and look at the numbers.

In the financial year 2009-10, the national newspapers division of Guardian Media Group—which also includes the Observer, Britain’s oldest Sunday paper—lost £37m. The following year, it managed to cut costs by £26m, and still ended up losing £38m. In May, Rusbridger told me he was expecting a similar loss for 2011-12. So, for three years running, the Guardian has been losing £100,000 a day.

In fairness, of the three other broadsheets competing in the same national market, the Times and the Independent are also losing millions and reliant on their owners propping up the business. Only the market-leader, the Daily Telegraph, is actually producing a profit (£55 million last year).

In the article, de Lisle mentions some of the new sources of revenues being explored at the Guardian to push beyond sales and advertising–of course iPhone and iPad apps, also Master Classes, and the Guardian Open Weekend. There are also various forms of networks, that de Lisle doesn’t touch on, including Guardian Soulmates, professional networks etc, plus of course various forms of e-commerce, selling books, shoes, wines, etc. Fancy an air cooler? (See screenshot below.) The Guardian can help you, and as you enjoy the pleasant temperature, you are helping pay for Nick Davies’ next expose.

The Guardian is thus, like everyone else, trying to diversify their business. But de Lisle has talked to those who doubt the current strategy, with its emphasis on growing the freely available website, is going to work. Juan Señor, a media consultant I know from my work at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says to de Lisle

“We are very concerned … that everybody looks at the Guardian’s success in terms of volume of traffic. That is not a measure of success, because you might as well get into pornography. … While I love the Guardian’s journalism at times, I just don’t think it’s sustainable. They’re announcing even more lay-offs, it’s a tragedy.”

And that is worth keeping in mind for those working to change news organizations elsewhere, who don’t have the kind of money in the bank that the Guardian can rely on (about £200 million at the last count–enough for five more years with losses like this).

For all its journalistic successes and its millions of users, the Guardian continues to double down on a all-or-nothing strategy that so far has resulted in millions and millions in loses. Wish them well. They need it. Think twice before imitating them. They are heading down a dangerous path.

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Posted in Business of journalism, Good reads, Online journalism, Trivia and impressionism

New report on (the travails of) journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe

Posted on May 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

Given all that’s being written about the economic travails of the legacy media industry, it may be surprising—and somewhat depressing—to learn that news media start-ups are struggling too.

But that’s the main finding of a new RISJ Challenge, Survival is Success: Journalistic Online Start-Ups in Western Europe, written by the Italian journalist Nicola Bruno and myself.

Examining nine strategically chosen case studies of journalistic online start-ups from Germany, France, and Italy, we find that the economics of online news are as challenging for new entrants as they are for industry incumbents.

The competition for people’s attention is fierce, and though online advertising is growing rapidly, most of it goes to a small number of US-based giants like Google. This is a tough environment for start-ups, and the track record so far suggests that, as we indicate in the title of our report, survival is a form of success in itself.

Given the structural challenges that new journalistic ventures face, what can they do differently? In my view, one I’ve laid out in a bit more detail in a piece for Reuters Analysis & Opinion, they need to stop irrationally imitating the strategies of the (few) large US-based start-ups, like the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Politico, that many of the people interviewed for the report referred to as inspirations. Strategies that worked for earlier movers operating in a much larger US market are not necessarily going to work for start-ups entering smaller markets at a later point in time.

To survive—and to succeed—journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe need to find their own way, think beyond the dominant, and mostly failing, existing models of news production. I know this is a lot easier to say than it is to do, but it is worth saying anyhow. I wish all the new news entrepreneurs good luck. We need them.

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Posted in Business of journalism, Comparative media research, Online journalism

The Rendell Inquirer?

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

Ed Rendell, the Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and Mayor of Philadelphia, is heading a group of powerful politicians and local business men interested i nacquiring the troubled Philadelphia Media Network. I’ve written a piece on the Nieman Lab blog about experiences elsewhere with “instrumentalization” of news organizations. You have to check it out, if only for the neat little photo colleage they’ve used to illustrate it…

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Posted in Business of journalism, Online journalism

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Good read – 02 14 12 (Piano Media), with 02 16 12 update

Posted on February 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

(Updated Feb 16 with reply below from Piano Media)

As is clear to anyone following the news industry, charging for online news is back in fashion as more and more commercial news organizations experiment with different pay models–metered models, freemium, paywalls. Experiments abound.

One initiative that has attracted a fair amount of attention is Piano Media, which started in Slovakia and has now expanded to Slovenia.

The idea is simple–create one common platform for people to pay for content and then try to amass all or most quality content in the country/language in question on that platform leaving users with a choice between quality and payment and whatever is outside the system. The US-based Christian Science Monitor, which, burdened by unsustainable operating losses stopped printing its daily edition in 2009, calls it “a model to  save newspapers.”

