Insomniactive

My friend Alan Mutter has an annoying habit of actually analyzing data rather than waving his hands at it. Recently, he did his trick on the latest numbers out of NAA, which remain dismal (16 straight quarters of decline). The most breathtaking piece is the precipitous disappearance of classified advertising from newspapers:

Among the classified categories, automotive and real estate advertising, two long-time pillars of the newspaper advertising model, each was down by 43% in the third quarter, compounding drastic declines in recent years.

Auto sales, which nearly hit $1 billion in the third quarter two years ago, were $321 million in the same period in 2009. Realty advertising, which topped $1 billion per quarter as recently as two years ago, declined to $358.6 million in the third quarter. It will take a long time for either vertical to return to its former strength, assuming they ever will.

Recruitment advertising, which surpassed $2 billion per quarter at the peak of the Internet bubble in 2000, all but dried up in the third quarter of this year, falling nearly 64.7% to a mere $175 million. Employment advertising is not simply at its lowest point in history, it is all but gone.

For those few of us who obsess on this stuff, the fusillade of ugly stats has taken on the feel of waves of body bags returning from Southeast Asia in the 1970s. It’s both sickening and desensitizing. But stepping back, here’s a way of thinking about these numbers in a broad-rushstroke sort of way.

At its peak, the newspaper industry probably had $15-18 billion in operating profits (30% of $55-60 billion in revenue). The NAA numbers show the likely permanent disappearance (due to the advent of cheaper substitutes, not merely “the uber-culpable “broader economic conditions” which the NAA is so fond of scapegoating) of about $10 billion in what were essentially pure profit dollars-60% + of peak industry profitability, before one even considers the slides in display and circulation revenues.

It’s oversimplifying the case a little, but it’s close enough: $10 billion in newspaper classified ads has been replaced by less than $100 million in Craigslist revenue. Last time I checked, 97 of the top 100 online classified sites belonged to the Craigslist newtwork.

So start with a very capital-intensive industry which is capped at mid teens operating profits percentage, and then consider two macro trends: (1) for every buck in display advertising that disappears in print, something less than a dime comes back online; and (2) sightings of faithful newspaper readers born after the inauguration of a certain Georgia peanut farmer are about as rare as credible video footage of Sasquatch hitting golf balls in the Big Thicket.

But, I digress. The classified franchise was exceedingly valuable to newspapers because classified readers were the portion of the newspaper audience closest to actually transacting. And especially in an absence of alternatives, the effectiveness of a newspaper want ad was was ultra-measurable: whether you were advertising a used Toro or the Deputy Assistant Vice Presidency of the Southwest Iowa Region, you knew precisely how many people had responded to your ad. Unlike legendary retailer John Wanamaker near the turn of the twentieth century, you knew damn good and well whether your advertising dollar was well spent: it was close to the transaction, and its return was imminently measurable.

Today, we call those lead generation businesses. And newspapers are simply not well positioned to be in the lead gen business. If you want to see what well positioned looks like, check out the S-1 on file for Quin Street, run by my business school classmate Doug Valenti and a competitor to AV-owned All-Star Directories (as always, I must remind that I speak only for myself, and not for AV,ASD, The Texas Tribune, or anybody else).

If mucking around SEC filings isn’t your thing, I’ll let you in on a secret: Doug is laser-focused on matching big communities of buyers with sophisticated and price-sensitive populations of sellers. The future of journalism? Meh. Not so much. Ditto the teams at Sawbuck Realty and Responselogix. Even though both are the beneficiaries of investments from A.H. Belo-and even thought the latter is run by an ex-Knight Ridder exec-neither company could spell journalism if you spotted them the consonants. It’s simply not their raison d’etre. They are all about creating liquid markets of buyers and sellers, period.

For a while, I was walking around saying that Wanamaker was right: half of his ad spend was wasted. Now, I’ve begun saying that he was wrong: he was wasting a lot more than that. And most of it he was spending with newspapers. So this is what I mean when I say that public service journalism is is a public good. And as such, it’s too important to be left exclusively to market forces. Nothing I’ve seen in the data suggests that investment capital will strike a love match with the newspaper industry when investment capital does what it does naturally, which is to seek the highest risk-adjusted returns. If you believe, as I do, in the importance of public service journalism, you simply have to examine non-market alternatives for producing it. Call it Wanamaker’s Revenge.

