“It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

If you’re among the majority reading this that has never bought one of my books in a bookstore, not much will change. But I thought I’d share with you this fork in the road. Thanks for reading, in whatever form you choose”.

Godin talks about his largely positive relationship with the book industry, while noting that “the architecture of [the] industry is fundamentally broken.”

Well, worth a read by journalists and those that pay them, as we face fundamental questions like how much do journalists need publishers, and how much do publishers need journalists?

In the old days, publishers were a taken-for-granted necessity. Of course, publishers owned the presses, and the presses printed journalism. Or the station owners held the station licenses and the technology needed to create programs. Now the Internet is the press and the station and so much else, a pipeline of universal and always-on distribution. Many obstacles still loom, like getting readers and viewers to know your stuff is out there on the web, yet new writers and groups of journalists are finding ways to get to audiences.

For publishers, outsourcing — to Demand Media for niche content, to bloggers for local content, to India for copyediting — is increasingly a way to cut costs while increasing the amount of content under their brands.

Make no mistake: Big news brands — like big book publishers — still have many advantages, but in a Facebook-sharing, Twitter-spread world, direct-to-consumer sales of book, and journalism, offers new promise.

]]> http://newsonomics.com/seth-godin-this-will-be-the-last-book-i-publish-in-a-traditional-way/feed/ 0 http://newsonomics.com/dept-of-newspaper-irony-chandler-scion-goodreads-founder-updates-the-book-section/ http://newsonomics.com/dept-of-newspaper-irony-chandler-scion-goodreads-founder-updates-the-book-section/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:48:02 +0000 Ken Doctor http://newsonomics.com/?p=12562 L.A. Times Media columnist Jim Rainey has a knack for finding good stories about the news media and telling them well. This one, he found under his nose, or somewhere within the bowels of the mothership.

Young Otis Chandler — generation six of the family that built the Times into one of America’s great papers — talked about his four-year-old Goodreads, a social book review site that has grown to 1.7 million unique visitors a month, a 65% jump from a year ago. What Goodreads does is embrace the web and book reading, “hosts reading clubs, gives away books, sponsors author chats, offers literature quizzes and generally dissects and celebrates writing”. The website has 3.5 million members. In short, it does the kind of things that the Times flagship, or any of the companies owing papers like the Times could have/should have done, some time over the last 15 years. After all, newspapers used to be go-to places for weekly book reviews, and as editors we fought like hell to preserve book review space, even though ad departments couldn’t sell ads on those pages.

But, once again proven, it takes fresh eyes to do it.

Rainey asked Chandler how he thinks his grandfather Otis, who built the modern Times and died in 2006, would have thought about Goodreads. Noting that Chandler didn’t even own a computer, he said.  “I think he would think that I am going in the right direction.” Indeed.

So if young Otis has modernized the book section, what other traditional newspaper sections are still ripe for digital modernization?

First up this a.m. is Suzanne Yada’s good, detailed take on all the little social, interactive, map-based and other smart things the site has done. It’s a lot of little things done right, and culled from years of its founders’ experience on the web. Her big complaint: Not enough news, and not enough people to create local news.

Meanwhile, check out:

• Editor Erik Wemple’s welcoming letter, laying out some basics of the site.
• PaidContent’s interview with Robert Allbritton, who runs the company behind TBD, and Politico.

More to come.

I chose to focus on social media’s huge impact on and nexus with news, both on reading choices and on the emerging business models of our time. An excerpt from the piece:

“Stated simply: I am the new home page.

Stuff gets to our pages in all kinds of ways, including the semi-serendipitous sharing. All of this, while interesting, might be just prologue.  News aggregation is young on Twitter or Facebook, and even on the old folks, Google and Yahoo. Very first-generation, very primitive, and done by amateurs for amateurs, largely.

So a looming question is who will emerge to lead the younger generations in bringing content together? Creating hybrid products? Weaving news onto social platforms? Socializing on a news platform? Other yet-to-be envisioned iterations?

