rasmuskleisnielsen.net

“The Story So Far”, an interesting new report by Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, presents a great tour d’horizon of the business of online news in the U.S. I’d warmly recommend reading it, it is well-written and wide-ranging, and deals with a whole host of important question facing the commercial media organizations that are such important parts of most national media systems and, despite their decline in recent years, continue to fund most accountability journalism around the world.

The report’s treatment of the increasingly explicit link between the cost of reporting, the traffic it attracts, and the revenue it generates will be rather chilling reading for many journalists and editors (see chapter nine). A concrete example: I spent a couple of hours reading the report, and a couple more writing this–even if we place the result in the lowest-ranking category used by AOL for “revenue managment”, this post would still have to generate 7,000 page views to be worth commissioning for $25. Let’s just say it is a good thing I have other incentives.

The subtitle of the report is “What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism”, with the proviso inserted in the introduction, that the study is restricted “mostly to the U.S. market.” “Entirely” would be more precise here, and that is a problem, not only for the international reader, but also for people who want to understand the situation in the U.S.

The thing is that we know an awful lot more about developments in the business of journalism, digital and analogue, in the U.S. than anywhere else, and that much of the conversation around the future of journalism remains focused on what takes place in the states—in the U.S. because this is understandably the main concern and because most of those taking part in the conversation do not seem to know much about how things are done elsewhere, in other countries, because comparative conversations are all too often limited to “us vs. the U.S.” and rarely expanded into more meaningful cross-national discussions of countries with similar size markets, market structures, and historical legacies.

This is not Grueskin, Seave, and Graves’ fault, and it takes nothing away from the valuable work they have done in researching and writing this report. But the dearth of comparative analysis is constraining both intellectual attempts to understand what is going on, and arguably also the ability of industry people and policymakers to make informed decisions about how to react to current changes in the industry. As the great comparativist Seymore Martin Lipset wrote in his book American Exceptionalism, “to know only one country is to know no country”–a point I’ve reiterated elsewhere.

In many ways, the American experience is exceptional, and one should be careful in understanding developments elsewhere through this lens. Let me give just three examples of factors rightly highlighted by Grueskin, Seave, and Graves as important in understanding the development of digital journalism in the U.S., and illustrate how things look different in much of Western Europe.

1. Sales versus advertising income

“Even before the Internet, subscription revenue didn’t amount to much for most news organizations,” the authors write. This is true in the U.S., but certainly not in much of Northern Europe, where home-delivered subscriptions have been an important, often dominant, form of newspaper use, and where the revenues generated have been very considerable. Consider the national differences illustrated by the following figure, taken from The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy, a book I co-edited with David Levy.

While American newspapers generated less than 20% of their revenues from sales in 2008, many European newspapers generated closer to 50%, much of this from subscriptions (in particular in Germany and the Nordic countries).

Many European newspaper readers have had a different relationship with their newspaper than their American counterparts, a relationship built on (often quite expensive) subscriptions and long-term loyalty.

More comparative research might help us understand whether this historical legacy can help them build different models as they move to online and mobile platforms, and whether it means people perceive the issue of online payments differently.

2. Newspaper competition

Grueskin, Seave, and Graves also explain why American newspaper came to be so dependent on advertisements: “The monopoly or oligopoly that most metropolitan news organizations enjoyed by the last quarter of the 20th Century meant they could charge high rates to advertisers, even if their audiences had shrunk.”

From the 1970s onwards, fewer and fewer American newspapers faced direct competition in their local markets, and national distribution was quite limited. Again, this is very different in much of Europe where national distribution is often more developed.

I live in Oxford in the United Kingdom, which is in most respects far from an ordinary place, but can serve as an illustration here: this town of about 150,000 people is served not only by the local Oxford Mail (6 days a week) and Oxford Times (weekly), plus various local advertising freesheets, but also by the whole range of nationally distributed British papers—The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, and the newly-launched compact title simply called the i. And no doubt several titles more that I’ve forgotten here. Most of these offer subscriptions for Oxford residents. All of them are available at newsstands.

The upshot of this is that many European media markets have historically been more competitive than their American counterparts at the national level, and the news organizations that operate in them have been more used to dealing with competition than their American counterparts. The Oxford Eagle published in Oxford, Mississippi (U.S.) does not need to worry all that much about print competition. The Oxford Mail published in Oxford, Oxfordshire (UK), has had to content with numerous other print titles for decades.

