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Caught In The Web December 2005 • Vol.5 Issue 12 Page(s) 76-79 in print issue |
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Are Print Newspapers Dying? How Online News Is Transforming The Industry |
 Days before Hurricane Katrina ever reached inland along the Gulf Coast, millions of us knew of the devastation coming. We witnessed the natives evacuating at a snail’s pace on jammed highways and interstates, and we knew thousands were staying behind. Even in the midst of Katrina’s onslaught, we saw images of the Superdome being torn apart and violent rain and winds ripping entire Mississippi towns off the map. And then we viewed the immediate shock and disbelief etched on the faces of those left to somehow pick up the pieces. Even 10 years ago, staying up-to-minute current on such an event would have been impossible for most of us. We would have had to instead rely on radio broadcasts, hope for network news to interrupt regular programming, or wait until the morning newspaper hit the porch to read already dated details. In 2005, however, millions of us steered our broadband connections toward instant online news to view thousands of images and video clips and pour over first-hand accounts written nearly as quickly as reporters could type them. But we also hit Wikipedia to learn just what a hurricane is. We compared before and after satellite maps of flooded land at Google. We viewed 3D diagrams and flash animations of levees. We listened to podcasts and read often heart-wrenching blogs from those living the nightmare. In short, we used digital media resources to actively acquire news rather than wait for it to be handed to us. The related numbers are impressive. CNN.com claimed 10 million unique users visited its site Aug. 29 for Katrina coverage, accessing more than 130 million pages. Video clips were viewed more than 9 million times, and in just one hour on Aug. 30, CNN.com had 11 million page views. Viewers at MSNBC.com reportedly played nearly 50 million videos in the week following Katrina, with page views averaging 300 million, or 9 million unique viewers a day. According to ComScore Networks, NOLA.com, the online home of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, saw a 277% spike in traffic in August from July. WWL-TV, New Orleans’ CBS affiliate, saw a 258% increase in traffic on its Web site. Notably, half of NOLA.com’s spike resulted from users outside the region. This active pursuit of news is a trend that’s picking up considerable steam and depending on who you talk to, is one that’s shaking the foundation of some of the nation’s largest newspapers and other mainstream media. As more of us turn to CNN.com, Reuters.com, BBC.com, MSNBC.com, Yahoo! News, Google News, and even Wikipedia for news, subscriptions at daily newspapers are dwindling, translating into dwindling advertising dollars, translating into budget cuts and layoffs.  The State Of Newspapers “Unfortunately, I suspect we’ll see more budget cuts and staff layoffs over the next several years. It’s sad to see a vital industry go through such a painful transition as more readers abandon traditional print newspapers to go online for news,” says Patrick Phillips, an adjunct journalism professor at NYU and the editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site that focuses on news media. “In addition to stealing away potential readers, many new media forms are also taking away newspaper advertising, especially classifieds. Not only are readers being stolen, so is one of newspapers’ primary sources of revenue.” As of mid-September, various reports had The New York Times cutting as many as 700 jobs in 2005, including at The Boston Globe, due to slow ad-revenue growth. Knight Ridder had announced 75 cuts at The Philadelphia Inquirer and 25 at the Philadelphia Daily News. The San Francisco Chronicle reportedly cut 120 jobs, The Seattle Times up to 110, the San Jose Mercury News 52, and Newsday 45. I Want Media has tabulated that since June 2000, nearly 72,000 U.S. media-related layoffs have occurred. Consumers’ increasing attraction to digital news is easy to understand, considering how much content is available online and just how quickly news is posted and updated online thanks in part to huge staffs. Reuters.com has a global operations staff of 14,700 in 92 countries, including 2,300 editorial-related positions in 197 bureaus in 130 countries, says Azhar Rafee, senior vice president and global head of Reuters.com. CNN.com claims a staff of 4,000. According to research firm Hitwise, Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 154% in the past year and is gaining ground on leading news sites as the designation for those seeking breaking news. And although Yahoo! News and Google News don’t actually break news, they offer a wealth of immediate information from varied resources that print newspapers can’t compete with. Yahoo! News, for example, provides news from 12 partners, including the AP, Reuters, CNN, ABC News, NPR, USAToday.com, The Sporting News, E! Online, and daily newspapers. Google News uniquely gathers global news via computer technology, updating topics every 15 minutes and arranging it by relevance. Yahoo! News and Google News further their appeal by offering photo slideshows; email alerts; mobile news services providing text, audio, and video to mobile