Journalists ought to be among those who embrace these challenges – make them part of what they think about and do every day, and have their experimentation go beyond their own participation as individuals in this social sphere. We’ll learn by trying new ways of doing what we’ve done with news, by putting ourselves visibly in the social media mix, and by using the emerging tools of daily communication in all aspects of our work. It’s not enough to watch from the sidelines, or even to try to mimic what kids do”.

Edited by Melissa Ludtke, the full report is here.

Which got me thinking about the growing gulf between the metros and the small-town press. I heard it in talking with smaller town publishers at this year’s New York Press Association. We’ve seen in the increasing circulation disparities between large and small. Most of the paid content experiments are happening at smaller papers.

We know there’s something here, and the movie theater metaphor helps explain it. Community is a constant and one that doesn’t scale well, above some thousands of people. Community sites from Mark Potts’ Backfence to Tim Armstrong’s Patch seem to focus on communities of 30,000 to 60,000. And even smaller is better, if harder to make work financially for publishers.

Just like people will go to the Roxy no matter what’s playing — “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”! — people will read the local press even if it isn’t Pulitzer-quality journalism. Show “Alvin” on a cross-country American Airlines flight, to which I was recently subjected, and you get groans from the crowd. Show it at the Roxy, and people just feel better about it.

The small town press, online and off, looks to have a far different trajectory than the metros. Re-creating the Roxy, in news, may be as good a guideline as any to chart the future.

Arianna Huffington celebrates the fifth anniversary (May 9) of her eponymous website with a great present: breaking into the top 10 news sites in the U.S. In March’s Nielsen news standings, The Huffington Post moved into 10th place, propelled there by a 94-percent year-over-year increase in unique visitor growth. Just over 13 million unique visitors came to the site in March.

That’s quite an achievement, both for a site that young and for one that employs only about a hundred people. As mainstream media sites struggle for growth in 2010 and proliferating startups look for formulae that can give them traction, what can we learn from HuffPo?

Here are six points I think we can extract:

• Don’t forget the intangibility of brand: HuffPo launched on the unlikely Greek accent of Arianna Huffington, political-wife-turned-populist-gadfly-turned-pundit-now-turned-magnate. Yet, in the final Bush years, her plainspoken opposition gave her a TV platform. Her venture backers smartly saw the value of that, and HuffPost has ridden this unlikely progressive brand through those Bush years, through the Obama wave, and now into the years of governing dangerously. Many newsies — old and new — rely on news conventions, the sexless “public affairs,” in trying to describe what they do. HuffPo has stood for a high-pitched way of thinking about the world — agree or disagree with it — and that’s made a fundamental difference.

• Don’t overpay for content: HuffPo early on put a new twist on “columnists,” inviting in celebs as diverse as Michael Bloomberg and Shakira, and then many lesser, though authoritative, lights. The Newsonomics here, ably explained here by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales: “The best of the political bloggers are easily the equal of the opinion columnists at The New York Times. I don’t see the added value there and question whether a newspaper should be paying large sums of money for that anymore.” HuffPo has excelled at medium-to-higher quality “amateur” content with a next-to-nothing cost structure. Some news sites — Hearst comes first to mind — have really reached out to pro/am columnists, but most sites have moved too gingerly.

• Embed yourself in the social graph: That graph of our all our digital interactions is now driving growth on the web; the fastest growing referrer to news sites and increasingly the center of our web lives. Many data points here, but here’s just the latest from Pew: 75 percent of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email/posts on social sites, and 52 percent say they share links to news via social networks. HuffPo did a major partnership with Facebook, creating HuffPost Social News. Earlier this month, it moved to create substantial Twitter editions of two-thirds of its sections, apparently anticipating Twitter’s recently announced “Promoted Tweets” ad availabilities. CEO Eric Hippeau has made this compelling point about the nature of his site: “We’re one part social network, one part news content site.” How many traditional news sites think that way?

