Transition from print to online leading to less journalism jobs?

In a comment on Ken Doctor's thesis, that 22 is the ideal staff size for a news room, Jack Lail says: "By nearly every estimate, surviving the cataclysm of going from print+online to online only will mean a dramatically smaller number of journalism jobs in U.S. newspaper newsrooms (and that's understated)."

I'm sure the number of people performing classic journalistic work will decrease - but not necessarily the overall staff size associated with a brand. Instead, jobs keep getting more diversified - not only, but especially in journalism.

Print vs. online or why you should team up with your opponent

Online supposedly is print's worst enemy. Long time readers become online users who don't want to spend money on paper products (but prefer to spend money on high speed internet flatrates...). Companies spend their money on online campaigns, not print runs. Poor print folks. 

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer - right. So let's think about teaming up as an option. I'm not talking about your bread & butter website which accompanies your print product. I'm talking about using online specific content in print products. Think about paper magazines and their attraction to online users. Hey, it's still cool to be in a magazine, for example with your latest blog entry, or a quote about a product, or with a screenshot of your impressively detailed user profile. You could show it around even there where's no internet. Or where a small iPhone display would hide more than it could reveal. 

Or think about the reputation and publictiy many paper products still have. Collaborate with your online users, listen to them - and offer them an additional forum by publishing their sorrows in your paper. Collaboration with your online community should not stop at the front step of your print publication. Instead, open the doors widely and welcome your users. Let them participate, the more the better. Create tools, that make it as easy as possible to directly become part of a print product. It should be easy for writers and editors as well to find useful user generated content for their work. So let print and online team up. If you can't beat them, join them.

Digital shouldn't make analog habits easier - it should revolutionise!

In January's Wired issue Clive Thompson writes how the general availability of recording, editing and sharing tools for video begins to fundamentally change the way we use it - as a totally different medium compared to what it was in the analog world.

Making analog habits easier mustn't be the approach to go digital. Of course it's great to have a typewriter with delete function, but thinking that way really limits us.

Currently one of the best examples of what could be possible is a presentation tool that (finally!) drops the idea of having to navigate through slides as if using a slide projector: prezi.com - you need to check out the short demo.

I used to be sceptical towards so called live papers (mostly flash-based digital version of magazines with sound, animations that readers can flip through via mouse), and using Prezi ascertained me that live papers go in the wrong direction. Instead of just increasing the familiar analog experience of flipping through a magazine, we need to think of a completely different approach.

thanks @ netzwertig for pointing us to this great tool.

Use your Users

Ad based business is having a rough time. So it's not surprising that more and more people are claiming that targeted ads could do a lot better than classic display ads. But how can you target users of your website? Of course, by tracking their clicks and keywords of pages they visit and then grouping users into clusters which can be marketed to your clients. That's what everybody can do and many do already. Just imagine how much more you know about your users when they become registered users and fill their user profiles with interests, things they like etc. You could target even better. 

Google is not in the targeting business. Yet. Facebook is. Facebook is using user data and its apps to create revenue. That's an interesting model for media companies as well. Media companies have information and assets to attract users and they have (at least some of them) attached communities to keep them on their site. What many of them are lacking currently is a strong set of networking tools. Both for the editors and their users. These tools can connect users on your site with users from other sites, can connect editorial staff to users. Regard your editorial team as being a part of the community.

Learn from Facebook and the Facebook apps. They are giving away things for free (apps, API, SDK) and get something in return - marketing, done by users who spread the word. And apps which attract new users and keep them busy on Facebook. And - most important - they collect data about their user's likes and dislikes and other social data. That's more than you can do with classic web analysis. Apps and modules as part of your web analysis - if these modules are made available as widgets for other sites you also learn more about your market environment.

Users are the key for media companies. They can contribute, they can become partners. Business partners, that is. Because users and their data is a value, and companies will soon realize that Facebook and others are having a head start in collecting and using this data. For example, VentureBeat teamed up with DEMO for a panel to discuss how sharing social data across the net will affect business and users. I'm sure that providing users with tools will motivate many of them to contribute to your site, not only with content and presence but also with valuable data.

How to deliver targeted ads? That's another chapter. 

Ads are not enough - what a revelation

Surprise, surprise: many a media executive these days is cited that new business models are necessary as print revenues decline and online advertising doesn't continue to double each year. Not exactly a revelation, or at least it shouldn't be.

But what business models are possible at all? Suddenly the 10+ year old idea of paid content comes back to surface - but I strongly agree with Mort Zuckerman that such models simply aren't realistic currently.
We tend to pay for software / tools much quicker than for online content - but then, that's natural as it's much easier to see the actual and unique value of a tool that e.g. saves you time sorting through e-mail. Of course, media companies should be able to create valuable tools for consumers?