devices; and the ability to easily access archives, search news, and customize your news by putting local weather, stock quotes, sports scores, tech news, blogs, and more on one Web page. RSS news feeds have also proven extremely popular, especially among seasoned Web users. According to a Nielsen//NetRatings survey, RSS users view news at the top 20 news sites three times more often than non-RSS users (10.6 news sites to 3.4). “Most of the changes taking place with the digitalization of both news and entertainment are focused on personalization--giving the consumer what he or she wants when they want it,” says Phillips. “Having media cater more to one’s own needs should please many consumers.” News Fit To Post Perhaps the overriding advantage digital news outlets have over print newspapers is the ability to immediately provide news with both a textual and visual format. Simply reading news isn’t sufficient for most of us any longer; we want to see and hear it, as well. In this regard, some news organizations have completely overhauled their Web presence, specifically by bulking up on audio and video streams. “I think if you look at Hurricane Katrina you have the best recent example of why you need [text and video],” says Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com. “There are some aspects of the story that are best presented in text. There are some that are best presented in still images. There are some that are best presented in moving images. And a story like Hurricane Katrina had to be seen and heard and felt as much as it had to be read, and we could not have done as a complete of job in covering and presenting that story in its full scope without being able to offer video as one component of the coverage.” Gelman--a former CNNSI.com executive editor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer projects editor, editor-in-chief of ESPNET Sports Zone, and Newsday reporter--says the ability to get news online quickly isn’t limited so much by the publishing system, but more by how quickly information can be confirmed for accuracy and edited. “From the time a story is confirmed, we can get a red Breaking News banner posted to the Web site and an email sent out within 60 to 90 seconds,” Gelman says. “After that we can change the top headline on the site and the language associated with it as quickly as one can type and post. The next thing that we would do is find an appropriate image to associate with the new headline and description, and the next thing we would do is publish a full story, which can be anywhere from three paragraphs to a complete write, depending on how much information we have, and roll that out.” Monty Mullig, CNN senior vice president of Internet Technologies, says past news events such as Sept. 11 and the 2004 Presidential Election helped prepare CNN.com to handle breaking news quickly. Mullig says CNN “has a lot of affiliates that have relationships with us with whom we can ping video . . . for the Katrina story, we were probably taking in 30 to 40 feeds into the building at a time for our television operations. But we take them in once at CNN as raw footage, and the individual networks, including the Interactive property, can all access that footage.” After video is prepared, he says, CNN.com can “take a cut piece that was prepared for television and use it with new fonts, or we can edit it and cut it down or add video to it if we want to. It all operates out of a shared resource in the central news facility . . . that’s why we can have 30 to 40 video stories a day coming off the site. If you saw the Katrina coverage on the site, every story on the home page had a Watch button on it.” Reuters.com’s Rafee says Reuters recognized the importance of offering multimedia early on. “We’ve made a considerable investment in our multimedia offering. We’re a big supporter of the broadband and mobile markets; it’s simply good for our users,” Rafee says. “In 2003, we introduced Reuters Television, which is a competitively unique online video service free of charge to consumers. This video service offers both edited and raw footage of news events, as well as financial reports . . . earlier this year we announced various partnerships with mobile carriers, and plans are to expand our reach by providing text, pictures, and video across various platforms and handsets.” CNN.com also offers numerous broadband and mobile services, and Mullig says its R&D group focuses particularly on the mobile space and other broadband categories. “They work with the devices and look for new opportunities, especially for our video product.” Meet Mr. Citizen Journalist In addition to the digital perks online news sites can throw at consumers, newspapers are also seeing their space invaded by pubcasters (those who post podcasts) and citizen journalists, or regular citizens who gather, report, and present news. This new wave of journalists sometimes works in conjunction with traditional media (think of the Rodney King beating video), but they also publish their material as an alternative to mainstream media, often on blogs. A current example of citizen journalism is Yahoo! News’ Kevin Sites In The Hot Zone feature, in which Sites, a professional freelance journalist, is filing reports, photos, and video for a year in war-torn locations. In the strictest definition, though, citizen journalists aren’t trained reporters and