• Niche, niche, niche: Everyone knew what the site was: a political news site, a bloggy, lefty Politico. Then the site started replicating itself — very much on the model of a newspaper; in fact, Arianna has called it an “Internet newspaper.” Topical sections on Tech, Business, Books, Health and Green. Local sections in four cities. A college section recently launched. Some are better than others, but all are inflected with the brand, a way of writing and presenting the news. The lesson here: in niching, give the topical content a strong and consistent voice.

• Grow when others are cutting back: The site doubled its staff in 2009 — the year of the great recession — using new investment to move close to 100 employees.

• Play pinball: Track HuffPo’s expansion — vertical, local, social and mobile (apps) — over five years, and you can see some pinball wizardry at play. Plainly, a site once totally associated with politics has become a convivial home for many people. The wizardry at work here means offering more and more like content to more and more like people; it’s a constant experimentation, but all in the direction of more. And all of that more, executed on the backbone of a good SEO strategy, creates the pinball effect. That’s how HuffPo has become a Top 10 site. The learning: Connect all the dots.

As in many things web, traffic hasn’t yet created that much of a business. Most estimates place HuffPo 2009 revenues in the $12-15 million range — meaning that it is monetizing its unique visitors and page views at something like a tenth of the rate of The New York Times, the largest newspaper-owned property in the top 10. What the traffic performance does do is give HuffPo the opportunity to play in the bigger ad leagues. But we can see it’s got a lot of work ahead on that.

Through all the twists and turns of economic boom and bust, Apple innovation after Apple innovation and news company bankruptcy drama, Internet-based advertising keeps growing its share of the ad market.

In a report just released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, there are signal numbers that tell us what the next several years of the ad economy will be like. The big, compelling numbers, though: In 2005, the Internet generated 8 percent of the ad revenue in the U.S. In 2009, that share more than doubled to 17 percent, to $22.7 billion.

So, through thick and thin, digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines. TV ($26.2 billion) and newspapers ($24.6 billion) are still ahead of Internet, but cable (at $20.4 billion) and TV networks (at $15.5 billion) are below. Radio pulls in $14 billion, while consumer magazines take in $10 billion and trades $7.5 billion.

Targeted media continue to grow the fastest. That’s no surprise in ad world in which Yahoo’s real-time ad bidding Right Media exchange is now aiming to match an advertiser with a consumer in the 50 milliseconds or less before a page loads. (How fast is that? A twentieth of a second — fast enough to align reading and commercial interests — and by some accounts the time it takes for each of us to decide whether we’ll stay on a web page, or not).

So, paid search moved up to 47 percent of digital ad spend in 2009, from 45 percent in 2008.

Classifieds were the big loser, down to 10 percent from 14 percent year over year.

Banner ads held steady, up a point to 22 percent, with digital video now grabbing 4 percent of the market, up 39 percent in revenue in one year.

Overall, online revenues were down about $700 million — or 3.6 percent — for the recession-wracked year, and that’s attributable to digital classifieds by itself.

So the online ad industry managed to pull off quite a feat: it stayed almost above water in a year in which traditional media lost more than 20 percent of its revenue. Significantly, newspaper companies’ are reporting a steady-as-you-go year in 2010, meaning what’s been lost in recent years — newspaper ad revenues are down 44 percent since 2006 — is unlikely to be regained in any great numbers.

For the online ad industry, it’s a different story. For the fourth quarter of 2009, it gained 2.6 percent increase year-over-year and 14 percent over the third quarter of 2009, bringing in $6.3 billion.

Collectively, those are sobering numbers.

Even pre-iPad — with its direct questions about how it and its successors may hasten the print-to-digital transformation — the movement is in one direction. More targetable, more measurable and seemingly more efficient digital advertising beats the selling of space (in newspapers and magazines) and time (on TV and radio). Certainly, brand advertising has a place in the marketing future, but as I’ve noted, marketers have far less need for big brands than they used to.

News companies, unevenly, are acting on these trends. They’re increasingly offering a panoply of online marketing services in their areas, with McClatchy’s just-announced embrace of WebVisible search engine marketing programs just the latest public example. It’s a slow rebuilding of the business, digital brick by brick, but it’s one that recognizes which way the wind is blowing.