Richard Perez Pena writes in the NYT about the new news venture, begun by ex Tribune journalists. The barely suppressed animus between the Tribune and the CNC staffers is understandable, especially given the long relationships involved, the intractable financial state of the the Tribune Company, and the bare-knuckled history of journalistic (or practically any other kind of) competition in Chicago.

At one level, it’s totally legit that these two teams view the world differently. One thinks that serious journalism is more likely-over the long term-to find support from market forces than from any other model. The other believes that market forces are insufficiently reliable to produce enough of the stuff. But let’s face it: the Tribune team comes off sounding awfully disingenuous when it claims-or at least implies-that its public service mission hasn’t been compromised by its resource challenges. Such a position strains credulity in a way and to an extent that no journalist would accept from the subject of one of his or her stories. It also belies bitch sessions which are taking place nightly (sometimes creeping forward into late afternoons) among long-time newsfolk at saloons nationwide.

If the two teams really wish each other well-and if they both believe, as the leaders of newsrooms often proclaim-that their first obligation is to the public, then they will publish or at least link to one another’s material liberally. I predict they will find that the sun will continue to rise and the earth will go on spinning. And who knows: maybe their public will keep them both in business.

The whole spiel really is all a little touching, and quite impressive-especially the psychoanalysis part. What it isn’t is new. Or maybe commercial media pundits have been relieved of the burden of editors who say things like, “wait, haven’t I seen that before? And before. And before?” Like about a zillion times since David Swensen touched off this whole debate in January (which frankly seems like it was in the Pleistocene)?

Ok, from the top. Shafer has two arguments.

The first is that anyone who funds this stuff must want something. That is true. I think most of us want quality journalism. Just like I give money to Ballet Austin because I like to see artistic athleticism and pretty women. The second is that news publications should attract readers. Wait, let me get a pen. Need to ….write….that one….down.

But seriously, where Shafer and I really come apart is here:

But the most successful, most heavily decorated, and longest-lived news outlets in the American journalism have been overtly commercial.

First of all, that’s precisely not true. Both WaPo and NYT are only sort of overtly commercial, in the sense that in each case a family controls the vote, and so any informed buyer of either stock can see a big, fat, caveat emptor stenciled on the certificate. And even if it were true, c’mon: if the past were necessarily prologue, why would all these things be going belly-up?

There is here an interesting debate about cause and effect. Shafer seems to be arguing that only enterprises focused on the creation of shareholder wealth can produce good journalism. My argument is that the forty years between Kennedy and Clinton were an accident of economic and demographic history, resulting in a temporary but highly profitable industry structure for the papers that dominated their markets. Great journalism thrived in a relatively monopolistic industry structure, because there was plenty to go around for editors and shareholders (God and Mammon, again).

Newsrooms of this halcyon era, untroubled by (and sometimes in separate evelvator banks from) the boys from ad sales, actually operated far more like nonprofits than they do today. But quality journalism remained the tail on the economic dog of monopoly (Philip Meyer’s labored attempts at proving the opposite notwithstanding). A monopolistic industry structure persisted as long as the cost to replicate a production and distribution infrastructure remained high. Enter near universal broadband access; marginal distribution costs trend toward zero, and suddently the news industry is super-fragmented, trending toward what economists call “perfect competition.” Exit monopoly profits, and exit the luxury that was Watergate-era public interest journalism.

But, never mind all that. I don’t think Jack Shafer is interested in much of a serious debate. But since he is convinced that my pocket has been picked of my silly money, all the more reason to visit texastribune.org and become a founding member. Better yet, do it in Jack’s name!

So. Pretend you’re in commercial media. Or, suspend your reality suspension and just say you’re simply a fan of Tony Romo or (coming rapidly to a Twin City near you) Brett Favre. Better here….or here?

I don’t feel sorry for newspaper publishers who think that putting their sports stuff behind paywalls is a good idea. I do feel sorry for the poor souls who are actually wasting their time executing said directive.

