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Windsor Digital

Handmade digital strategy from the heartland.

$50 to the first API participant to out this newspaper exec.

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I will send a fresh $50 bill to the first participant of the API Newspaper Crisis summit to out this guy or gal:

One participant expressed the lone view that the crisis was cyclical, not structural, and that hefty cost-cutting is all that is required to tide companies over until there is recovery.

Seriously. We need to know who’s forgotten to sip from the clue bottle for the past five years. This isn’t checkbook-journalism. It’s public service journalism, with a reward.

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Comments

  1. If this sort of crisis were cyclical, newspaper staffs wouldn't change drastically over a long period, and neither would content.

    Newspapers (and I'm betting broadcast outlets, but I don't have any experience there) lay off a chunk of staff, say 10%, to alleviate a crisis. Then, when people complain that they can't handle the work load after the paper stabilizes, the paper hires a half dozen admin assistants or interns to retype press releases as “news,” then when they hit another crisis, another 10% staffing reduction happens.

    If it were actually cyclical, they would lay off 10% of the staff, stabilize, grow, hire as many back as they could convince to come back, and the next time they laid off 10% of the staff, the paper would be down maybe 11.5% over the original staffing level, not the 19% you're down with two rounds of layoffs (the second time you lay off 10%, you're laying off 9% of the original work force — it's actually 10% of 90%, but now I'm just doing math in circles).

    I look at newspapers the same way that I'm looking at auto manufacturers right now: call it a crisis all you want, but if you're not giving people what they want, they're not going to buy your product, crisis layoffs, government bailout, whatever. Don't try to tell them what they want, ask them, and then make it happen.

  2. Do you really think any CEO would bite for a mere $50? … Well, times are tough. Maybe! … More likely, you'll entice an API staffer to leak. 🙂

  3. It's kind of a joke, in that no CEO *would* bite, right? Unless things are so bad…

    I just had to do something to draw a little attention to that particular jaw-dropper. The usual carefully considered chin-stroking seemed to be not enough in the face of such absurdity.

    Unlike some, despite the super-secrecy of the event, I think there was value in the API summit. Anytime you get 50 newspaper executives with the power to do something to talk about how bad things have gotten, that's more progress than if they'd simply stayed siloed off in their home markets, sweating the looming Q1 2009.

  4. And if I *did* hear from someone at API, I wouldn't use it. Though I'd probably still pay, if only to have a killer story to tell the next time I find myself pub-crawling with Alan Mutter and Jeff Jarvis.

    🙂

  5. The end is nearer than I thought when Steve Miller is being brought in to advise the newspaper industry (I read at the API site that he spoke with the CEO guys at a luncheon). The last big company he unfortunately had to manage into bankruptcy was Bethlehem Steel (it wasn't his fault, but rather, the decades of structural hurdles that had calcified within the US steel industry.) When I covered Beth Steel while it was still active in Baltimore, he was its CEO.

  6. Also, I thought this was another interesting graf: “Fewer attendees spoke to changes on the content side, though there were a few calls for radical rethinking of newsrooms.”

    Hello API folks: Newsrooms at many daily newspapers absolutely need to be reinvented, from the top down and from the bottom up. There is a tremendous amount of irrationality that goes into producing the content and leveraging that content between print and web.

    For instance, if you take a look at a newspaper front page and the top 10 or 20 most-trafficked stories on any given day, there's a good chance that at least one front page story (or more) is not even in the 10 most viewed. Despite good “play” on a site. So, what does that tell us in the news business about what our online readers want? Are we providing them we something they need, online? I would say, no. We are taking the news judgment of the print model — limited to our geographic scope and lacking interactivity — and foisting it onto a news website. The audience forces at work in both media are different, yet, still more art than science, in terms of trying to understand the dynamics.

    Tim, I would love to hear your take on this. Because in my own time, I've seen story taffic report after story traffic report that make me wonder: Why the frack are we still writing stories, at big metro dailies, that only get 1,000 to 2,000 pageviews? In a city that has hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people, a story that gets such low interest would suggest low value to readers, in my view.