Part One: “Nine Questions on the Tablet and the News Industry Future”

Paid or free, or some combo? That’s one of the big questions news publishers are asking themselves as they debut iPad products. Many publishers are, understandably, hedging. They are offering free products out of the gate — the Financial Times’ being sponsored by high-end watchmaker Hublot — and then planning/hoping to charge two to three months down the line. They are each eyeing the other guys, and seeing which way they’ll go — and what the early experience of charging looks like — before committing.

Bloomberg, Reuters, New York Times, USA Today, NPR  and AP are going free out of the gate, with WSJ poised to erect a stately $17.99 monthly paywall, a wall that looks far less pervious and freemium-loving than its WSJ.com web counterpart.

Time Inc and CondeNast — GQ (which will be the first up on the iPad), Vanity Fair, Glamour and the New Yorker -- magazines see the world more simply: Just pay us about what you pay for a print copy, and we’ll give a luminous, more-fun-to-play with iPad product.

We’ll see a broad divergence between newspaper and magazine products — much broader than what we have seen on the web, where the meat-grinder designs of horizontal formatting long ago sapped vitality and innovation in newsy product presentation. We’ve been stuck in 1.0 land for a long time.

The big consumer magazine producers — your Next Issue Media consortium members Time, Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp — can simply write off the last decade as an awkward interregnum. They invested far less in the web than their newspaper counterparts (no classifieds to protect) and found themselves competing at a disadvantage. Their stuff didn’t look as good online as it did in print, and they were competing for attention with scruffy news publishers and bloggers, low-end company that always seemed a bit below them. They lost ad pages and staff, and, somewhat, their way.

So they are likely to return what they do best: produce whole objects, removing them from the messy, atomized web. Take a look at their demos, and you see the homecoming celebrated. Thank you, Mr. Jobs, who is happy to collect his 30% (take that, airport kiosks and the struggling USPS). For their part, the 30% payment to Apple is just a new cost of doing business, a bedrock of a new sustainable business model (Newsonomics: “Nine Questions on the Tablet and the News Industry Future”) — as long as advertisers come along, which they will, as long as readers come along. What’s old is new is old.

They’ll probably recuse themselves from the free web conversations, increasingly delaying their free web offerings to differentiate from paid iPad+ offerings. Wired’s Chris Anderson explains this philosophy to Gawker:

“We’ve always sequenced magazine content so that it comes out at different times in print and on the web, with web delays that have typically ranged from days to weeks. I can’t speak for the rest of CN or any other title, but at Wired we intend to do the same thing with tablets. I can’t yet say what the range of delays will be for various parts of the magazine, but we’ll experiment with different options, ranging from short delays to long ones”.

I like Marc Frons’ arraying of the products on a political spectrum. Frons, CTO of the New York Times, tells me he assesses the first rank of iPad products to be on the right-wing of publishing — essentially re-purposed products of the existing, conservative order. In the center, the web,  a hodgepodge of somewhat repurposed print, spiced with still-awkward multimedia mixings. On the left, a hazy future, as digital newsy media comes into its own, with its own look and feel. Or as Frons describes it, ” improvisational jazz to the classical music of reader apps. We don’t want to cede that ground to the Facebooks.”

So magazine publishers clearly will retake the right. Magazine look-and-feel with all the wonder of iPad functionality they want to add in over time. With largely monthly production schedules, the tasks are doable. They see a path forward in the digital age.

The center is the center, and it may lose its grip over time. The battle to define the left — the real new news media — will be fought out by fewer companies. Leave the magazine companies out of that battle; they’re now closer to happy. It’s the news companies that are staking out the iPad turf, and in the process, redefining the medium.

