Own the news community, not the news: How to save The New York Times

The New York Times searches for a futurist.

(click to jump to any section)

1) Introduction
2) The often-rumored death of print
3) Identifying print media’s real ailments
4) Faux solutions to misunderstood problems
5) Tracking the real solution
6) The new newspaper model
7) Own the news community, not the news
8) A renaissance of local coverage
9) Summary
10) Q&A

1) Introduction

The Times is seeking a seer. It’s attempting to recruit and develop a source of prescience to keep the mighty media ship from foundering on unseen shoals, or sailing off the edge of the Earth.

Specifically, the job is to identify 'threats and opportunities' to the Times' business. This double-edged sword is wielded by 'changes in technology and disruptive forces' (which usually mean the same thing these days).

Of course, the horse has already left the barn here. I was initially tempted to advise them to save their money. But the competitive media landscape has been misdiagnosed so often and so badly, that perhaps a better analyst is an investment that can yield meaningful results.

Certainly hiring a futurist is a far more discerning (read: cheaper) solution than dumping $400 mil on About.com. (More on that later.) Besides, as a wannabe futurist considering the problem myself, I’ve concluded that there is a way to steer the big ship into more profitable waters. [top]

2) The often-rumored death of print

The death of (periodical) print media has been ‘greatly exaggerated’ since the advent of the telegraph (which could break the news well before any paper). The funeral shroud has been aired afresh for subsequent tech developments from the phone to radio to TV to the Internet. The devilish dilemma is that all these predictions were correct - yet all of them were wrong.

Warren Buffet tells us to invest in a business with high barriers to competition. If we consider the communications business, it's plain that the term meant “anyone with a printing press” for quite a long time. As long as the demand for communications grew (as it has, consistently, since Guttenberg), anyone with the means to establish a printing business shared in the bounty.

When new technologies finally began to divide the communications cabal, the future looked cloudy. But early advances grew the market without cannibalizing the existing players. While the telegraph and telephone could break news much faster than any paper, these were relatively expensive technologies designed for one-to-one communications. They merely heralded the full story that would follow in the papers.

Radio was the first one-to-many (“mass”) media since the newspaper, and it (aside from the cost of the radio itself) was free. Many again predicted that the new technology would dwarf print. But the papers enjoyed inherent advantages of relative permanence, flexibility, and portability. A printed story could be accessed anytime, anywhere, and the articles could be as long as necessary. With radio, one had to be sitting in front of one's set during a broadcast, which vanished as soon as it aired. These complementary features (radio had immediacy, music and sound, while papers had pictures, etc.) allowed both media to prosper and co-exist in an expanding communications pie.

TV had pretty much the same weaknesses as radio, but sound, color, immediacy and animation offered additonal, compelling features that began to encroach on newspapers’ turf. The Internet offered new features such as unparalleled breadth, persistence, interactivity, and search, while matching the feature sets of print and TV except for three: simplicity, price, and easy portability. (And it was steadily eroding even those few remaining advantages.)

As the Internet’s feature advantages grew the communications pie, newspapers were unable to develop compelling new features of their own (aside from greater use of color). Instead, new content was attempted (new sections, new writers, new formats). Online, newspapers tried to become more like their Internet rivals, but the analog papers themselves could not develop any new, compelling, and unique advantages. Newspapers’ share of the communications pie shriveled, and concern over the death of papers reached new heights. [top]

3) Identifying print media’s real ailments

Let’s first cover what print’s problem is not. The decline in readership is not an unwillingness to read. In the decades before the explosion of the WWW, the media regularly offered up stories regarding how Americans no longer read (or wrote) ‘as they once did’. Blogs and the enormous number of websites out there demonstrate that this was never true. The world reads, it just demands content that meets its needs.

