kirk lapointe's themediamanager.com: how the news business is changing

What a question: What do teens want? From its research, OTX believes there is no particular fix on the teenager. He/she/they want all sorts of things and it cannot be pinned down.
What its survey finds is that teens are spending an average of 11.5 hours online weekly. That feels hard to believe. Harder to believe is that the survey finds teens are not trying to do everything online. They still have lives quite apart from their computing ones.
They prefer to shop in a store than shop online. They would rather watch TV than a program online.
Of importance for media: They prefer to get their information from the Internet than from traditional media.

The Canadian newspaper industry has not experienced the same sort of economic revolution under way in the United States. Its revenue base, while not necessarily booming, isn't in the decline of its counterpart below the border. Indeed, with a wave of competition from free and niche publications, the daily newspaper has held its own as digital revenue starts to develop.
The Canadian Newspaper Association released data today on the first quarter of 2008. It shows daily newspaper print revenues down 2.8 per cent to about $608.8 million. The declines were more pronounced in eastern Canada; the West still is robust, CNA notes.
Apart from that print revenue, the online advertising piece added $39 million to the total (the methodology for gathering the material changed, so comparables are not available to 2007). What that indicates, of course, is that print revenue is still the overwhelming piece of ad revenue (about 93 or 94 per cent). Circulation revenue declined 1 per cent to about $201 million, so the importance of that stream remains.

At the risk of overworking the canine cliche, two new studies point to a transformational period in media. They indicate that print media are far from dying and that a new advertising model online isn't emerging the way people anticipated.
Roland Berger Consultants has created one of the most assertive studies on the strength of the print media in some time. He outlines nine theses on success in the next number of years: high-quality, investigative, niche, premium, even marketing, and so on.
The Publishing 2.0 site is one of the strongest around the media (r)evolution, as it terms it, but Scott Karp has diagnosed in his latest posting a real issue for advertising valuation in the digital sphere. Namely, advertising isn't adding value online, so advertisers are only paying a fraction of what they did for conventional media. He doesn't have a real prescription --- if he did, he would rule the world at this point --- but his analysis of the conditions is sound.

The challenge for newspaper companies is to venture into the digital space with the same prominence, and the latest Borrell Associates online revenue survey indicates they're doing that.
Newspaper online revenue surpassed $2 billion in 2007 in the U.S., which puts them ahead of all local media companies and accounts for some 27 per cent of the overall online revenue pie. Newspaper firms held a three-to-one advantage on television and Yellow Pages.
One of the more interesting findings in the survey was that non-newspaper advertisers accounted for a majority of the revenue for the first time --- some 59 per cent of the total.
Video is the fastest growing of the advertising and is expected to quadruple in 2008. And the survey indicated that extra staff for online sales pay off handsomely.

It is intriguing, to say the least, to read the new Associated Press Managing Editors/Missouri School of Journalism report (here's the AP story on it) on how editors and readers each approach online journalistic standards.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, editors are more conservative and readers are looser when it comes to some of the issues involving verification, sourcing and opinionated writing. But there are challenges for conventional media inherent in the study.
The report suggests readers want a loosening of restrictions when it comes to the online conversation.  They are seemingly fine with opinions --- or at least something beyond sheer stenographic reporting --- insinuated into copy.
Exactly what that is, isn't clear.
Editors themselves are more protective of their standards and on the conditions under which online journalism is created.
Now, there are some qualities that need mentioning: This is a U.S. study, where media are trusted less to begin with, so the debate about standards among editors and the audience may not be the same as in other countries. And I would suspect, too, that the audience doesn't really know all of the particulars on how journalists create and uphold standards, so those standards may on the surface seem to matter less to an audience (until something bad happens, at which time the standard matters more).

If you live in Canada, you have to bear with perceptions often groomed below the border. Case in point: The economics of the newspaper.
The economic convulsion in the U.S. newspaper industry hasn't hit Canada in quite the same way.
New data released Monday by the Canadian Newspaper Association points to a 2.4 per cent decline in revenue for print and 29 per cent online revenue growth, meaning the overall picture was down about 0.8 per cent in 2007. Total revenue reached $3.576 billion in the year.
In the U.S., of course, the numbers are much worse --- a 9.4 per cent decline in newspaper revenue. And the online growth was about 18.8 per cent, meaning the decline was sharper and increase duller.
The CNA report can be found through its site on a PDF file.
Updated Tuesday: A Canwest News Service story is here, and a Forbes.com item looking at how newspapers below the border might weather the storm is here.