Here, I look to the Digital Dozen companies I noted in Newsonomics. That Digital Dozen -- the 12-15 nationally and globally reaching news companies, based in the U.S. and UK — categorization has been one of the most controversial as I’ve talked about the book in interviews and talks. Surely, these companies, bloated as they are with outsized cost structures, will cave in on themselves in the new digital world, many smart people tell me. They may be right, but I doubt it. Most of the Digital Dozen — think News Corp, BBC, FT, Bloomberg, Reuters and ABC, among them — operate as big news operations within far larger, deeper-pocketed, diversified companies. Yes, some — New York Times, NPR, AP, among them — don’t have those buffers and may have a harder time competing.

Yet, here we are on April 1, two days before the big iPad launch, and it’s the Digital Dozen who are represented in the first-to-be launched products. It takes big companies to afford the investment in the platform and the ability to operationalize the product day-by-day.

From here on, I think we’ll see these companies go head-to-head for reader and subscriber dollars. As they do, I think they’ll face a new five-fingered exercise. Raise one hand; five is the probably the maximum number of iPad news sites for which readers will pay.

Pew Internet. always-intriguing , in its 2010 “Understanding the Participatory News Consumer” suggests that:

“While internet users who get news online tend to explore a wide variety of news topics, they are fairly modest in the number of internet sites they use to gather that information.  One in five online news users (21%) say they routinely rely on just one website for their news and information, and another 57% rely on between two and five websites”.

Even on the promiscuous Facebook, we see that the average Facebook user becomes a fan of only four pages.

The technology is getting a lot smarter, but as humans we’re still supremely limited. We recall three to five things about things. And that enduring truth will color iPad payment success as well, I’ll bet.

So in a world constrained to a hand of paid possibilities, what will readers buy?Among the answers we’ll see evolve (more discussion on this to come) are:

• Single-company all-access products. All-you-can-eat of the New York Times, by print, smartphone, iPad and you-name-it. All-you-can-eat of News Corp news (WSJ, Barrons, Marketwatch, AllThingsDigital, +++).
• Niched, higher-end products. Reuters, long overlooked in the U.S., may take a lead here. At launch, it will have three separate products, one of which is market dashboard for financial enthusiasts, in addition to a pictures app, highlighting its global photojournalism and its News Pro product, itself more targeted (as is the newly designed Reuters U.S. website) to business professionals. In business and sports, particularly, we’ll see targeted products that serve much more specific audiences.
  
• Aggregated products: These will be the wild cards. So we may only buy a handful of products — but they don’t have to be single-title or single-company offerings, though that’s all we’ve seen in early demos. Who, for instance, might finally round up the local press, a lassoing that should include worthy start-ups as well as dailies? We won’t see many local tablet products at launch. In their emaciated states — and given how small individual markets will be this year — these companies will stay largely on the sidelines. An aggregated product, though, could be a hit. One cool interface, navigation to your locality (and please connect me not just to the daily rag, but to Yelp, Open Table, Google maps, Zillow+++). AP Gateway’s app will try to stake out this turf. I think it’s got two competitors. One would be Journalism Online’s Press+, whose paid system could power an aggregated product. Then, of course, there’s a minor Cupertino start-up called Apple, which put together some product called iTunes. iTunes for News, second life?

Yes, Facebook is trying to dominate the social space, becoming its nexus. That’s what companies do. Google, as it built itself, made a case that it was just a great set of highways and superhighways, directing people, but not trying to snare them. All good fictions in Silicon Valley speak. The generation may be new, the technologies may be new, but the mantra behind the scenes is still about “owning the customer,” a phrase old media types know well. Own the customer and steady revenue streams, and better revenue shares, flow for a good time.

Now the web makes that ownership harder. Most companies feel they are lucky to rent a customer for a small time, monetizing page views here and there. From a media company point of view, that ongoing customer, owned or leased, is a great value, and we can see that in the metering/paid content pushes going forward.

For all of us, as consumers and readers, we just need places to keep our stuff, organized well and the ability to connect up all parts of our work, family, financial and social lives. We don’t really want to be owned by anyone, but we’ve got to put that stuff somewhere, and that somewhere is increasingly in the cloud. Who owns the cloud(s)? That’s almost a metaphysical question, and one clearly unanswerable today.