Again, more comparative research is needed to help us understand if this legacy makes any difference in how news organizations compete for audience attention and advertising revenues and how they try to stay relevant to their readers.

3. Charging for online content

I suspect the report’s chapter on paywalls will be read with particular interest, for the obvious reason that everyone in the news industry wants to know if it is indeed feasible to charge for general interest news online and on mobile platforms.

As the authors rightly point out, the track record in the U.S. (and elsewhere) is less than inspiring so far. While the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times remain well-known exceptions, few newspapers have built significant revenue streams from online sales. The decision to make content available for free online (to market the print product and in the hope that audiences and advertising revenues would eventually grow to cover costs) is now widely seen as the “original sin” of the business of digital journalism.

While the free model certainly does seem to be dominant not only in the U.S., but also around the Western world and beyond, here too more comparative research might help us understand developments in the business of digital journalism.

To take just one example from my native region, Scandinavia—the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, which has the highest print circulation in the country (over 300,000 copies), has for years operated a system by which most basic breaking news is free, but where people need to sign up for a special online premium subscription to get access to long-form and unique content on the website. In 2010, the newspaper reported that 115,000 people paid about $4.5 a month for this (several more specialized and more expensive subscriptions are also offered for people interested in particular topics)–see more in English here.

If the self-reported figures are reliable, this should generate north of $6 million a year in sales revenues—not a fortune, but not trivial either. Has this drastically undermined the total audience of Aftonbladet.se, and thus its ability to be “part of the conversation” and generate online advertising revenues?

Not if one compares daily unique visitors to the second and third-most circulated Swedish newspapers, the broadsheet Dagens Nyheter (dn.se) and the tabloid Expressen (ds.se) or to the public service television broadcaster Sverige Television (svt.se), as can be seen from the above Google Trends graph—Aftonbladet is, despite having charged for premium content for years, by far the most popular news website in Sweden, a country that has a quite competitive national media market with several newspaper titles, a well-funded public service broadcaster, and several commercial television channels.

According to a press release from Schibsted (the Norwegian media conglomerate that owns 91% of Aftonbladet), the newspaper generated almost 20% of its revenues from online operations in 2010. This is in itself an impressive figure, and even more promising because a growing part of this comes from online sales.

How does Aftonbladet, which is neither particularly specialized nor particularly localized, get away with this model (which is increasingly being replicated by others, like the Danish broadsheet Berlingske)? Nobody knows for sure, but again, more comparative research beyond the exceptional case of the U.S. should help us understand what is going on.

* * *

None of this—the international variations in the historical importance of sales and subscription revenues, in how competitive newspaper markets in particular have been, and in how news organizations have tried to monetize content online—take anything away from the value of the Grueskin, Seave, and Graves report.

But it all underlines that “The Story So Far” is an American story, and that there is a lot we still don’t know about the business of digital journalism, including how the spread of new digital information and communication technologies impacts commercial news organizations with different historically inherited business models, operating in different contexts, and who have pursued different online strategies.

These are important questions, not only for the journalists and others directly impacted by the upheaval of the news industry, but for all citizens in the democracies that have developed hand-in-hand with the mass media for the better parts of a century, and thus also for social scientists who have an obligation to understand what is an ongoing and potentially profound transformation in how we govern ourselves.

Full disclosure: I graduated from the Columbia Journalism School, and Lucas Graves is a good friend.

Twenty years ago, W. Russell Neuman wrote, in the opening pages of his The Future of the Mass Audience

“[Print, broadcasting, and telephony media companies] currently enjoys a highly profitable tradition of business practice. The market boundaries between these sectors are based on a series of evolved social conventions for the repertoire of media appropriate for each category of human communication. A single integrated electronic system for high-quality video, audio, and printed output will make such artificial barriers less meaningful. As a result, each corporation in these fields will soon face three or four times the previous number of determined and well-financed competitors for its business, a prospect about as welcome as an invasion of Vandals and Visigoths.” (p. x)

“The hero of the piece is communications technology, or at least its increasing capacity to enhance communications and empower the individual to control the communications process. There is no villain per se. There are, however, social, economic, and political forces that threaten to constrain, to limit, and perhaps to prevent the new technology’s potential for intellectual diversity and openness. But if there are to be heroes, powerful oppositions are required for a true test of their mettle.” (p. 5)

And tested they have been…

Back in March, I made a guest appearance via a recorded presentation at a debate on “Activism vs. Slacktivism” organized by Fairsay.