The demand for communications, while growing, is not growing fast enough to assure growth for all the players in the arena. This is a problem for everyone in the media game, but it is – surprisingly – most worrisome for some of the biggest players. Size and established presence no longer assure survival in today’s media world. Owning a radio station is no longer an assurance of profitability in the age of Internet and satellite radio. Mass TV audiences, for the most part, aren't what they used to be. Book publishing is doing well, but there are many more publishers splitting the take.

With media empires on the line, it’s no wonder the Times is looking for a futurist. Under these stressful circumstances, one couldn’t fault them even if they hired a tarot reader.

The press’ problem is not the public's preference of one media over another. The problem is that the channel, once controlled by a few in the press, has become an increasingly difficult place for anyone to assert their authority. There is no longer a way for the messanger to control the message, and the press’ business, since its onset, was predicated on such control..

Further, as the MySpace phenomenon reminds us, the message today comes not only from commercial sources, but from the vast community of readers as well. Today’s reader feedback is ungovernable, a far cry from the time when newspapers could dominate a handful of message channels. No longer can print media dictate reader feedback simply by determining whether to run an op-ed or letter to the editor.

This loss of control runs hard against the deeply embedded, top-down grain of media culture. This is particularly true for a paper such as the Times, which considers itself the final authority over what’s ‘fit to print’. In many cases, media’s resentment over power and authority lost to readers has spilled over into print.

Media believes it has made its peace with this cultural conflict, but it has actually only masked the symptoms. In order for newspapers to become relevant again, they need to confront this cultural change at a much more profound level. (I’ll return to this in upcoming chapters.)

Hand in hand with the loss of control over the news channel (and therefore, the news) comes a new struggle to make publishing profitable. Again, as Mr. Buffet says: Business profits are a function of demand and monopoly. If the demand is there, and the competition is not, you're Bill Gates. If either the demand goes or the competition arrives, profits dwindle. Why was AOL THE hot stock of the late 80's and early 90's? Because what little 'Internet' there was, came through them. AOL controlled the channel and the community. (They barely concerned themselves about controlling, or even creating, content.) Why did the stock go bust? Because so many alternatives for connection and community emerged that AOL's virtual monopoly vanished almost overnight. This seems self-evident in hindsight, but few (especially among those closest to the situation) saw it coming.

At the moment, the Times' can still draw a relatively large audience, for which advertisers will pay a premium. What's alarming for the paper and its stockholders is the rapid erosion of those numbers caused by the incursion of new, alternative channels. As stated earlier, it’s become increasingly difficult for media to ‘own’ a message. In an age of commoditization of news, the Times is only as relevant as the crowd it can attract. [top]

4) Faux solutions to misunderstood problems

By now, the Times is learning (if not quite acknowledging) that its $400 million purchase of About.com was a colossal misjudgement. The Times assumed that, since blogs are popular, purchasing a large blog would somehow shelter it from audience erosion.

Some media visionaries assert that what the public wants is newspapers delivered in a whole new medium. Those electronic papers we see in Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report’, for example, are hyped as a newspaper savior. The theory goes that this is because the new medium would allow papers to enjoy the same advantages of animation and instant updating (and sound?) that the ‘net enjoys.

Cool as it seems, faith in this technology as newspapers’ (and trees’) savior unravels when one considers that these devices will be able to access the rest of the ‘net as well as whatever the papers produce. In fact, with electronic paper devices, papers will lose one of their last remaining advantages – portability. We’re still left with the question of why readers will turn to the Times rather than blogs, Drudge, BoingBoing, Yahoo News, or some combination thereof.

Aping TV or the ‘net won’t solve newspapers’ declining readership problems. Neither will buying or starting blogs. What newspapers need is to regain a feature advantage over its competition, such as it once enjoyed when it competed only with radio, telephones and telegraphs. Technology, which floats all boats, won’t deliver this advantage. The papers will have to look somewhere they haven’t yet thought (or cared) to explore. [top]

5) Tracking the real solution

Of all the blog properties $400 million could buy, why did the Times choose About.com? One reason was that it resembled the Times’ corporate vision of the way blogs should behave: Orderly and top-down. In other words, a reflection of the Times’ concept of journalism – and a dated, heavy blog model.