    If I was to reinvent a newsroom, the very first thing I'd do is order up an audit of online stories and their online traffic numbers. I'd classify and group stories and figure out which types or categories simply do not play well online — and either choose to not clutter a website with them and keep them in print only, or don't write them at all.

    Not only do we need our leaders to embrace new technologies, they need to start using the great number of analytical tools at their disposal to start making smart moves on how they use their staff, to get the biggest bang for the buck. If I can free up 10-20 percent of my newsroom staff from writing nonsense that goes nowhere on the web or in print, what else can I get them to be doing? Maybe managing a web community? Producing more video? Working on more indepth projects and real journalism, not the hamster-on-a-wheel journalism that the current print/web metro news daily operation has become? Helping develop new killer web apps one day a week with the website staff?

  7. Gus,

    I'm running, so this will be dashed off quickly. Pardon the wreckage.

    I think there are two factors: readership and investment of time. A crime blotter story that gets 2,000 pages is a good thing, imo, in that it's the perfect long-tail story. It appeals to a certain number of people, and it is produced quickly. Where the worry comes in are with the big multi-month packages and series which get very little readership. We can write that off as the cost of good public-service journalism, but if few people are reading it, are we truly doing our jobs?

    Finally, somewhat on contradiction to my previous point, some stories are effective because they're read a low number, but in that low number are influential people who can make a difference. If I remember correctly, the Ground Rent story wasn't a blockbuster for readership, but it brought about change because it was a runaway hit in the halls of government.

    So, we have to be careful not to simply become Randy Michaels, using story-counts or readership statistics as blunt weapons.

    All of that said, though, yes readership is a very good general indicator of the interest of the general audience, over time, for particular topics and coverage areas and we should use those figures to redirect resources appropriately.

  8. Thanks, Tim. Sure, we should always pursue stories like the Ground Rent series. No doubt. I think it did fairly well online, too.

    What I think is a greater challenge, as big metro dailies have shrunk, is dealing with the proud history and legacy of being able to report everything (or that myth that we used to be able to do that.) The staff size is no longer there at such newspapers to be comprehensive. Despite many saying our future is in hyperlocal, daily metros were 10x more hyperlocal 5 or 10 years ago than they are today.

    That said, I think to survive, our industry is going to be forced to make very difficult decisions in editorial, and I don't just mean layoffs. I mean story selection. I mean turning more toward using social media and UGC, and — your idea — becoming more like curators and organizers of information.

    Case in point: There are certain standard stories we do at newspapers that come with the territory of big stories. One example: a “reaction” story. What do people think of a big news event? A reporter or two or three spends their day interviewing some talking heads, some “men on the street”, and a politician or two. And then writes a story that tells the world how people reacted to a particular news event.

    This works fine in print. We've done these stories practically forever. But, on the web, as a reader, if I want to gauge peoples' reactions to a news event, I'll check out discussion forums, comments under the hard news stories, blogs, tweets, etc. The reaction is almost instantaneous online.

    Doing a “reaction” story these days almost feels quaint — yet well-paid reporters and editors spend tons of time doing this type of story every week at every daily paper. It probably makes more sense to have a reporter or editor manage and facilitate a community discussion, where people are reacting, interactively, online. Such an effort would be so much more rich and worthwhile to readers.

    So basically, right now, I'm saying, nothing is sacred. We need to question everything we're doing — and why — and make some tough, ruthless decisions. And fast.

  10. There are no words…

    This person should be fired immediately for gross incompetence.

    The real question isn't who said this, but rather how many other newspaper execs quietly believe this?

  11. There are no words…

    This person should be fired immediately for gross incompetence.

    The real question isn't who said this, but rather how many other newspaper execs quietly believe this?

  12. There are no words…

    This person should be fired immediately for gross incompetence.

    The real question isn't who said this, but rather how many other newspaper execs quietly believe this?