Category Archives: The basics
These entries lay down several of the basic concepts and principles discussed in this blog.
One more time: Our content is failing our industry
The year was 2005, and the scene was a meeting of the Newspaper Next Industry Task Force — some of the best and most innovative minds in the newspaper business.
In midstream, the brilliant and irascible Lincoln Millstein, then head of digital for the Hearst newspaper group, threw down this challenge (not his exact words, but my best recollection):
“You can’t name any other business that would leave a manager in charge of a product whose sales have fallen every year for the last 30 years!”
He rammed home the point: Newspaper circulation had been falling steadily for decades, and yet newspaper companies had left the same kinds of people in charge of content, doing the same old stuff. When were we going to get serious about changing the content to produce better results?
Amen, Lincoln. I’ve never forgotten your point. It’s as deadly accurate today as it was 12 years ago — and the results keep getting worse.
In this blog, for five years, I’ve written repeatedly about why and how our our content needs to change. We keep acting out that old cliche about insanity — doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
This time, instead of trying to come up with yet another way to say it, I will point back to 13 of my previous posts. Or should I say, 13 previous attempts to open this industry’s eyes to the desperate need for change in content.
Rethinking the mission and purpose of local reporting
https://mediareset.com/2016/04/20/rethinking-the-mission-and-purpose-of-local-reporting/
Excerpt:
“So we need to start with a different question. Not, “How do we fund journalism?” but “What is the content that local people really want and need?”
“And that points me back to the core purpose of local reporting. It’s not “doing journalism.” It’s providing information every day that meets genuinely felt needs among the people who live in our communities.
“Our purpose should be to figure out what those needs are and go get that information.”
The hardest part of saving news: Changing the definition
https://mediareset.com/2015/05/21/the-hardest-part-of-saving-news-changing-the-definition/
The tiny share of web traffic we’re getting with news, what Millennials consider to be news, and a metrics approach that can lead us to more successful content.
Millennials, news and the Borneo effect
https://mediareset.com/2015/03/17/millennials-news-and-the-borneo-effect/
How the explosion in available content has reduced the demand for news. With a parable from a friend’s experience in the jungles of Borneo: If you grew up with an infinite supply of every kind of food, how much rice would you eat?
Millennials grew up with access to every kind of information; no wonder they don’t consume a lot of news. And what we should do about it.
The audience game is forever changed; will we change, too?
https://mediareset.com/2015/03/01/the-audience-game-is-forever-changed-will-we-change-too/
“The stats (presented here) show that we’re losing the audience game in a big way. So we need to do some hard thinking about which audiences in local markets have the most value and therefore are most worth pursuing.
“Home buyers? Car buyers? Job seekers? Finance, insurance and mortgage customers? What else? Then we need to set appropriate priorities among the most promising target groups and figure which solutions will work best for each of them.”
Media business model: Are you running the Scotch Tape store?
https://mediareset.com/2014/08/12/media-business-model-are-you-running-the-scotch-tape-store/
How an old Saturday Night Live sketch about the Scotch Tape store at the old mall parodies our business’s relentless concentration on news.
And how, at the “new mall” — the Web — “you can find content directly relating to every big and little interest and concern in your life. You can get content that’s immediately useful in what you’re doing or about to do. Content that’s suited to exactly who you are, to what your life situation is, to what you care about, to what makes you laugh, to what you are considering doing right now. And, with a smartphone in your hand, you can get all of this in seconds, anywhere you are.”
Why the definition of news must change in the digital age
https://mediareset.com/2014/02/18/why-the-definition-of-news-must-change-in-the-digital-age/
To understand the new landscape, every news person should take up a challenge from magazine blogger Andrew Davis, who said:
I challenge you to put yourself in the shoes of your primary audience. Spend the day consuming the content they consume, visiting the websites they visit. Then, ask yourself what you could do to make your print product more valuable given the experience you’ve just encountered.“
And not just print, of course. We’re a local information franchise, print and digital. To get back to success, we need to start over by understanding the appetites that are driving our desired audiences today.
The big picture: Mass media era was the blink of an eye
https://mediareset.com/2013/12/17/the-big-picture-mass-media-era-was-the-blink-of-an-eye/
Excerpt: “Let’s put it in individual human terms. For 200,000 years, you could get hardly any information about anything. For 150 years, you could get whatever someone decided to print or broadcast. And now, from about the year 2000 on, you can get just about any information you want, from just about any source, wherever you happen to be.”
Excerpt: “On a planet where everyone can get virtually any information, what new models can we discover for engaging their attention, for being indispensable, for supplying information they aren’t willing to live without? And how can we help businesses take advantage of the vast new range of audience-reaching channels and technologies — whether we own them or not — that are penetrating every waking moment of human consciousness? And get paid for it?”
