● You really think newspapers can make the switch to the web? Consider the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which prints its last edition tomorrow.
The P-I will keep its high-traffic website alive, trying to milk a few sour droplets from a sagging name. But instead of 165 staffers, it will have 20, mostly back-end web types, and instead of independent journalism, will feature columnists such as "Norm Rice, a former Seattle mayor, and his wife, Constance Rice; a congressman, Jim McDermott; Maria Goodloe-Johnson, who heads the city’s public schools; and a former police chief, a former United States attorney, and two former governors."
Kill me now.
● Newscut's Bob Collins has a terrific write-up of the state House press credentialing debate on MPR's "Midday."
● The overall U.S. ad market fell 2.6 percent last year, despite the Olympics and political campaigns. The biggest single ad segment, according to Nielsen? Cable TV, which netted 20 percent of the total and was the only segment showing growth (7.8 percent). Online? Down 6.4 percent, but for display ads only. (In other words, not search.) Local newspapers were off 10.2 percent, magazines fell 7.6 percent, and network TV slid 3.5 percent.
● Meanwhile, Pew says newspaper sales were off 23 percent in the past two years, and per-viewer Internet rates have been cut in half; each thousand views now earn an average 26 cents. That seems stunningly low; it would mean a site with 5 million pageviews a month would earn $15,600 a year. Net gurus: what am I missing here?
● Despite all that, Pew's Project in Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel had this to say about the likelihood of no-newspaper towns:
For all the dreariness surrounding the industry, Rosenstiel pointed out that newspapers have a surprising amount of strength. He doubts that a major city in the United States will lose a newspaper in the foreseeable future. "We don't really think that is likely to happen in 2009 or really likely to happen anytime soon," he said. "[Newspapers'] problem is fundamentally a revenue problem, not an audience problem."
Many newspaper operators have operating capital that is "still pretty robust," Rosenstiel said. "Profit is more the norm, than not."
The report found that on average operating profit margins for newspapers are about 11 percent. However the margins are falling and are often not enough to cover debt payments for some companies.
Many newspaper operators have operating capital that is "still pretty robust," Rosenstiel said. "Profit is more the norm, than not."
The report found that on average operating profit margins for newspapers are about 11 percent. However the margins are falling and are often not enough to cover debt payments for some companies.
● Which will cities lose first: their newspapers, or their alt-weekly? The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism says the weeklies' collective print audience dropped 5 percent in 2008, which isn't terrible. However, three times as many readers are 45-plus as are 18-24. Of course, these readerships have been aging forever, so demographics won't save them. Overall, 37 percent spend an hour or more with a newspaper each day, which may indicate a mutual suicide pact.
● Would it be worse if the Strib was still a McClatchy paper? Two dispatches from that front: ex-Strib deputy managing editor Mi-ai Parrish, now the Boise Statesman's publisher, issues a cutback memo here, while an anti-McClatchy site says Raleigh News & Observer staff wants to rip apart its boyish CEO.
● MinnPost is one of the journalistic innovations the Knight Foundation funds. If you want to check out some others, the Miami Herald (one of the fastest-sinking print dinosaurs), describes a few here.
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Comments (6)
Doesn't the Strib's "Your Voices" section sound a lot like the P-I's new lineup?? At least they'll be ready if chapter 11 fails...
Someone on Pew's write up had to have misstated facts, mistyped or some other simple mistake.
The only thing I can think of is that they may be talking about the CPM paid by remnant ad networks, not direct sales ads.
I saw the reference to 23% drop in revenue in the last two years in the report's detail summary, but nothing about a cpm of 26 cents. Here's the page: http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2009/narrative_newspapers_economics.p...
Ask someone at minnpost about your site's revenue ... if you -- or a newspaper site -- sells ads at a 23 cent CPM call Google AdSense for Content or a display ad network and you can do much better.
Just spent 20 minutes surfing the story and, while many referenced the 23% revenue drop in two years, only one referenced a CPM drop to 26 cents. That was on prweek.com ... right here: http://www.prweekus.com/Pew-study-Media-facing-continued-ad-crisis/artic...
RE: revenue per pageview. There may be average rates, but there are no average views. I'm no guru in this subject matter, but I know that advertisers can track revenue arising from internet clicks with a very high accuracy. They know what they're getting for their money. The ad buyers who drive pricing, it would seem, find the results "stunningly low", not the rates.
> Net gurus: what am I missing here?
Nothing. The vast majority of the ad sales on the biggest Internet sites -- like the Strib's -- are remnant sales. They're really easy to see -- do you really think Verizon hand-picked the Star Tribune to receive their abundance of ads? Hell no.
Even a targeted site lile daily kos is getting only .55 CPM retail ($3,500*6,322,768 impressions), and given the structure of BlogAds daily kos is getting 60 percent of that at the most. And that's before someone demands a discount for a huge buy. Outfits like Federated have been slashing their cpm rates and shares as well.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Anyone who has been around Web publishing in the last decade saw the same thing happen in online tech publishing years and years ago; for instance, around 2002 or so the Slashdot sites declared war on high CPMs and adjusted their rates to the equivalent of late-night TV, hoping to make it up in volume. They failed. (Indeed, you can see every frickin' debate today in Web publishing, like paid content, has already happened -- as in the case of Salon going paid and doing fundraising a la MinnPost years ago.) More growth coupled with lower cpms = death spiral. I feel an incredible sense of deja vu these days.
Anyone who outsources their ad sales -- which is what you do when you deal with an ad network -- deserves what they get.
> Ask someone at minnpost about your site's revenue ... if you -- or a newspaper site -- sells ads at a 23 cent CPM call Google AdSense for Content or a display ad network and you can do much better. <
Feh. Google's eCPM rates on average are around a quarter now at best, more if you're in a very targeted area (like trolling for mesothelioma victims). Real-world terms puts them lower, because Google puts a spin on CPM with their eCPM valuation. We completely dropped displaying Google ads because they are close to worthless, and we're ending our Adsense buy because it's failed to deliver any meaningful traffic.
Here's my financial contribution to MinnPost today: all those out-of-town readers will some higher-buck Google ads on the site -- mesothelioma! mesothelioma! mesothelioma!
Wow. Apparently we really know what we're doing over at my unnamed web publishing company because it's certainly not the gloom and doom described above.
Or, maybe I should go into consulting!