Posts tagged newspapers
In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper. The many locales served by the newspapers we are acquiring fall firmly in this mold and we are delighted they have found a permanent home with Berkshire Hathaway.
Warren Buffet, founder, Bershire Hathaway, in a statement announcing the fund’s purchase of almost all newspapers currently owned by Media General, 63 titles in all mostly located in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama.
Via Yahoo Finance:
A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, BH Media Group, will purchase all of the newspapers owned by Media General, with the exception of the Tampa group, for $142 million in cash. Media General said it is in discussions with other prospective buyers for its Tampa print assets.
Under a separate credit agreement, Berkshire Hathaway will provide Media General with a $400 million term loan and a $45 million revolving credit line. The new loan will be used to fully repay the company’s existing bank debt due March 2013 and will mature in May 2020. In conjunction with this, Media General will issue Berkshire Hathaway penny warrants for approximately 4.6 million Class A shares, which represents 19.9 percent of Media General’s existing shares outstanding. In addition, Berkshire Hathaway has the option to nominate a director to Media General’s Board of Directors.
Possible Takeaway: It’s good to have one of the world’s richest people on your side.
Google’s Richard Gingras: We are at the beginning of a journalism renaissance
via Nieman Journalism Lab:
Richard Gingras, the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his8 questions that will define the future of journalism.
On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues.
Click-through to watch the video.
Infographic: How is the Newspaper Industry Trying to Save Itself?
via GOOD & Column Five Media
UK newspapers reveal Saturday-only sales for first time
New figures have revealed the extent to which UK national newspaper Saturday circulations far exceed sales on Monday to Friday.
The shift in reporting the circulation figures for particular days, instead of lumping them together may seem like a small change to reporting figures but it also signals the beginning of a seismic shift in the business model of UK newspapers. If Saturday is the best day to publish a newspaper, maybe it’ll become the only day?
As the shift to online reporting via iPad, apps and the web itself continues, we could see newspapers using their websites during the week and the Saturday edition become bumper packages with more long form journalism, features and lifestyle stories.
This could be a long-drawn out affair or a quick one - after all, The Economist has seen steady increases in readership and initiatives like Matter show that there is an appetite for less noise in users consumption of news. Intriguing times.
By 2017, there will be no printed metro newspapers, no local network TV stations, and few printed magazines. Weekly newspapers and video will be thriving. Tablets will be common and cheap. WiFi and WiMax will be everywhere. What do these and other predictions mean for the newspaper industry?
Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker, Ideas Magazine.
A bit dystopian, no?
Reports on the media habits of Millennials, those “digital natives”, have given some the impression that young people never read newspapers. However, survey evidence stubbornly insists that they do.
Wrote Katy Pape at NPR’s Go Figure, on a survey of millennials that reported 52% of people ages 18 to 24 read a newspaper up to 14 times a month.
It’s the heavy reading, though, that betrays their age: only 22% of millennials read the newspaper on a daily basis, as opposed to the 40% of all adults.
But the most interesting part? The prestige that comes with a heavy newspaper diet:
Heavy newspaper readers (groups I and II) are 75% more likely than light/non readers (groups IV and V) to hold a graduate degree. Heavy readers are also more than twice as likely to be considered “Influentials,” meaning people who participate in three or more public engagement activities every year (such as writing a letter to an elected official, running for public office, or attending a public meeting).
But that can’t mean that one needs to read the paper to be an important person in civic life. It just means that we’re in a shift, hopefully, which we all probably know already.
Just ask Scott M. Fulton:
The ongoing death of newspapers is not about changes in journalism, or the need for them. It is about a business model that has ceased to be relevant in the face of present technology.
FJP: Think LP vs. CD? Or, actually, CD vs. mp3.
“News just reads better on paper, man.”
Your Local Paper, In More Ways Than Ever
via Editor & Publisher:
A new marketing campaign from Pioneer Newspapers, Inc. is on a mission to send one very important message: Newspapers are alive and well. But you won’t find the message just in print. It’s being broadcast in television commercials, radio advertisements, and on billboards.