The kind of blog showing vitality right now is not About, but MySpace, which runs counter to the Times’ corporate vision. Few corporate leaders have the stomach to acquire (and be identified with) a MySpace. Fewer still (if any) know what to do with them once they’ve got them.

What the Times must do is bluntly confront its core approach to journalism, which is failing to find purchase with new audiences. To save the paper it must re-examine its attitude toward content creation, in ways I will examine in the next two segments. This will be an extraordinary cultural struggle, and will require a good deal of internal education, prodding and regular course corrections. [top]

6) The new newspaper model

Clearly, the Times bought About because blogs were seeing explosive gains in readership, while newspapers were seeing declines. The perception (probably a correct one) was that people increasingly preferred to get text-based news from blogs and other online sources. How this purchase would result in gains for the paper’s main business, however, was never clear.

What the Times should have done before (or, rather than) signing the check was to study blogs as a guide to identify just what the public found lacking in the mainstream media. Clearly, the paper was not prepared to do this. It not really understand blogs, did not know what it was looking for, and was unprepared for substantial change. The paper hoped to buy into something it did not really understand. Indeed, at around the time of the purchase, Times executive editor Bill Keller dismissed blogs as ‘looking at the world through a pinhole’.

Whether or not Keller was right about blogs doesn’t matter. What matters is that this was all the Times understood about blogs at a time when it was paying $400 million for one (technically, a network of them). At that price, it must be some pinhole.

To understand the new path newspapers must take, one must study the contrast between the sharp growth of blogosphere readership and the sobering decline of newspaper readership. What compelling core factor is driving their fortunes in such polar-opposite directions?

I believe the key issue is central control over news: Newspaper and blog readers want to be participants. Frank Moss, head of MIT’s Media Labs, says:

“No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them... The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.”

The BBC likewise noted: “Media are becoming democratised, and a global conversation is emerging.

The tools of production - used to create digital content such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games, mashups - are increasingly powerful and easy to use, yet decreasingly expensive.

Distribution is also becoming less expensive and easily arranged. . . . The democratisation of media is also, fundamentally, about the people we once called mere consumers. Their role is evolving from a passive one to something much more interactive, but they are blessed (or cursed, depending on one's viewpoint) with an unprecedented variety of voices and services.”

Largely unrecognized is the important difference between the user getting his/her information from the ‘net (blogs, etc.) and the user getting information from radio or TV. That is: the former wants interactivity, the latter accepts input passively. This is true even when the ‘net user and the TV watcher is the same person. A TV viewer turns on a ballgame for a passive viewing experience. When that same fan wants to interact, he goes to the ‘net for baseball info.

Until the web emerged, newspapers were the most interactive medium (letters to the editor, op-eds, etc.). Newspaper readers as a rule do not share the more passive nature of TV viewers, and they often pick up the local paper to see what their neighbors have to say. (This is similar to behavior on the ‘net, where ‘opinion’ is followed almost as closely as ‘news’.) ‘Local’ papers in particular have long addressed their readers as a ‘community’ to one degree or another, and blogs/sites create their own communities. TV/radio by contrast do not by their natures foster community interaction.

Newspapers underestimated the cumulative chafing under years of central news control over a readership which, apparently, has long desired a greater voice in news coverage. These frustrations have been widely and passionately expressed on blogs, particularly in their early days when feelings had been long pent-up. It’s telling that most media commentary on blogs concerns newspaper and other written coverage rather than TV or radio news.

Why do newspapers deliver news created from the top-down? Ask someone steeped in newspaper culture, and they may tell you that this is the natural and right way of things, that this is the model that ‘proved out’ over centuries of experience. Newspaper folk know best. But actually, the top-down shaping and dissemination of news is habit, and has never been tested against another model. The technology to deliver news using ‘Wiki’ models did not exist until recently. And in print media’s early days, few channels existed, so that a handful of powerful men made news decisions.