Important Details: Google opened up a new war front this week, as its Google Buzz product aims to take user attention and market share from fast-growing Facebook and Twitter. Google Buzz basically connects social networking functionality to the Google Mail inbox, potentially allowing users to watch both e-mail and social exchanges from those in their networks on one screen.  The product does a number of thing, but one thing is clear — it promotes sharing.

That sharing was also the focus of a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers, which recorded the meanderings of the New York Times’ most e-mailed stories list every 15 minutes for six months. They offered some unexpected analysis.  Among the findings were that people prefer to send positive, uplifting stories, and longer-form “intellectually stimulating” stories.  The researchers claim that the emotion of “awe” is a thread found through the story picks, articles with the “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”

Less awesome, but also revelatory of social network power, is the tale of two recent would-be acquisitions. Monster bought Yahoo! HotJobs, creating the number one — by job listings — online recruiting supersite.  The price was a surprisingly low $225 million, plus whatever value the parties agreed upon as Monster and Yahoo! enter into a long-term distribution agreement. One reason the price came in low: the burgeoning social web that is linking positions and candidates through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and a swarm of niche, social-oriented sites, like Jobvite.

The other socially related acquisition of note is one that fell through, at least for now (see Insights 12 January 2010, Google: One Yelp and its Local …or Not).  Both Google and Microsoft tried to buy city guide social site Yelp, a popular user-generated, local destination for readers in many cities, and now number one in local reach, in at least one survey, in the Bay Area. The $700 million reportedly offered by Microsoft was rejected as insufficient, given the growth trajectory of the site.

The common thread here is that social sharing of information and news (and job information) is now a phenomenon with which to be reckoned.

Outsell’s own News Users’ survey (News Users 2009) tells us that 44% of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter. Further, a recent Rutgers  survey of social use shows that 20% of posts in the “statusphere” come from “informers,” those that share news and information. The other 80% are “meformers,” telling their followers what they had for breakfast and what they’re doing with their day.

In addition, consider that Nielsen reports that Internet users worldwide now spend 5.35 hours a month on social networks, up from just three hours a year ago. The social web is the new home page.

Finally, one other emerging datapoint: Bit.ly, one of the top “URL shortening service providers” –  sends about two billion link referrals a month, largely given its Twitter stronghold.

Implications: Recall how a few years ago we heard cries from editors about “lost serendipity”?  That’s what many pointed to as being lost as readers migrated from you-never-know-what-you-might-find-inside newspapers to the search-driven, one screen at a time web.  Editors — gatekeepers — had long picked out stories for their readers.  Now we’re picking out stories for each other, flinging them about the digital universe, into our e-mail inboxes, Twitter accounts and Facebook walls.  The Google Buzz news just reinforces this wider phenomenon and tries to harness it.

We’re becoming each other’s editors, creating a new serendipity.

We’re at the very beginning of this revolution and the realization of its meaning.

Outsell believes that publishers should consider three words for now: Social Media Optimization, a concept noted in Outsell’s January 2010 report on Analytics-Wired Content.  That’s a somewhat hazy idea that may be the child of search engine optimization.  Just as publishers once thought SEO strange, but have slowly adapted to its power, they’ll want to adapt to social optimization.  For now, consider just three ways that social optimization can find its way into news publishers’ skill sets:

• Story sharing: Most national news publishers have now adapted their smartphone products to include basic sharing via e-mail, text message, Facebook and Twitter. Such a move is now fundamental to all news publishing, not just mobile.
• Engagement of staff: Some news staffs have been restrained from Tweeting by understandable craft concerns, while others have been told to tweet away. The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray has gone farther, saying reporters’ job descriptions now include getting the word out about their stories on social networks. Staff engagement, and training as necessary, is another vital piece of the puzzle.
• Engagement of advertisers: Sharing deals is another thing we like to do. Begin figuring out how to leverage the news-related social net for such basics as couponing; what’s old is new again, just in different clothing.