are generally free of the constraints of remaining objective or unbiased in their reporting. While some see this as a breach of ethical standards, others find it refreshing that citizen journalists can report news locally for demographics often overlooked or ones that traditional reporters aren’t familiar with. So, while an article a single mother living in a poor, urban neighborhood writes on the local city council may contain biased opinions, advocates suggest it also represents a voice traditional media often neglects. “We don’t view it as competition. We view it as an opportunity,” says CNN.com’s Gelman. “Our job is to cover news. Traditional journalists cover news from the outside looking in. What citizen journalism allows us to do is to also cover news from the inside looking out, and in order to tell a complete story, we need both points of view. [CNN] has been doing it since before it was commonly referred to as blog or citizen journalism, back when it was just users and viewers sending email and images. We included a voice of our user within our coverage many years before it had been dubbed ‘citizen journalism’ or blog software was available to people to publish their own pages.” Whatever your stance on citizen journalism is, its impact can’t be denied, especially in the blog world. Bloggers are regularly breaking news, and readers are regularly turning to blogs first, especially in countries where the government censors the media. Many newspaper publishers have recognized the value of citizen journalism and are incorporating it into what they offer. For example, The State Publishing Company, publisher of South Carolina’s largest newspaper, The State, created TheColumbiaRecord.com, a site where local residents can post news, photos, opinions, and more. Similarly, The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News created YourHub.com, providing residents in about 40 suburban communities in the Denver region a place to post news. Elsewhere, the WashingtonPost.com is teaming with Technorati to provide links in online articles to blogs with related content. A company named Scoopt is offering amateur photographers a service to market and publish photos in global news outlets, splitting profits 50/50 with the photographer. In September, Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs let Wikipedia users edit an article scheduled to appear in the magazine’s November issue, and LA Times.com recently carried out a similar experiment. Branching Out Today, most newspapers as small as the weekly Ashland Gazette in Nebraska to a giant such as The New York Times have online sites where news is posted. This route seems the most obvious way papers can boost ad revenue and hold onto readers. A typical site will contain some, but not all, of what appears in the daily print version. Many newspapers only post partial articles, requiring a free or paid subscription to read entire articles online. Other papers are enticing readers by offering bonus material only available online. The New York Times, for example, recently began offering TimesSelect. With a home-delivery subscription or for $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year, TimesSelect gives readers access to exclusive content from op-ed columnists, including video of columnists speaking on current issues, book club discussions, and direct correspondence. TimesSelect also includes archives, multimedia features, personalized email alerts, and the ability to read material before it’s published. The good news for newspapers is that readers are apparently heading to their local newspaper’s site when going online for news. A Nielsen//NetRatings study from July 2005 indicates that readers in almost every top 10 local U.S. market read their local paper when seeking online news. The study had local newspapers claiming an average of 19% of local Web readership, with WashingtonPost.com leading all news organizations by reaching 30% of its local market. The exception among top 10 markets was Philadelphia, where USAToday.com grabbed a 9.6% share of local readers, topping Philly.com’s (which posts material from the Inquirer and Daily News) 9.2% share. Less encouraging is an eMarketer report. Positively, the study indicates online revenues for the newspaper industry went up 38% from last year, and first-half 2005 numbers show similar gains. Overall, eMarketer reports the online newspaper industry had about $1 billion in 2004 revenues. Negatively, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and MSN alone generate eight times more ad revenue than the entire online newspaper industry. Even with a stronger online presence, it’s apparent that the newspaper industry has much work ahead of it to increase declining ad revenue and hold on to dwindling subscriptions. If it’s not successful in reversing current trends, more layoffs and publications folding seem inevitable. “I don’t think that there are any quick and easy answers,” says Phillips. “Newspapers are run by smart people. If the solutions were easy, they would be taking advantage of them already. Newspapers are continuing to experiment with such things as blogs and charging for some online content. Newspapers have many challenges to confront.”  by Blaine A. Flamig Chart 1 (NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader) Chart 2 Chart 3
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