Newspapers may not admit print is dying, but the guys who make the paper will

May 24, 2012 in magazines, Newspapers
Tags: Evening Standard, iPad, Jon O'Donnell, newsprint, RISI, Roy Greenslade, tablets, Voith

The commercial director of London’s Evening Standard, Jon O’Donnell, was widely quoted this week when he said that newspapers, especially his own, had a healthy future:

 ”The printed version has a healthy life ahead of it. The digital world is immense. But people still like the tangible asset of a newspaper. They like to tear them and dispose of them.”

Now, it would be a little odd if a commercial director for three newspapers – he also oversees the Independent and i – ran around saying “print is doomed”, but basing his optimism, at least in part, on people’s love of papier mache and recycling seemed a bit odd.

Those who run paper mills or provide them with equipment don’t seem quite so sanguine about the future.

Voith, a German company that makes paper mill machinery, announced this week that it will cut 710 jobs because demand for graphic paper (used for magazines or newspapers) has fallen. Voith says tablets are to blame:

“… the ongoing digitalization of everyday life through tablets like the iPad and the ensuing changes in consumer behavior is faster than expected having a negative impact on the demand for so-called graphic papers”

This message was backed up by RISI, an information service for the forest products industry, which said yesterday that world newsprint production would contract by 5.5 million tonnes over the next five years as newspaper demand shrank “due largely to media tablets and mobile devices”.

But possibly the most grimly amusing assessment of newspapers’ future came in a comment on Roy Greenslade’s blog:

“It [newsprint] definitely has more usage than you think. Here at Vernacare we buy all the available newsprint that is either recycled by the consumer or the newspaper that had not been sold by the retailer”

And what does this booming market for old newsprint produce? Disposable bedpans and urinal bottles.

Seems a step down from tomorrow’s fishwrap.

Making money from your newspaper’s archives

March 27, 2012 in :: Irish Media, Future media, magazines, Newspapers, Public service media, Uncategorized
Tags: archive, Irish Examiner, Long Tail, New York Times, newspaper business model, paywall, Vogue

JFK on Cork's Patrick St - buy it now

The Chicago Reader, a free alternative weekly, has put online its archive of long-form film reviews. It’s the latest in a line of print publications (such as Vogue and The New York Times) trying to figure out a way to add to the value or extend the reach of older content they own and have already paid for. Adam Tinworth lists an interesting couple of additional uses of archival material on his blog (M&S lingerie anyone?).

I’ve harped on about this before, using the example of the Irish Examiner’s archive of great Cork photos (that’s JFK on Cork’s Patrick Street, above).

But seeing a paper publish an archive of its film reviews brings the issue into sharper focus for me. Because print publications have been aggregating and publishing their non-news archive material on paper for years. In film, the obvious example is the annual Time Out film guide. But the Daily Telegraph has printed volumes of its renowned obituaries, a compilation of Yorkshire Evening Post cryptic crosswords accompanied me around the world and The Economist even publishes its in-house style guide. In hardback.

Newspapers are experienced at wringing extra revenue from their non-news content. Some of them are transferring that experience to their online operations – Vogue’s online archive costs $1,575 a year.

But many more are sitting around wringing their hands because “newsgathering is expensive” and no one wants to pay for “journalism”. It’s far from an original statement but it cannot be repeated often enough – readers never paid for journalism. They paid for the bundle – the crossword, the weather, the stock pages, the fashion pages, event listings, movie reviews. And newsgathering has always been the most expensive part of generating that bundle.

Parts of it are worthless a month after the event. Thanks to the internet, parts of it are worthless after minutes. But some  parts are worth something a year, a decade or even a century later. Isn’t it time papers figured out which is which and started devoting more attention to bits that can provide either readers’ cash or readers’ eyeballs for years?

Why newspapers really needed to start tagging stories 10 years ago

October 11, 2011 in advertising, Future media, magazines, Newspapers, Uncategorized
Tags: baseball stories, CJR, Columbia Journalism Review, database journalism, Felix Salmon, iTunes, monetising news, New Yorker, repurposing news

How do you monetise archived newspaper stories? One of the more frequent arguments used against an “iTunes for news” approach to selling individual newspaper articles is that they do not have the shelf life of a song. You listen to songs many times – you bin a newspaper the next day.

