Research: Tweeters love news

More encouraging news yet re: online usage and news.
Pew Research found that 76% of tweeters are reading newspapers online. "Twitter users are just as likely as other to consume news, but are more likely to do so on the internet and more likely to get online news through a smart phone."
This finding appears to solidify the argument that what is affecting newspapers today is not loss of readership but loss of revenue. We need to focus on revenue generation rather than focusing on what I consider to be a straw man argument that recent closures, bankruptcies and mergers show that "newspapers are dying."
They are morphing with different delivery mechanisms but arguably not fast enough. Rather than look for the magic bullet we need to address the "long tail" application of fulfilling our community needs to provide different kinds of news using different methods of delivery.
Pew Research on tweeting

#3 newspaper thought: Rock and river = landscape

#3 thought from NAA interviews:

CHARLOTTE HALL: senior vice president and editor, Orlando Sentinel, and president, American Society of Newspaper Editors:

 (The successful newspaper of the future) stops the clock once a day and takes an assessment, offering the kind of in-depth and analytical work that the 24/7 breaking news world on the Web cannot provide. Print is good at the things the Web is not good at—watchdog, explanatory, enterprise, narrative storytelling. The two media complement one another. One is the flowing river, changing constantly; the other is the rock on the shore, fixed and solid.

MY TAKE: The successful small to medium sized news enterprises will look at the web product differently than the newspaper -- not unlike how we view the difference between our magazines and our newspapers. To expand on Ms. Hall's description, online flows with breaking news (not features nor depth and analysis), databases of community information for day-to-day decision making (ratings of local mechanics, day care centers, where to eat tonight), archives (past editions and stories), deep and wide links to community information (online directory with depth of access more than phone numbers and addresses), and local/local social networks of community gathering niches (mom to mom, teen to teen) facilitated by the news enterprise.

#2 newspaper mission: No more one size fits all

Thought #2 from NAA interviews

TIM McGUIRE: Frank Russell Chair, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University in Phoenix, and former editor and senior vice president, Star Tribune in Minneapolis:

 Print publishers need to totally rethink what they are doing and [ask]:

• Do I want to deliver eyeballs to customers, or do I want to entice customers to pay for the product or a combination of the two? How do I support the news gathering I want to do?
• Is this a mass endeavor, or it is targeted? What are the information opportunities for that market?
• What is my role in the democratic process? If you want one, go for it. If you want to be all Britney [Spears], all the time, chuck the democracy façade.
• What are the market’s information needs and potentials?
• What is it that we can do for our market that nobody else can, and how valuable will that be to the market? If it is a commodity product, I can’t charge much. If it is truly special and distinguishable, the value of my product is greater.
• Invent a new product that is not tied to yesterday but is tied to serving your market or community. Create and add value that meets the market’s needs.

MY TAKE: It may be time to explore separate print products for separate customers. Those who want and act with a vested interest in developing community and partaking in democracy would get one type of product; those who need information to conduct their day to day lives with information of a different sort, get another product. Define the market, link up the advertisers who want to reach those markets and put out your products.

#1 newspaper mission: Concise, compelling

Captured thought #1 from interviews with NAA

 ALAN MUTTER: blogger, Reflections of a Newsosaur (http://newsosaur.blogspot.com) and managing partner, Tapit Partners, an information technology consulting firm)

Although the newspaper generates 90 percent of a typical publisher’s sales, it is a mistake to think of it as the “core product.” The true core products of a newspaper company are its abilities to produce compelling content, build large audiences, sell advertising and make a profit. The publishers who succeed in the future will be agnostic about the platforms they use to capitalize on those core strengths.

The traditional, one-size-fits-all newspaper should be a concise, reasonably comprehensive and extremely well-organized guide to the community. It should leverage the strengths of print: deep reporting, thoughtful analysis, fine writing and elegant visuals. 

It should avoid the weaknesses of print by de-emphasizing warmed-over coverage of stale, widely reported news."

MY TAKE: Stop calling it newspapers, then. The print components -- newspapers, magazines, tabloids -- these are print and very distinguishable from online. To be discussed on Thought #3.

Diary from newspaper retreat

I participated in a Minnesota Newspaper Foundation Leadership Retreat for publishers and editors, funded by the Blandin Foundation, this past week joining smaller papers from such diverse areas as Sleepy Eye, Ortonville, Cottonwood County, Park Rapids and Fergus Falls.

Here are some random thoughts that bubbled up during this time.

• Equation for successful newspapers: ? => # => ! => $ 
• Defined: ? (find out what people want to know about our communities) => # (interview or be authority that gives most useful answers) => ! (aha moment keeps readers coming back) => $ (subscribers/advertisers will follow authority). This is different from what we provide today because we tend to cover meetings, not issues.
• Just like hospitals, newspapers are obligated to improve the health of their communities. When all other leadership fails, newspapers are the institution of last resort before anarchy.
• Regardless of where we are with leaders in our community, we should be developing a "training" or "step up" program for our future leaders and not leave it to serendipity.
• What is impossible to do today at the Free Press but if done can make us a success? Shouldn't we focus on how to make it less impossible?
• Those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.
• What is being yelled at us from around the curve? "Pig!" Talk to me and I'll explain it.
•  The courage and dedication of editors, writers, desk people -- hell, all newspapers people who live in the Red River area to continue to cover the story while their own families and homes are threatened. I'm hard pressed to believe a citizen blogger would do the job just as well. Why aren't we telling this story more?
  