Many, if not most, newspapers believe that putting their content online (along with some sound and motion) constitutes a bold change in the way they deliver news. Instead of learning to adjust its failing publishing model, the Times and other papers tried to graft a ‘blog appeal’ they barely understood onto it.

Two important facts about newspapers can be learned by studying and researching blogs:

1) We can discern that such a thing as a ‘news community’ exists. This community, or communities, revolves around issues covered by newspapers, or the papers themselves. This community congregates around the various blogs covering the issues they feel passionately about. The commentary on news coverage is, to them, as important as the news itself. Put another way – the commentary is inseperable from the news.

2) Frustration with top-down news creation has been amply demonstrated via the tremendous, unforseen proliferation of blogs and Wikis. Distrust of the prevalent institutional news model far outweighs support for it in online forums.

Once we understand these lessons, the new mantra for newspapers becomes clear: [top]

7) Own the news community – not the news

The new Times will work very much as the old Times has, with reporters and editors making the usual decisions on coverage and approach. However, the online paper (and eventually, the analog paper) will resemble a Wikipedia page.

Like Wiki, all stories will be heavily annotated and ‘corrected’ by readers. Certain constraints will be instituted (time limits on responses, and readers will rank commentators, conferring certain commenting privileges on some readers, denying them from others) to keep friction to a relative minimum.

The impact of these community-built online articles won’t be fully felt in print news until that Minority Report e-paper technology becomes available. Print editions will run at least one Wiki-based article per section (one on the front page, one in Metro, etc.). Footnotes right alongside the text will summarize the first hour or two of online comments before the paper went to press. (Full interactive commentaries will only be available online.)

Each story will attract its own online commentators – ‘mini-communities’ who will shepherd the thread while the story remains news.

This social investment in articles will generate far greater interest in the Times than the author blogs or segregated commentary areas with which the paper has been experimenting. Such measures hold readers at arm’s length, perpetuating their sense of frustration. In this new model, readers will be involved directly in the shaping of stories. Blogs will, in turn, comment not just on the stories, but on the commentators crafting the message. Interest in the Times’ coverage will skyrocket as it builds its community through this bold innovation.

For those who feel the Wiki model results in amateurish, inaccurate writing, this Times article confirms that such concerns are yesterday’s news. There are proven ways of bringing a sizable community of readers into the process without plunging into chaos. Times writers and editors will still lead the news-shaping process, as they must. They will merely have a different relationship with their audience than they have known.

It’s easy to anticipate the deeply-felt objection of reporters and editors to losing their accustomed control over the news. But that control is mostly illusory today. The Times no longer controls the news. Rather, it distributes news as raw material for a world of commentators to reshape. In this new, social news model, the paper merely acknowledges this fact and incorporates the best commentary directly into the story.

In this new model, the news is free. Attempts to control news are pointless anyway. What the Times can control – and what is, after all the only monetizable aspect of the paper – is its community. It can control its community/audience/readership in the sense that it can empower and grow it.

Through this reinvention, newspapers such as the Times will finally take full advantage of their text foundation’s greatest strength, building an advantage that distinguishes them from other communications media. Radio and TV cannot be annotated so efficiently, and cannot achieve this MySpace-like sense of community. (Case in point: YouTube, a heavily trafficked video clip site, generates far less commentary, reader for reader, than a medium-sized blog.)