The videos from the debate are up now, including my own aesthetically-challenged home-recorded contribution.

I thought the discussion was quite encouraging, partially because the cyber-optimism vs. cyber-pessimism polemic that seems to generate so much heat but relatively little light was largely absent, and partially because this absence did not equate a dearth of self-criticism and meaningful disagreement amongst these practitioners and observers of internet-assisted activism.

There are dozens of valuable nuggets scattered throughout the videos, from Naomi McAuliffe from Amnesty talking about how the organization has used Shell’s own social media marketing strategy against them to raise some pertinent questions about their business practices, over Eric Lee from Labourstart.org discussing how a company had left one union he had worked with flat-footed when it actually responded to an email-writing campaign by sending back a rebuttal it took the union weeks to respond to, and to basically every one of the speakers underlining the basic point that digital tools are precisely that—tools.

Tools are integral to what we do, and shape what we can do and how easily, and encourage us to see the world and our place in it in certain ways. They are important, worthy of careful attention, and each should be considered in its own terms—not all uses of technology equals inconsequential “clicktivism”, nor does the use of this or that new app or gadget magically propel one towards the promised land, and all effective acts of technologically augmented activism have to start from the first principles of activism—what do you want to achieve, who do hope to mobilize, what can you—together—do to change the world?

Catching up on a couple of necessary reads on paywalls

1. Ken Doctor on the economics of what he calls the “pay fence” at the New York Times, which has adopted a carefully claibrated “metered approach” where people will only pay after a certain period and can find content in many ways that circumvent the fence/wall.

2. Alan Mutter on the same issue, cautiously suggesting the NYT content may be strong enough to make the wall work, but also warning that that does not mean that media outlets with less unique and compelling content–specifically other newspapers–can succeed.

3. Frédéric Filloux is considerably less sanguine, arguing that “The New York Times paywall is like the French tax system: expensive, utterly complicated, disconnected from the reality and designed to be bypassed.”

In all this mixed with some travelling with little web access, I almost missed the release of new figures from News International on the number of paying subscribers to the London Times website and tablet versions–journalism.co.uk has the numbers, Roy Greenslade a dose of skepticism.

For some time, I’ve been developing the argument that when we want to understand the role of internet technologies in politics—in particular when it comes to getting people involved in electoral campaigns, in various forms of activism, and in other forms of civic and political activity—we should focus less on the newest and most heavily hyped tool of the moment (Twitter election! Twitter revolution!) and pay more attention to the role of what I call “mundane internet tools” like email, search, and ordinary websites.

New Media & Society has published the article where I make the argument, based on ethnographic research I did during the 2008 U.S. elections, but based on intuitions and interests aroused by previous research in the 2007 U.S. presidential primaries (published by the Journal of Information Technology & Politics here).

The abstract runs as follows:

The internet’s potential for political mobilization has been highlighted for more than a decade, but we know little about what particular kinds of information and communication technologies are most important when it comes to getting people involved in politics and about what this means for the active exercise of engaged citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in two congressional campaigns in the USA, I will argue that specific mundane internet tools (like email) are much more deeply integrated into mobilizing practices today than emerging tools (like social networking sites) and specialized tools (like campaign websites). Campaigns’ reliance on mundane internet tools challenges the prevalent idea that sophisticated ‘hypermedia’ turn people into ‘managed citizens’. Instead, I suggest we theorize internet-assisted activism as a process for the coproduction of citizenship and recognize how dependent even well-funded political organizations are on the wider built communications environment and today’s relatively open internet.

The notion of “mundane internet tools” is part of an empirical and relational typology distinguishing between mundane, emerging, and specialized internet tools—these are not properties of the tools themselves, but of patterns of use and degrees of familiarity, which of course change over time, between places, and across social groups. Tools are not causes of social actions, but parts of socio-technical action, things that help us do some things, hinder others, and are integral to how we live, act, and see ourselves—this is also how I hope people will think of the role of social networking sites and other technologies in the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, not as causes, or as irrelevant, but as tools (for protesters, though sometimes also for security forces)—in North Africa, even with a less than open internet, some of those involved in recent events certainly seemed to produce their own role as active citizens partially through the use of everyday tools and technologies.

Stressing the importance of mundane internet tools in processes of political mobilization (really one should include mobile phones in this, something I hope to research more in the future) does not mean that these tools are the most important internet technologies for all political processes (fundraising, PR, etc) let alone all social processes (online banking, open software development), or in all contexts (think ‘digital divide’).