“We’re trying to reach people who don’t read the paper,” said president and chief executive officer Mike Gugliotto.
The Seattle-based family media business owns newspapers primarily in the Northwest…Their goal? To take a more proactive stand to dispel myths that the newspaper industry is dying.
Nine Pioneer newspapers are participating in the campaign, which will continue for one year and incorporate several themes.
The current theme focuses on the changing landscape of news delivery. One of the commercials shows a newsboy riding his bike through a neighborhood delivering the news, but it’s a laptop landing in homes. Another shows the family dog fetching the newspaper, only to come back with an iPad in his mouth.
And of course, multimedia is a big part of the campaign.
In addition, Pioneer has invested in new formats to deliver the news. The Chronicle equips reporters with “MoJo” kits that allow them to carry a laptop, digital camera, video, and audio recorders so they can bring readers breaking news and live blogs. The Tribune launched HTML5 websites for readers who prefer a tablet-based experience. Advertising representatives are also given tablets to take to meetings with clients to showcase online and mobile offerings.
FJP: A nice rebuttal to the all the talk on dying newspapers.
Image: Cupcakes announce the slogan, “Your Local Paper in More Ways Than Ever.”
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism generated gasps when it reported that newspapers are losing $7 in print advertising for every $1 of digital revenue that they gain. But the situation is even worse. In fact, publishers since 2005 have lost $26.7 billion in print advertising revenues while gaining only $1.2 billion in new digital revenue. Thus, the true ratio of print loss to digital gain is 22 to 1, not the 7 to 1 reported by Pew in March.
Employment in journalism has plummeted to levels not seen since the 1970s, after peaking during halcyon days of the early 1990s. Compiled from data gathered by the American Society of News Editors, the chart above shows newsroom staff in 2011 dropped to levels not seen in the U.S. since 1978. Newsosaur writes:
Newspapers now employ 40,600 editors and reporters vs. a peak of 56,900 in the pre-Internet year of 1990, according to the census released today. Thus, newsroom headcount has fallen by 28.6% from its modern-day high.
Granted, there’s nothing particularly newsworthy about the decline of newspaper staff. And there is one bright spot. The ASNE data collection project began to track the number of journalist of color who were working at papers across the U.S. In 1979 just 3.6 percent of reporters were people of color compared to 12.3 percent in 2011. While this figure lags well behind the overall racial diversity of the American populace, it’s an indication that more than technology has changed in newsrooms.
Also not included in he data are journalism jobs at online-only shops like Gawker or Aol’s cornucopia of Internet media properties such as Huffpo and Patch. While not enough to offset industry-wide decline, there are thousands of modern journalists working full time whose last chance to see their name in print was likely time spent working for the college rag.
H/T PBS MediaShift
USA Today Bets on Adaptive Mobile
Digiday highlights USA Today’s approach to app development. USA Today is the only “big 3” publisher (WSJ, NY Times, USA Today) to not charge for content on any device, relying exclusively on advertising:
Newspapers are experimenting with different ways of distributing content on tablets. When it comes to mobile, most publications rush to replicate their content via an app. USA Today is thinking different.
USA Today is betting on an adaptive experience that morphs with the device. While there’s no dynamic personalization based on user behavior or any type of intelligence, the articles served up on the iPad vary from person to person. For example, I read USA Today sports stories, and my colleague reads tech and advertising stories. In turn, more sports stories appear in my app than in my colleague’s app, and she therefore receives more tech and advertising stories.
“We don’t create for the paper and port to the mobile,” said Matt de Ganon, vp of mobile product and operations. “We create content, and it gets certain finite production on the digital properties; it’s a fluid experience of, here is the format that works best, and here is the subset of content that works best on smartphone, or here’s the context of tablet.”
LinkedIn Industry Trends
Note the bottom item left and second to top item right.
Read through for LinkedIn’s take on the numbers.