In this way, the Times will become much less a centrally-controlled arbiter of taste and opinion, and more a central framework to which a great community will attach itself. It will become a MySpace (MyPaper?) for the well-informed (or merely opinionated), an eBay for ideas. [top]

8) A renaissance of local coverage

Coverage of regional issues should benefit greatly from this approach. The Times covers outlying regions via reporters who are not indigenous to those areas. The coverage loses a lot in translation, because the reporters just aren’t close enough to the issues. At the same time, local papers often do a poor job in their own backyard. A Wiki approach to local issues, built on the Times’ high-profile platform, might raise the paper’s local coverage to a point where it becomes readers’ first choice for local news. Local news treated this way holds significant promise for growing a great news community around the paper. [top]

9) Summary

This is not your father’s (or your grandfather’s) paper. It’s not like any paper that’s come before. It’s not that those papers were misguided – the means to make them what they were meant to be did not exist. This new model could not have been suggested or understood ten or more years ago.

These changes will place a great stress on institutional culture and deeply-held beliefs, since they demand a real loss of control/power for many. Institutional resistance will be considerable. This increasingly apparent solution sits in a great blind spot of media’s all-seeing eye.

Hanging on to illusory control over news will certainly lead to this much-linked ‘EPIC’ scenario describing the demise of the Times and other papers. Rebuilding text-based media properties as new Town Squares could lead to a great rebirth for any papers courageous - or desperate - enough to brave the attempt. [top]

10) Questions and answers

Q) Aren’t the issues the Times covers too controversial to be handled using a Wiki model?

A) No more so than the issues Wikipedia covers, and it has learned how to handle (and even incorporate) controversy.

Q) But the Times is a major corporation. Can it afford to handle news this way?

A) The way things are going for the Times, can it afford not to? In terms of major corporations operating ‘social’ news-gathering operations, AOL has recently instituted a version of this very model which it is running under its Netscape brand. AOL is obliged to create new methods of income creation, since it has abandoned charging for connection services.

This Netscape innovation was pioneered within AOL by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. He was blogged frequently on the fierce resistance to instituting this new model that he encountered within AOL.

Q) How can you argue that, after centuries of perfecting the form, newspapers should suddenly function in some other way?

A) I’m not making that argument. Millions of former Times readers are making that argument. I’m merely pointing it out.

Q) Reporters have years of experience at newspapers and journalistic training. Shouldn’t we leave reporting to the best-qualified people?

A) Newspaper reporters are absolutely the best-qualified people to write about newspaper reporting. On any other subject, however, they do not represent the best expertise – rather, they represent a filter between the reader and those with the real inside track. Filters, by design, keep things out, and they cannot keep undesirable elements out without affecting desirable ones as well.

Q) So you’re saying get rid of reporters and editors?

A) No, I’m saying that reporters and editors will need to make serious adjustments in their approach to this business in this new newspaper model. And they need to get behind this new newspaper model if they want to avoid its further deterioration.

Q) What exactly is the ‘new newspaper model’?

A) The new model is one in which a ‘news community’ shapes stories. From a business point of view it acknowledges that news today is a commodity, and that no good business model can be built around a commodity which is so freely available.

Things were different when there were few communications channels and news could be somewhat monopolized and controlled. Then, a business based on the selling of news was possible.

In that era, the Times controlled a sizable audience because it controlled a news channel. Today, controlling that audience is still the key to healthy profitability, but that control won’t come about because the paper finds a new way to control the news. That genie won’t go back in the bottle.

Instead, they key to maintaining a large audience is engaging and building a news community around the paper. Just as eBay uses auctions to build an auction community around its site, just as MySpace caters to the (mostly) young and disenfranchised to build their enormous teen community, the Times must learn to use the commodity of news to build an online news community that will become the new founudation of its various publications.

Not only that, but the Times should build this community before AOL or someone else cracks the code. One need not always be first with these ideas. MySpace followed the similar Friendster – they just did it better – and Google was hardly the first search engine. But while one need not always be first, the first to ‘get it right’ usually dominates a market.

The Times is well-positioned to do news ‘right’. But will it? Or will USA Today or another competitor get there first, and drain away competitors’ skills and talent with the superior resources it will command?

Q) Isn’t the Times already dealing with ‘news as commodity’ via TimesSelect?