There are skeptics and critics too, of course–to quote from the same CSM story:

Some say a national paywall could violate antitrust laws. In the United States, proposals that the major papers go behind a paywall simultaneously have sometimes been discredited on those grounds.

Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back,” says any collective effort would be resisted by major Internet businesses such as Google and that they might try to block it with antitrust legislation.

The anti-trust concerns would arguably apply in much of Europe too. (I’d be interested to hear from lawyers who know more about market regulation or from people who know about the situation on the ground in the two countries concerned.) It will be interesting to see if current experiments in Slovakia and Slovenia will be challenged as monopolies or for price-fixing.

Because whatever way you look at it, that is what Piano Media is meant to allow–it offers a way of giving back some market power to publishers who fear they have lost the ability to price their products on a generously supplied market for online “content.” And indeed in Slovakia, where Piano Media started, they are just now testing just how much power they have gotten back–jacking up subscription prices by 25% , as reported by Andrew Phelps at Nieman Labs.

(Robert Andrews at PaidContent has followed the story, his articles on Piano Media are here.)

UPDATE: David Brauchli from Piano Media wrote to me Feb 16 in response to the piece, with his permission, I’m copying in the relevant parts below:

We had our lawyers in Slovakia check with the anti-trust/monopolies office in SK and of course in SI before we launched in either country. It wouldn’t make sense to launch a business that was sure to run afoul of the monopoly authorities. Suffice it to say the business model complies.
We really run a payment system and the competition is still intact among the papers. That’s due to our unique chronological meter which measures how long and what type of content the reader consumes. Content is weighted according to type and that’s weighed against how long a reader spends on the site. So if a reader simply clicks through and then out of an article, the publisher isn’t compensated. Likewise, if a reader spends all his time on the discussion forums then the publisher again receives little compensation. However, if a reader spends a lot of time looking at, listening to or reading something which the publisher has spent a lot of time and effort creating, he is rewarded. What that means is superior journalism is rewarded. It also is a better system than micro payments which reward publishers simply for click-throughs, which really don’t benefit anyone except advertisers.
Thanks to David for the update. It would be interesting to hear from people with legal expertise in other countries about what the model he describes would look like in other jurisdictions.

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Posted in Business of journalism, Good reads, Online journalism

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Arianna Huffington opens “Huffington Post of X”

Posted on July 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

One constant theme of contemporary conversations around journalistic online start-ups is the oft-expressed desire to start something that will be “a bit like the Huffington Post of X”—X here being some other country than the US. Apparently, Arianna Huffington and/or her AOL bosses share this ambition, as they have announced launches in Brazil, France, and the United Kingdom (in addition to the Canadian version launched in May).

Just looking quickly at the UK media market, the one of the three I am most familiar with, I’d second many of Kevin Anderson’s observations, and suggest Huffington/AOL faces several challenges as they try to expand—

  1. They are entering a smaller and more competitive market (Kate Burns aside) than the one they entered in the US in 2005, with a more diverse media system, including ideologically diverse nationally-read newspapers with a strong online presence and of course the giant that is the BBC.
  2. They do not have the early mover advantage that they had in the US. It is, to put it bluntly, not 2005 anymore, and many sites have moved a long way since in terms of harnessing people’s desire to participate and express themselves (either because of the intrinsic rewards or because they are spokespeople of various sorts) and to be engaged.
  3. They are no longer the Huffington Post of 2005, the exciting start-up, the cool new thing everyone (might) want to be part of. They are part of AOL, and the same issues over compensation or lack thereof that are dogging the site in the US will follow the model as it is transposed to other countries (especially since some of them have, you know, unions and stuff).

Does the UK need a HuffPo site? Personally I’m not sure it adds much that is critically undersupplied here, but it is an open party, and a free-for-all when it comes to competing for audience attention and advertising revenues. If Huffington makes any substantial contributions to the media systems she is about to launch in, it may be indirectly, by pushing legacy media online to compete with her in terms of participation and engagement, where there is surely still much room for improvement.

Coming with a well-known brand and much know-how accumulated over the years, the new HuffPo subsidiaries need not necessarily grow to the same size as the original to be successful—if aggregation, remix, and commentary fuelled by those who make a living professing views and those who like to profess their views (plus a bit of original content) can be assembled at a low enough cost and a large enough audience gathered by using the methods that have worked so well in the US, they could wriggle their way in here and there.

But I suppose that this is the central difference between the old (US) HuffPo and the new (national) HuffPos—the 2005 original very successfully created a niche by identifying and serving an underserved demand in the US. It looks like the 2011 franchises around the world will have to carve out their niches in a rather more crowded space.

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Posted in Business of journalism, Comparative media research, Online journalism

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