Think of this as Volume 18, Number 46 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.
2014 has been a good year for business, a good year for investors, a good year for mankind generally.
For writers, not so much.
What’s happening is that run of network ad rates are dropping to the floor, mobile makes this worse, so news sites are responding by ditching writers in favor of talking heads. If you watch some sell-side analyst tout his merchandise for five minutes, that’s five minutes the site can spend throwing ads at you, and it’s basically free – just point the camera. There is no news value in it. Getting five minutes out of a reader, on the other hand, requires that you deliver some serious content, or at least an original take. This costs money. And no one has money.
There’s almost a news blackout going on. If you use Google News, as I do, you’ll increasingly find your way to stories linked from the site blocked by paywalls, or demands for registration, even to see press releases. Google has stopped doing anything about it. If they protested at this point there would be no service.
Content providers with defined audiences, facing run of network ad rates that don’t pay the bills, are trying to make up for it with paywalls that drop their numbers to the floor. Or they demand registration of every visitor, which also drops their total numbers. They fire writers, fire editors, but they’re circling the drain. The whole news business, on some days, seems to be circling the drain.
It’s true on all beats. The same forces that pushed me out at TheStreet.com are pushing out all my tech beat friends in the Internet Press Guild. Text is out. Publishers have given up on finding the market, let alone serving it.
Jim Cramer, founder of TheStreet, put the dilemma best on CNBC. “If we had to depend on our free site to survive, we would be out of business.” The whole business model there is that the free site delivers up-sells to other products, like TheDeal and Herb Greenberg.
In creating products like this it’s the data, not the words, that counts. Get the data and everything else follows naturally – that’s how Bloomberg became powerful.
What I suggested to TheStreet, while I still had the ear of management, was a call to Mitre Media http://mitremedia.com/ They own a host of data-filled sites, and their “secret sauce” is technology – they move marginally-profitable sites to Amazon and make them profitable. They have their act together. What they lack is a strategy for getting traction in New York, where their buyers are. It looked to me like a great deal, but no one pursued it.
So what would Dana do? How would he solve the problem of the news business?
What no one with a defined audience has yet gotten about the Web is the need for a multi-channel approach. You need a free site. It has to have information of value to people in your target market. It needs to be highly interactive.
But that site needs to be the bottom rung of a permission ladder, consisting first of getting an e-mail address, then registration permission, then paid tiers, each with exclusive content which has higher-and-higher value. Think of it as TV (free) a newspaper (e-mail permission), magazine (registration permission), then newsletters (paid tiers). Each link up the chain is increasingly specialized, each makes a living with fewer readers.
The newspaper site takes run-of-network ads, the magazine site takes specialized ads, and the newsletters are ad-free. Each site is interactive – the TV site pushes everything to discussion threads, the newspaper site has something like Disqus, the magazine site specialized events and closed discussion threads, the newsletter sites have intensive e-mail back-and-forth between readers and writers.
The problem for publishers is that they’ve seen their online products as discrete silos. I’m a TV station. I’m a newspaper. I’m a magazine. And they see the Web through the prism of that discipline, whatever it is. They still don’t understand that it’s an integrated whole. Everyone competes with everyone but everyone can also cooperate with one another – across disciplines.
These are business questions. They don’t matter much to journalists – even those of us who cover business. We’re mission oriented. The mission is to research, write, and try to get it right for the readers as they’re defined for us.
The problem is that these readers aren’t well-defined for us, and publishers are even more confused than we are. That’s a bad place for a writer to be.
As a result, another recession has hit the writing community, at a time when things should be looking up. I continue to believe that there are huge online opportunities in defined audiences – industries, lifestyles, places. I’ve been saying it for almost 20 years – organize and advocate your target market. But no one in these vertical markets has a Clue, along with the financial wherewithal to bring that Clue to the marketplace, so they can hire people like me.
So good journalists are doing other things, and the world is poorer for it.