• Think you are prepared for all emergencies? How about a pandemic! (Thanks, Deb.)
• You know your own social capital but what about the links from the rest of your staff? You may have more valuable connections waiting to be utilized.
• What's wrong with using fear to get the community to activate, participate, attend? Because the Blandin process of involvement must carry ethical issues of how to involve the community or shoulder some of the criticism of instigation rather than activation.
• Newspapers can help a community define itself. If you focus on crime, conflicts and rock & roll to sell newspapers, it may be great for newsstand sales but it presents a distorted picture for all to assume. And it can shape the personality of its members -- we aren't a mirror as much as we are a shiner of the light, an educator. Our goal is not audience; our goal is community development so our businesses stay healthy.
• Why would any newspaper editor want to be a mere chronicler of a community's slow, spiralling death?

'Keep on publishing'

Amid all the talk of moving to a "new platform" for news delivery and journalism evolving to web only, we need to keep in mind a constituency that will not follow that migration.
Here's a letter received today from a reader in Cleveland MN.
"Please! Don't stop publishing your newspaper as others have. I have been retired for several years and when I get up in the morning, I grab a cup of coffee and my newspaper; settle down and enjoy! We don't all own computers, nor do we want to. Most of us have lost friends and spouses. Please! We don't want to lose you too. Keep on publishing!"
I know the immediate reaction from some would be "Your most loyal customers will be gone soon and those not in the newspaper habit will not be there to replace them."
I think the jury is still out on that premise, mostly because we all age and we all need portability. And, no, not "everyone" is migrating to just the web. My bet is on maintaining both online and print as the viable business model but with product differentiations -- not one copying the other and not one replacing the other.
Frankly, I am both encouraged and saddened by this letter. Encouraged because not many businesses have such a personal connection with their customers. Saddened because the actions of others are scaring people needlessly. Smaller newspapers are not going away and probably will come out this faring better because they will fill the voids left by scaled back metros in some areas.
Meanwhile, we need to keep readers like the one from Cleveland MN in mind as we "evolve."
We have a greater purpose than just putting out a product.

Chicken Little with a bigger megaphone

Sat down Monday morning with a friend who also is president of the local credit union. Not exactly a financial institution that is hurting today but the effects are felt everywhere just the same.
As we talked, he paused a little, set down his mug of coffee and said "Have you ever experienced anything like this before? This is a little different."
In fact, we both had been here before but in circumstances one could say was much worse than today. We both lived through the 1982-83 recession when the prime rate was 17% and that was coming down from its high of over 20%. I had just locked in my mortgage at 13.3% a few years earlier and felt lucky!
Unemployment hit a high of 10.8% that year and my employer froze every one's pay. He then took to wearing dress shirts with frayed collars and driving a run down pickup truck after we just had some layoffs. I was lucky because I was new and lower paid. I was also young and being poor was nothing unusual for people my age.
We didn't remember those times as being particularly paralyzing as they seem today. Today is a little different.
Back then we had very specific and limited sources of information. We had only the three network news programs at 6 p.m., a common point of reference for us all. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk had not yet made it to the national talk radio scene. Johnny Carson was a reassuring Midwestern voice for late night viewers and his satire was less biting than today.
Of course, we had newspapers and we had our backyard fences over which neighbors would discuss the trials of the day and find some solace in shared pain.
Why are we so much more frightened today than we were 25 years ago?
We lived through the S&L crisis and survived. We lived through the "malaise" of the '70s with the long gas lines and heating oil crisis and moved on to those dastardly '80s.
And before that we lived through the upheaval of the '60s when people thought our very democracy was crumbling.
And here we are having just lived through one decade of "excessive exuberance" -- that we were sufficiently warned was unsustainable but who was listening -- so that when it did start to erode, we now feel somehow that the end is near.
Today, we seem more edgy, more pessimistic, less sure about coming out whole.
But why is it so different?
It could be because today we are barraged constantly, unrelentingly with updates -- we have 24-hour cable news of all persuasions needing to find ways to fill up the other 23 hours; news alerts on stock market conditions beamed to our Blackberries; Twitter texts sent with up-to-the-minute reinforcement from other Tweeters to let us all know that it is still bad out there, don't get too comfortable; Internet at home and at work accessing all sorts of unfiltered news, blogs and chat rooms.
There is barely enough time to reflect and ponder before the next news blast.
And the backyard fence conversations have been replaced with societal clones -- people who like to converse with, listen to and read from like-minded people thereby shutting off the chance contact with someone who may have a different perspective on things.
In an effort to surround ourselves with assurance, our comfort zone must be secured and isolated from challenge. Consequently, other voices -- maybe unpopular voices, definitely different voices -- are not heard, evaluated, challenged and measured against what we see, hear, believe.
And so we remain paralyzed -- first by the constant drumbeat of bad news and secondly by our cloistered existence -- lacking confidence that it will all come out all right even though times were tougher ... maybe not for those who have lost their jobs in this latest round but historically so.
This is especially tough for those under 40 years of age who don't have a frame of reference to or (as some research suggests) even a desire for history.
So what's to be said of all that?
Well, maybe we should all pause at bit, step back from the dance floor and climb up on the balcony. Disentangle ourselves from the chaos of the every day and find those related experiences to learn what was done back then as well as seek out those who lived through it and find out how. Learn from history. I know that's a bit out of vogue but something I genuinely hope the leaders of today are spending some time doing.