Walter Isaacson, who contributed the Time magazine article "How to save your newspaper?", sees quality regional journalism as especially worth saving for a nation, as it provides information necessary to be a good citizen. But then, why shouldn't a freelance journalist set up a market place where caring citizens (or organisations or communities...) can assign him to report from any townhall meeting online and pay him by task?

After now about 3 years of constant fight for changing from classic magazine publisher to modern media company, we learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. #1 lesson: affiliate partnerships - or as it's often called today: "lead generation" - won't fix the problem. The volume's just too small to supply a classic cost structure.

So what we're doing instead, is to really expand the core business, leveraging the portfolio / reach.
Production, dibstribution, exploitation of Online Games is such a field of activity, and a very promising indeed. We partner with a leading game development studio, the first game is released in May 09. A "normally" successful browsergame is worth a 6-digit-revenue per month. Could help, right?

And of course it's a constant struggle for more efficient processes and less overhead.

Any thoughts on what could save us media guys?

What comes after paper

A column at The Independent is betting Plastic Logic's "plastic paper" / eReader-device could be the real successor to paper. I had the opportunity to talk to one of their european executives, and I firmly believe in this product - though the first edition will aim at a business audience only (black & white, no animation capabilities, basically a comfy word doc reader).

I need this thing!

What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis: Top 5 Findings

“What Would Google Do?” by former-media-executive and blog-mogul Jeff Jarvis – catchy title, and it keeps the promise. It’s not a book about Google’s company history, not even on web- / media- / tech-topics, but a scholar’s interpretation of what kind of corporate mindset and behaviour is necessary to first benefit, then survive in the age of empowered customers, free information and dramatically changing laws of economy.

I definitely recommend you to get the book, though I heavily disagree with some views Jarvis expresses regarding business models: just because nowadays Google and others don’t make money from the business model they started with, doesn’t mean that a precisely thought-through business model isn’t necessary from the very beginning in a network economy – it just might happen to change as more connections are made and different values are created.

This is a work-in-progress-list of the IMO top 5 ideas Jarvis sketches in What Would Google Do? are (sorted by priority) – I’ll edit / change while finishing my reading (halfway through):

• Middlemen are doomed. If your business model is to be a bottleneck of information in an inefficient marketplace (as nicely explained on the example of realtors), then your days are numbered. Internally, we’ve started discussions on how journalistic work can add value as the information itself is omnipresent and content is created by amateur users faster than by any army of editors / writers. I think we need a totally different understanding of editorial work compared to what we, as a magazine publisher, are used to.

• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. Jarvis cites the (old – 2005!) thesis of economist Umair Haque predicting “the age of the blockbuster is past”. Entertainment media heavily rely on blockbusters, from World of Warcraft to The Dark Knight. So if Jarvis / Haque / Anderson are right (and I second that), we need to find a way to “enable, organize and monetize the abundance”. I.e.: one-size-fits-all-products will fit a decreasing number of people.

• Listen & Collaborate. “We know our audience’s taste, because we have so-and-so many years of experience” – that’s so yesterday. First, there’s not THE audience. Second, our user’s tastes depend on so many criteria that prediction is bound to fail. The process of creating and publishing content on the web has to evolve to constantly incorporate extensive testing / analyzing of user behavior and sharing ideas with “the audience”. Quote: “Join in conversations with customers. Ask people what you should do. Admit mistakes (!). … Your ceompetitive advantage is not htat your designs are secret but that you have a strong relationship with your community of customers. … It’s still your job to come up with good ideas, to invent, inspire, surprise – and to execute well.” Actually, the users are not OUR community, and they’re already doing what they want. Our privilege is to help them by sparking discussions with our content and of course by providing the tools.

• Think distributed. Not control (… of products, distribution...) earns a profit but creating connections. Our content shouldn’t be closed in into the walled gardens that many editorial websites still are. Jarvis writes: “That’s how companies and institutions should view themselves: on the outside [of the people’s me-spheres], asking to come in.” So we contribute to networks, and make content accessible and reusable, even editable. When we compose an editorial site, we decide to focus on certain contents / topics. Why shouldn’t interested users take the pieces and reassemble it in a different way? Why shouldn’t we give them access to our tools / technology and syndicate content? The idea is not new in the media business, and basically what Glam’s talking about. But from my point of view,Glam doesn’t execute the “create connections”-part very well – they’re much better at creating a story for advertisers and investors.

• Google diluted our brands – true for brands that stand for providing information / content. But trying to fight or even inverse this state would be denying reality – and, frankly, dumb. As Google-keyword stats show, many (in our case print) brands are still very lively – so we need to find out what exactly users are looking for and work hard to best possibly serve their needs. And we should embrace Google and add values (services, views, connections) that make us stick out from the other results.