Interesting and sympathetic article about the Grahams and their position with the Washington Post in Vanity Fair. I love this turn of phrase:

In a sense, the Grahams are managing, and financing, their own transformation into lesserness. They will not be—can’t be—the first family of news in the nation’s capital anymore. That privilege is gone.

They’ll be much less dominant and much less important—along with everybody else in the news business. (Even in an ideal world, where, in the description of former Post editor and MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer, a “billion-dollar news business making $200 million becomes a $200 million business making $75 million,” it’s a smaller, much less impressive pie.)

Come to think of it, sooner or later, don’t we all face the challenge of “managing ourselves to lesserness?”

Alan Mutter keeps coming the steady drumbeat of bad news for newspapers:

In round numbers, total newspaper advertising sales are likely to drop by $10 billion in 2009, which would put them roughly one-third lower than they were in the prior disastrous year…

The last time newspaper ad sales were as low as $27 billion was 1986. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the $27 billion in sales achieved back then would be worth $52.3 billion in 2008 dollars.

By that measure, it is fair to say that the industry today is only half the size it was two decades ago. And there are no signs the decline has been arrested.

In a long and thorough survey piece, Massing does a nice job dimensioning the news biz landscape. (Oh yeah, and gives The Texas Tribune a nice mention deep into the article). Here’s the real hope for businesses like ours:

Yet amid all this gloom, statistics from the Internet suggest that interest in news has rarely been greater. According to one survey, Internet users in 2008 spent fifty-three minutes a week reading newspapers online, up from forty-one minutes in 2007. And the traffic at the top fifty news Web sites increased by 27 percent. While this growth cut across all age groups, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found, “it was fueled in particular by young people.” The MTV generation, known for its indifference to news, has given way to the Obama generation, which craves it, and for an industry long reconciled to the idea of its customers dying off, the reengagement of America’s young offers a rare ray of hope.

In his post on the Harvard Business site, Umair Haque lays out better than I ever have the characteristics of the genre which The Texas Tribune aspires to inhabit. Particularly, the idea of “knowledge, not news” is one that I’ve appropriated wholesale for our discussions with partners and investors. The twin ideas of placing news in context and building on a topic-rather than a story-as the basic units of news are among the things that got me most excited about starting TT. Matt Thompson first introduced me to these concepts more than a year ago at newsless.org. A helpful interview with Matt is here. Hopefully, we’ll be hosting Matt in Austin in September for a jam session about news in context.

Here are Haque’s characteristics of a nichepaper, some of which I buy into more than others:

Knowledge, not news. Newspapers strive to give people the news. Next stop, commodity central. Nichepapers strive to impart meaningful, lasting knowledge instead.

Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through “commentage.” Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.

Topics, not articles. That’s why Nichepapers develop topics — instead of telling quickly-forgotten stories. When Talking Points Memo exposed the Bush administration’s series of politically motivated firings, it did so in a series of posts, that let the story develop, surface, thicken, and climax. Stories are for information — topics are for knowledge.

Scarcity, not circulation. Newspapers strive for circulation, by telling the same stories in the same ways — in slightly different places. Nichepapers strive for scarcity: to develop a perspective, analytical skills, and storytelling capabilities that are inimitable by rivals.

Now, not then. Newspapers give you the news then. Nichepapers give you knowledge now. Why have weekly columns and daily articles — that then get lost in the wilderness of a vast archive? It’s an arcane, obsolete way to produce content. Nichepapers develop topics of conversation, not individual stories, and let them co-evolve with readers.

Provocation, not perfection. Newspapers seek perfection: perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines. Nichepapers seek provocation instead. Sometimes, yes, that provocation is mere titillation. But more often than not it’s authentic provcation: nichepapers provoke us to think; they challenge us; they educate us in ways that newspapers stopped doing long ago.

Snowballs, not sell-outs. Newspapers long ago sold out to advertisers, PR flaks, powerful “sources,” and lobbyists. When was the last time the WSJ bit the hand that fed it? Why is the Post’s editorial page so predictably tepid? Nichepapers haven’t sold out — and if their economic promise delivers, they won’t have to. They “sell in” instead: they pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.

Tasks, not tech. Nichepapers aren’t about technology. They might use a blog post, vlog post, podcast, wiki, series of tweets, or a long-form article — or all of these, all at once. They are tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.