There seems no other way around it: If advertising is to be effective in the digital space, it is going to have to learn more about user behaviour online and tailor messages accordingly.
One critical question involves the degree to which privacy rights are tested in the quest for more sophisticated ad service.
This frontier is well explored in today's New York Times' Bits feature on the NebuAd service in the United States. It gathers information through Internet Service Providers (it has a roster of small- and medium-sized ones) and categorizes what it calls the more "innocuous" categories of sites surfed, then matches ads with the user. It alerts users they're being observed and permits them to opt out.
There seems to be some sensible boundaries in the mix: NebuAd doesn't know who you are or where you are or even that you are one and not two or three or more users (an IP address is used by an entire household, for instance). And it chooses to exclude certain categories --- health and sex sites, for instance --- from the ad-serving roster.
The implications are significant, no matter that NebuAd is attempting to responsibly play in this space. The competing interests of commerce and privacy are going to have a challenging time playing nicely, but without some commingling, it is even more challenging to see where the new revenue models will originate.

Critical to the evolution of journalism is the development of a new digital business model to support it. We can whinge all we like about fragmented audiences and the challenges facing conventional media, but we have to spend more time creating a sustainable form of support on the digital frontier or the effort to redevelop and strengthen journalism will fall on deaf ears.
Recently a number of experts on online publishing have confronted the basic wisdom that advertisers should be measuring effectiveness of campaigns on the basis of click-through traffic.
This is a significant development because it stands to deconstruct a model that is barely off the ground. No sooner have advertisers started spending online and measuring their reach through traffic metrics than did experts come along and say it's the wrong way to measure.
In the latest Online Publishing Insider blog, David Koretz echoes a sentiment emerging in the field that it's necessary to change the advertising experience online and develop new metrics. Mainly, though, he's suggesting clicks can hurt an advertiser or mislead one about the reach of the campaign.
In managing media, finding this new experience amounts to one more layer of challenge.

When Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought Dow Jones, one expected result (of many) was that the Wall Street Journal 's subscriber-supported online model was going to be liberated to become a free service.
For a dozen years wsj.com has been only accessible to the paying customer. A number of other large media organizations, from the New York Times to our own company at Canwest, either compelled users to pay for some access (TimesSelect) or granted access either as an add-on to existing newspaper subscribers or to users who would pay a fee for the HTML version of the paper's eligible content.
Newspapers wrestle with this question on at least two main fronts: there is a value proposition for consumers in a paid-for product (they feel more loyalty to it and feel it is more valuable) and there is a significant revenue implication to abandoning a business model that depends partly on users (and not entirely on advertisers) to pay for journalism. The recent State of the News Media report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism affirmed concern about finding a new business model in the absence of a well-supported advertising-based media organization. After all, someone or something has to pay for news.
Even so, slowly but surely almost everyone has opted with varying degrees of reluctance to join the content-is-free club. Almost overnight the user traffic grows substantially, and in theory that traffic is the foundation to build a successful advertising revenue model to finance newsgathering.
When wsj.com loosened some restrictions earlier this year and permitted editorials, commentary and videos to be freely available, traffic grew by about 40 per cent to 23 million unique visitors a month. It was widely expected that was the first of a few steps to make the Journal's journalism free. Perhaps a premium service with extra content might be preserved for the paying customer, but the  general view was that any month now a free Wall Street Journal would be online.
But it's one thing to give up subscription revenue when you're early in the game, and quite another when there are about one million paying customers.
So Les Hinton, in his first interview as the CEO of Dow Jones & Co. with The Australian newspaper, says it's unlikely wsj.com will be free --- he's not saying never, just not now.

A critical challenge for newspapers is to engage non-newspaper readers now online.
A new comScore study has some interesting and positive findings.
It found that those who don't consumer a printed paper are, as one might expect, younger. But they aren't necessarily light news consumers. Quite the opposite, in fact. They visit a lot of news sites.
Both heavy and non-print readers frequently surf recognized news brands, which suggests the brands themselves have stand-alone qualities online.
And they like the TV brands online, pointing to the need for audio and video in any offering.