Meanwhile, over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes:
In other words, traditional media outlets like newspapers may not be succeeding, but online publishing has never been better. It’s not clear exactly what kinds of companies or businesses were included in LinkedIn’s definition of online publishers for the purposes of the report — presumably it would cover digital-only entities like The Huffington Post and the rest of the AOL empire, as well as Yahoo’s publishing units (both of whom have been hiring writers away from traditional print outlets) and a number of other online-only publishers such as Politico. And obviously some traditional companies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have significant online operations, although whether they were included isn’t clear either.
It’s also worth noting that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have been hiring journalists at a fairly rapid pace over the past year or so, and while they fall into a different category in LinkedIn’s ranking, that’s definitely a sign that digital media is in pretty good shape (Bloomberg has also been able to absorb Businessweek magazine’s estimated annual losses of $20 million or so). For both companies, of course, the consumer-facing parts of their media businesses are funded by proprietary information services that are designed for financial and other specialty markets — so their digital businesses subsidize their “traditional” media assets, instead of the other way around.
Legacy publishers, he notes, are weighed down by the pre-existing business models and practices, and find themselves in a “valley of death” where they need to cannibalize the old in order to proceed with the new.
Image: LinkedIn Industry Trends: Shrinking and Growing Industries. Via LinkedIn.
The Last Handwritten Newspaper Still in Print?
The earliest forms of newspaper were handwritten and now ‘The Musalman‘ probably is the last handwritten newspaper in the world. This Urdu language newspaper was established in 1927 by Chenab Syed Asmadullah Sahi and has been published daily in the Chennai city of India ever since.
FJP: Wow.
Three Unique Publisher Apps
Digiday points out 3 mobile apps created by publishers that go above and beyond just recreating the web & print experience (look, feel, layout, content). You know, actual innovation on the mobile front:
Unfortunately for readers, it seems as though media outlets often take the path of least resistance and just port their online content into an app. There are a few, however, who forge their own paths. Here are three unique mobile apps where publishers are trying something new.
Orange County Register: This local California paper (1.3 million uniques in February 2012, according to comScore) takes a unique approach to delivering content on its app, The Peel. The outlet plays to the audience, serving stories throughout six categories — news, sports, business, trending, things to do, and photo/video gallery — that are chosen based on iPad reader’s interests and many of the stories can only be found within the application. Additionally, the app pushes content in the evening and each addition features content exclusively for the app. A novel approach for a local outlet, this app can go a long way for those living in the OC — or those just stopping by.
Download the app here.
WP Politics The Washington Post has an election 2012 specific app, which does way more than port content from its website. Sure, there’s news from the paper and a website that finds its way onto the app — like Ezra Klein’s blog or The Fact Checker — but the app delivers additional information that’s not on the site: a polling map for the uber-wonky who want to know how each candidate is faring in sentiment at any given time; candidate issues tracker, which uses motion graphics to provide users with an “at-a-glance” understanding of where each of the candidates stand, and previously stood, on the major issues of the campaign; the historical election results map, which includes every vote, in every state, for every candidate, in every presidential election since 1789, and is presented with Washington Post articles written before and after every election since 1880. This app is a political wonk’s dream as it gives information that can’t even be found on the Washington Post’s site.
Download the app here.
King’s Cross, London – Streetstories The Guardian recently released an app that lets users listen to the sounds of Foggy London Town while walking the streets of King’s Cross. Additionally, the app serves as a walking guide with more than 70 stories and two hours of audio material, all relevant to a user’s location. The app boasts of readings from Dickens (location-specific), the architecture of Gilbert Scott’s St. Pancras, as well interviews with former street workers giving listeners an oral history of the area. This is a great idea for users who want to learn more about their surroundings. Hopefully other major news outlets will follow in The Guardian’s footsteps, especially in cities around the world.
Download the app here.
How the Guardian's US move added 4m readers
The Guardian moved its online operation to the US, jumped on coverage of the Occupy movement before just about anyone else, and rode that savvy journalistic decision to a huge increase in readership.
Now comes the hard part, continuing the momentum and growing a stronger US brand than it had even in England before. This interview with the Guardian’s editor here suggests a few lessons. Now I wonder how many UK pubs will start sending their online crews over here to make their fortunes.
FJP: British Invasion, 2012 edition.
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