Desperately needed: More innovation on the audience side
https://mediareset.com/2013/10/14/desperately-needed-more-innovation-on-the-audience-side/
A visual rendering of the change in our world that’s destroying our old, keyhole-based business model.
1950s:
Today:
We’ve lost the keyhole effect. Now how do we attract an audience? A list of seven specific kinds of content that would draw like crazy.
Everyday goal for media companies: Be the greatest show on earth
Now that we’re in competition with all the information available on the planet, we have to win our audiences every day by the value of what we offer them. So the job of the publisher, the editor and the VP of content/audience (if there is one) needs to be: Produce content throughout the day — every day — that no one can live without.
Seven kinds of “new news” for the 21st century
https://mediareset.com/2013/02/13/seven-kinds-of-new-news-for-the-21st-century/
A deeper description of the seven kinds of content that would draw audience like crazy in any local market.
Part 1: The Mass Media bubble
https://mediareset.com/2012/05/01/the-mass-media-era-a-150-year-bubble-now-ending/
My first explanation of the paradigm-shattering concept of “The Infinite Pipe.” This is one of three foundational posts from which virtually every other post in my five years of blogging is derived.
“The Infinite Pipe” — the history of human access to information over 200,000 years — reveals what’s happening to the entire mass-media business today, and why.
Part II — The end of the Mass Media era
https://mediareset.com/2012/04/30/part-ii-the-end-of-the-mass-media-era/
What happens when information goes from limited to infinite? Five basic changes that are swamping the mass media businesses in a tsunami far larger than we can imagine.
Part III — What about news?
https://mediareset.com/2012/04/29/part-iii-what-about-news/
In this post, five years ago, I threw down the gauntlet for the first time:
“So it’s time for a fundamental awakening in local media businesses. We need to stop thinking of our communities as places where news happens and we report it. We need to start thinking of our communities as places where people lead their lives and we help them do it. We need to figure how to provide solutions they will regard as essential in their own lives and will use over and over every day. News has its place in this, but it’s a far bigger assignment than news.”
In conclusion
Folks, the game isn’t over. But we will continue to lose if we don’t wake up to the fact that we are responsible for producing content that works in today’s information systems, for people who are living today’s lives.
It’s change or die.
Part I: The Mass Media bubble
Newspaper companies have fallen farther and faster in the last six years than anyone could have imagined.
Beginning with the third quarter of 2006, newspapers now have seen 22 consecutive quarters of declines in print ad revenues – a loss of 57 percent. And there’s no end in sight, as we’re seeing continued declines in 2012. Most analysts also see continued declines in the years beyond.
The recession was a big part of this, but for most of the U.S. economy, it ended in the summer of 2009 – nearly three years ago – with a return to weak growth. Yet newspaper ad revenues continued to plunge at double-digit rates in 2009 and 2010, easing to single-digit declines in 2011 with few signs of relief in 2012.
This is much more than a recession. What’s happening to the newspaper business, and why? Read the rest of this entry
Part II — The end of the Mass Media Era
(Part I described the “Mass Media Era” as a 150-year bubble that produced an incredibly profitable mass media business model — one that is now breaking down.)
Ask most people why newspapers have fallen so far in the last few years, and they’ll say, “The Internet.” And they’ll be right, in a simplistic sort of way.
But let’s look closer. What’s really happening is that the lopsided old “mass media” information system — a few providers sending limited amounts of information to huge audiences — is now being engulfed and dwarfed by an information system that is truly “mass” on both ends — sending and receiving.
Call it the Internet, but it’s really this: Read the rest of this entry
Part III — What about news?
Six years into a massive disruption of the newspaper business, most U.S. newspaper companies are driving hard toward solutions they hope will stop the revenue slide and stabilize the business. They are focused mainly on two things: driving costs down and driving digital sales up.
With revenues down by half since 2005, painful cost reductions have been keeping most newspaper companies alive and in the black. At the same time, some companies have achieved encouraging gains in digital revenue. But few have managed to fully offset their print declines, even in the most recent reporting periods.
So the business keeps shrinking.
Fewer people, fewer resources, more consolidations, more outsourcing, more partnerships, redoubled digital sales efforts … most newspaper executives probably believe they are rethinking everything.
But few are rethinking the assumption that news can be the heart of a successful local media model. Mostly, they’re just trying to produce as much news as they can with fewer people, distributing it on more digital platforms and selling more ads around it. They don’t seem to question whether news can generate the audiences and revenues they need to stay in business.
Here’s the brutal fact: News isn’t getting it done. Read the rest of this entry
MediaReset 