My argument is simply that even in countries like the United States, where I did my research, which has high levels of internet access and use, and plenty of money plus professional expertise in politics, the oft-discussed “mobilizing potential” of the internet is mostly realized in practice where campaign staffers and volunteers trying to get more people to participate “meet them where they are.” People get involved in politics in many ways, amongst them via the various online (and offline!) platforms that are already part and parcel of their everyday life—whereas newfangled emerging tools and specialized platforms owned and operated by campaigns themselves in general seem to play a more modest role. Some politicians—in the U.S. most notably President Obama and Sarah Palin—have managed to leverage their high profile and charisma to generate a large community around themselves and their own profiles.

But most politicians and political campaigns still labor in the shadows of popular indifference (for instance on Twitter and even Facebook), and should not assume that people come to them—if one want them to be involved, one needs to mobilize and organize them, one at a time, on their terms, using their tools. Every elected official trying to capture the so-called “Obama effect” by purchasing this or that technological solution used by his 2008 campaign should have a sign in their office reminding them “you are not Barack Obama.” And they should never think they can become something like what he was in 2008 simply by buying some gadget—hence the suggestion they and the people who work for them—if they are genuinely committed to getting folks involved and building a movement for change—start elsewhere, try to meet people where they are, and go from there.

(cross-posted to Politics in Spires)

In the wake of AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post (which many people have already criticized from a business point of view), quite a few media commentators are shivering at the thought of the dynamics that lead thousands (and across the web hundreds of millions) of people to generate content for free that competes for attention and advertising expenditures with what’s produced by paid professionals:

1. Here’s David Carr of the NYTimes talking about media companies build “on a nation of serfs” (that’d be you and me).

2. Athony de Rosa of Reuters, whom Carr cites, calls it “digital feudalism”.

They are having a bit of an autonomist moment, concerned about exploitation of immaterial labor by insidious networks, what a friend of mine in a nice phrase has called “loser generated content.”

I take the point (both of Carr et al and the autonomists–though I think it is rather overblown to call your average Facebook user or even HuffPo blogger a “serf” and I find the phrase “digital feudalism” hyperbolic).

From here on the debate only gets more confusing, even without getting into the discussion of whether the satisfaction that comes from sharing and expressing oneself outweighs the direct and indirect costs of becoming dependent on various “social media”–

3. Nate Silver argues that the unpaid bloggers on HuffPo don’t actually drive that much traffic, whereas Frederic Filloux in a couple of posts here and here have offered a pretty vehement criticism not only of the price AOL paid for HuffPo, but also the potentially corrosive “model” it is supposed to represent.

I heard John Keane speak this Friday on “Democracy in the Age of Google, Wikileaks, and Facebook.” His talk represents a genre that divides academics—heroic social science, the attempt to synthesize findings on a range of topics from a range of fields to understand some “big” question, like the one raised by Keane that afternoon—what do changes in our communications environment mean for how we conceive of and practice democracy? Now that’s a big question if there ever was one. Try to think through what you would say in response to it, and how you would support your views, and I think you’ll agree.

Keane basically argued (further truncating what he himself constantly reminded us was a “bowdlerized” version of a much more extensive analysis) that the incipient and growing forms of “monitory democracy”—the permanent public scrutiny of power that supplements formal electoral arrangements around the globe—that he discusses in his book on The Life and Death of Democracy today have to contend with five truly new features of our life

1. The democratization of information (as it is made more widely and easily accessible on a number of platforms)
2. The end of privacy (as the boundary between the public and the private shifts and everything is potentially recorded and stored)
3. A new age of muckraking as a whole host of new actors try to expose elites
4. The flourishing of unelected representatives on- and offline
5. The growing importance of cross-border communications and increasingly global politics

I think one can challenge him on each of these five features—whether they represent the dominant trends, whether they are new, whether there are others, and so on, and Keane did not get an easy ride—I got the sense that a third of the room was overwhelmed by all he had thrown at them, a third of the room thought there was little new in what he said, and a third of the room thought he was all wrong about something or other. Both respondents and the audience continually questioned and challenged him.