A) TimesSelect demonstrates several of my points. It suggests that the paper is very aware of news as a commodity, and is attempting to counter this problem by charging for opinion. The theory seems to be that readers will want, say, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and John Tierney’s opinions enough to pay for them.

TimesSelect also suggests that the paper is not institutionally ready to face the loss of control and other cultural challenges that my new model demands. The Times sees that news is a commodity, so it attempts to make its profit from a form of ‘news-related content’ that it can control.

Likewise, it discerns from blogs that users want more interaction. It attempts to offer this, while still keeping readership at arm’s length from actual news content. It does this by purchasing About.com and creating many author-based blogs. Here again, the Times shows that is just not ready to leave its comfort zone.

How has TimesSelect changed the paper’s fortunes? WHile the paper can point to some income from the effort, in terms of turning the paper’s fortunes around it has been a failure. MediaBistro gave it ‘two thumbs down’. Slate snickers that the paper made their columnists ‘second class citizens in the blogosphere’. Charles Warner guesses that “The WSJ has been extremely successful with this subscription model, but the Times is coming to it a couple of years too late”, Editor and Publisher says the paper’s goals “won't be met with TimesSelect subscription numbers in the tens of thousands”, and PressThink philosophizes “If one faction wanted to go the Wall Street Journal's pay wall route, and another wanted to remain free like the Post, then TimesSelect is not a hypothesis for how to succeed on the Web, but just a mid-point between competing theories. That alone is reason to worry.”

The purchase of About was viewed more positively (no doubt, many commentators had visions of being bought out themselves). Here again, however, there is no evidence that the purchase has had or will have any meaningful impact on the paper’s fortunes.

What’s telling about these moves is what they reveal about the Times’ inability to face the real, difficult choices it faces head-on.

And now, the paper is hiring a futurist to suggest its future course. Will the paper listen to its new hire? If past is prologue, it seems unlikely. This NY Times’ ‘Digital Timeline’ does not recount a single online initiative that has impacted the print version’s functions.

Q) If the paper becomes like Wikipedia and incorporates all these new voices, won’t that affect the paper’s unique POV in reporting news?

A) Does the Times really want to be ‘the paper of record’, or does it want to be the paper that forces its POV on the world? I suggest the latter may please some already-sympathetic voices, but it won’t change many minds.

Being the ‘paper of record’ is a noble goal, worth striving for, and worth making some institutional changes for.

Q) Just what are the Times’ editors and writers supposed to do while the rest of the world is writing their paper for them?

A) It’s not like that at all. The paper won’t be Wikipedia, which is written more-or-less entirely by volunteers.

For that matter, Wikipedia is not quite the free-for-all that’s generally been reported. There is a good deal of structure and discipline among those who make it go. Contributors earn their stripes, and it will be no different at the Times.

Reporters and editors will still initiate coverage. The difference is that a lot of the barriers of self-interest will have to come down. The public (a segment of them, anyway) will wade right into those stories and interact. They won’t be exiled to the letters page or possibly the odd op-ed anymore.

What reporters and editors will do is act as traffic cops and help guide the process. They can no longer smother alternative views because they don’t support the points they hope to make. Conflicting views will have to be incorporated into the coverage.

The new publishing model won’t tell readers what to think - instead, it will help them think, and form their own opinions. It will actively engage, not passively entertain, many thousands of participants. It will open doors to expertise which have previously been closed. It will have elements of political interaction previously unknown in newsrooms (horsetrading with the publiic to reach a consensus on issues).

It will vary from Wikipedia in that the stories will be written much more quickly than that site’s stories. Reporters raw, early drafts will go online where higher levels of the news community will have access to them. Eventually the stories will reach ‘lower’ levels, and as they become polished the general public will see and comment on them. Reporters and editors will work this process all the way through. [top]

MORE: A couple of years after this post, more thinking on this subject.