Will Marlow

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journalism

 
January 4, 2010
 

What's the Problem with Newspapers?

What's the problem with newspapers?

It's not complicated: Print revenue = shrinking.  Print costs = constant.  Online revenue = growing, but small, and online revenue isn't mature enough to replace the print revenue, yet. Right? 

Brand new paperless news organizations with nothing to lose are bathing in money.  Famous angel investor Marc Andreessen pumped money into Talking Points Memo in 2008, and in the middle of 2009 the blog The Business Insider closed its third round of investment in a $5 million round led by Andreessen.   Estimates for the value of the paperless Huffington Post range from $100 million to $200 million.  TechCrunch and Mashable are each estimated between $50 million and $100 million, and there are plenty of other examples of flourishing paperless news companies.  

Even though I'm someone who is sentimentally attached to the print edition, I think a hard break with regularly scheduled print editions is a better move for newspapers than the slow, painful decline that most are going through right now (like just went down at the Washington Times).

Here's an opportunity: if a great newspaper like the Washington Post eliminates 90% of its printing costs, it could print an occasional "Premium Edition" that is far higher quality and sells more like a book.  This strategy would be a variation of Seth Godin's theory of souvenir publishing, where most of his content is given away free, but his work creates demand for a printed book periodically.

PS - There are going to be tons of other ways for people to build innovative business models for news organizations. Click here for a cool new prototype of what online magazines may look like on tablet computers.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.  

Filed under  //   Media   journalism   journalist   newspapers  

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January 3, 2010
 

The Ideal Journalist

I was having a discussion with a journalist the other day about what combination of skills/traits are desirable in a journalist today.

We came up with some interesting thoughts.

According to us, the ideal journalist (without the support of a staff) should:

1. Be a great photographer.
2. Be a great videographer.
3. Be very well-versed in Photoshop and Vegas, not to manipulate images, but to build mashups of photos and videos to supplement stories.
4. Be a near-daily blogger to keep the most loyal readers updated on what she's doing.
5. Be an active "Twitterer," Tweeting both her own stories and the stories she wishes she wrote (that is, for creation and curation).
6. Use "bit.ly" links to track how many people click on her stories, so she could talk about how many readers she brings with her to whichever company she writes for.
7. Use Google Analytics or some other tracking software in her blog so she understands which of her story formats were most popular and successful, and she improve her presentation over time.
8. Be comfortable responding to readers in comment fields all across the web, and would setup various alerts to notify her when a reader was talking to her or mentioning one of her stories.
9. Have an online bio where she lays out her modus operandi, her standards, her skills, her background, and what readers should expect of her.
10. Have good grammar.

Personally, I think the only journalists who will have any job security or steady work in the years to come will be those who have a strong personal connection to their most loyal readers.  And to do that they need to understand how to produce stories that are optimized for the Web, not optimized for paper.

PS - If a journalist can do all this, and they manage to build a daily traffic of 2,500 unique visitors, a rough estimate for how much revenue they would get from advertising would be $60,000 a year.  That would be cool, especially because if you're smart enough to build that level of traffic, you're probably smart enough to develop other streams of revenue to supplement it.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.  

Filed under  //   Blog   Blogs   Media   blogging   journalism   journalist   newspapers  

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