And rightly so. Keane was making important claims, and claims that he in a sense knew—and said in advance—are virtually impossible to substantiate, especially at this level of generality. He said early on that what he, using a wonderful German term, called a “Gestamtdarstellung”, a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon at hand, is impossible due to the complexities and pace of change involved. And yet he tried—and I think he (again, as he is a serial offender when it comes to trying to pull things together like this) did well enough to be lauded not only for having the courage to try tackle big questions, but also for having inched the debate around them forward.

Like everyone else who cares about anything but ones immediate surroundings, I’m following the protests in Egypt, and find myself deeply touched by the  images coming out, ranging from the beautiful sight of police officers and protesters praying together to the terror of violence, chaos, and human suffering.

While history is being written on the streets of Cairo, many people are also trying to write their first drafts of the role of new information and communication technologies in the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

I’m glad that this debate has mostly moved beyond (a) the increasingly sterile polemic between cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists and (b) the mis-phrased question of whether the internet and other tools and technological infrastructures “caused” these events.

Just a few pieces I’ve found insightful so far are these:

1. Mary Joyce’s sketch of a “digital activism and digital repression framework” to get beyond the largely separate discussion of how new tools help or hinder on the one hand activists, and on the other hand state apparatuses.

2. Mathew Ingam reiterating the basic truth to keep in mind, “It’s not Twitter or Facebook, it’s the power of the Network.” “Network” here should be understood as what sociologists and science-studies folks call a “socio-technical” network, i.e., one that involves both people and the tools they use to connect across space and time.

3. Nancy Scola on the complications, calculations, and possible miscalculations behind Egypt’s regime first basically shutting down the internet and later turning it back on. Even when a government is in a position to turn to repression (online as well as offline), there are always complicating factors.

Sounds unlikely.  Did Twitter? Nobody really seems to claim so, though Evgeny Morozov erroneously claims that Andrew Sullivan claims so, though Sullivan actually only raised the question and linked to Ethan Zuckerman, who … wait, back to the fax machine.

I met Marc Plattner yesterday, who edits the Journal of Democracy and is a veteran of both academic and policy discussions around issues of democracy and democratization. He told me about how some people used to claim the fax machine “caused” (or at least played a large part in) the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can imagine all the arguments that could be marshalled. (“Between them, television, the fax machine and word of mouth have banished fear,” writes John Russell in the New York Times in 1991, offering an admirably cross-media if somewhat optimistic analysis of the role of communications in political change.

It seems we could save a lot of time and energy if we moved beyond this “new technology X caused specific political (or social) event Y” discussion, whether of events in Moldova, Iran, or Tunisia–all cases where complex and predominantly local political events have been taken intellectually hostage by people out to prove a point about this or that amazing new internet site.

I’d suggest that new information and communication technologies, whether fax machines or Twitter, do not have social implications in such a clear fashion, just as they do not seem to have clear moral implications in quite the neat way some would hope (“I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can call their own government to account,” in the words of President Obama–but surely, that depends an awful lot on what information we are talking about?). It seems to me that these claims, reducible to “the internet (or this internet tool) is a singular and powerful causal force that will affect change, and that change will be for the better,” are often driven by the posturing of publicity-seeking pundits and people looking for grants or business opportunities (see the first part of this story on the U.S. State Department)–and the professional pessimists who live to challenge them.

But that new information and communications technologies aren’t all-powerful or irrelevant doesn’t mean that they do not matter–or that their sometimes exaggerated positive sides actually distract us from recognizing their more nefarious aspects, as people like Morozov sometimes come close to arguing, as pointed out by Zeynep Tufekci in her thoughtful review of his book.

Even though new technological infrastructures or individual tools rarely, if ever, change the world in one blow or cause particular events, they still have implications, biases, long-term implications, like the ones discussed by careful, deep thinkers of long-term change like Harold Innis and Elizabeth Eisenstein and more immediate ones for how we live our lives, as studied by social scientists willing to let the chips fall as they may. (This is, since I’m on the topic, is what I’ve tried to do in my own research on political activism in developed democracies…) (See 1, 2, and my chapter in 3).

Tools–new and old–are part of human life, for good and for bad, and permeate everything from everyday life to extraordinary moments like the uprising in Tunisia and elsewhere. And they should be studied and understood as such–parts, tools, elements of larger settings and sets of practices.

From January 1, I’ve been in the privileged position of having not one, but two jobs–and good ones too.

While remaining a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, I now also hold a position as Assistant Professor of Communications at Roskilde University (RUC) in Denmark

I will continue to live in England for the time being but will visit Denmark periodically to teach, and assume my position at Roskilde full time September 1, 2012.