Depressingly often, those most guilty of a “tomorrow’s fishwrap” mentality toward newspapers are those most involved with their creation. The focus, understandably, is on the value to be added to tomorrow’s edition and rarely on extracting any from work that has been done, paid for and archived.

That’s why I found this story about the New Yorker charging for collections of old articles cheering. They started with baseball pieces selected from 90 years of the periodical and moved on to golf and other subject areas. The collections were for the iPad, but they could just as easily be for any other tablet, an e-book reader or even printed for an old-fashioned dead tree edition.

This isn’t a new idea – on-demand printers, such as Amazon’s CreateSpace will print your book. Wikipedia will print books of any entries you choose. Newspaper Club will print you a one-off, small newsprint run from any files you send them. National newspapers regularly give away vouchers for print-your-own photo books.

The consumer side of this market is well stocked, but there are few newspapers or magazines chasing this stream of revenue.

The trouble is, a lot of the functions needed to put this together take place behind the scenes of a newspaper’s archive and the value only starts acruing from when you get organised. In other words, to be reaping the value from a properly organised, categorised database of its content NOW, a newspaper website would have had to start 10-15 years ago. Some did, but some still don’t tag content properly.

But better late than never – Google is digitising books that are out of print but still in copyright, with a view to selling them. The technology cannot be that different when digitising the more saleable elements of a newspaper’s cuttings archive. It means scanning a lot of yellowing paper, or more likely microfiche, but many newspapers have begun the process already. Optical character recognition (OCR) software is pretty reliable these days, and should a newspaper make a wiki of all their past information on a subject, crowdsourced corrections could conceivably make any scanning problems minimal.

If a newspaper’s database is sufficiently well organised, there are almost endless possibilities with this:

- Books of obituaries. These could be organised by job (politicians, World War II air aces, drummers) by nationality (50 famous Belgians), by home town, or by any combination. Set up a website, let readers build their own collections.

- Coffee table books of archive images – when I worked for the Irish Examiner, the picture processing team would scan old glass plate  images into the digital during down time. The images included JFK’s visit to Cork city. People pay for reprints.

- Annuals – a year’s gardening columns, organised by season or month; a collection of travel columns organised by country.

- Sports – I have little interest, but there are those who would pay for a book of match reports and images of their local hurling or football club’s year.

There are also great sponsorship possibilities – Robinson’s pay for an e-book of Wimbledon greats, Odeon a collection of the year’s movie reviews, or PC World a pre-Christmas collection of tech reviews.

CJR’s Felix Salmon sums it up: “the small sponsored collections are for me the most exciting, from a business-model perspective. It’s hard to sell old content — but it’s much easier to repackage it and get a sponsor to pay you to do so.”

If you involve the reader in the creation and correction of these documents, you minimise the costs of production. If you use print-on demand, or e-books, you minimise production costs. If you organise your database properly, you minimise  (but, thankfully, don’t eliminate) the need for editorial input.

As Salmon points out,  ”the more different models and revenue streams, the better”. Better yet if you’ve already borne most of the costs.

Picture ethics or a bit nit-picky?

July 6, 2010 in journalistic ethics, magazines, Newspapers
Tags: BP, Charles Apple, economist, New York Times, Obama, oil spill

The doctored image, left

PetaPixel and Charles Apple both posted on this yesterday. The image, originally by Reuters, is clearly photoshopped to remove the woman in the middle and cropped to remove the man on the right.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. I did or commissioned similar things for feature or analysis pages at my last paper. The cover is a different country, but still not sure it doesn’t tell a good story well. This isn’t a daily newspaper, after all, and they do often use more obviously manipulated photos on their fronts.

The New York Times’s Media Decoder carries a response from the duty editor at the Economist, Emma Duncan, who makes much the same points.

Is it just me or does her explanation ring true?