Link: TEMPLE TALK: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley.
I couldn't resist pulling some really interesting and insightful quotations from the text of this speech by John Temple at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. I'd noted the earthquake the closing of the Rocky Mountain News sent through the journalism world back when it happened, and this follow-up sort of gives it additional context.
Background on John Temple: (bio pulled from his blog)
Here are some links to places you can read or catch the entire speech, online:
But here are the bits of the speech that jumped out at me (and has been gathering steam around Twitter too, I think). It is a tremendous look at something, a moment, I think, that will be seen as a key turning point in media history. Forgive me for taking the bits out of context (indicated by elipses . . .). Also, all indications of emphasis are mine.
I couldn't resist pulling some really interesting and insightful quotations from the text of this speech by John Temple at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. I'd noted the earthquake the closing of the Rocky Mountain News sent through the journalism world back when it happened, and this follow-up sort of gives it additional context.
Background on John Temple: (bio pulled from his blog)
"John Temple is the former
editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, which
printed its final edition after almost 150 years on Feb. 27, 2009.
Under his leadership, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and numerous
other national awards for journalistic excellence. Temple also served
the E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the Rocky, as vice president/news of the
newspaper division."
Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley
The death of the Rocky Mountain News in February rippled around the
world. Many want to understand what happened and what we can learn from
the loss of Colorado's oldest newspaper.
Today I kicked off the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex (the company's headquarters) in Silicon Valley.
The following is the text (The link takes you to Scribd, where you can print out the speech. I have also attached it below. I apologize for any inconvenience people have had trying to access my presentation) of my speech. You can also see a video of my presentation (the keynote slides, with my voiceover) at Vimeo. Here is a link to the keynote slides themselves.
Today I kicked off the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex (the company's headquarters) in Silicon Valley.
The following is the text (The link takes you to Scribd, where you can print out the speech. I have also attached it below. I apologize for any inconvenience people have had trying to access my presentation) of my speech. You can also see a video of my presentation (the keynote slides, with my voiceover) at Vimeo. Here is a link to the keynote slides themselves.
But here are the bits of the speech that jumped out at me (and has been gathering steam around Twitter too, I think). It is a tremendous look at something, a moment, I think, that will be seen as a key turning point in media history. Forgive me for taking the bits out of context (indicated by elipses . . .). Also, all indications of emphasis are mine.
[...]
Recently, when I asked my former colleagues at the paper for reflections on their experience since its closure, Bernie Lincicome, a fine sports columnist, wrote me back: “I feel like the cadaver being asked by the funeral director, how did you like the flowers?” I’m not sure what that makes this talk. Maybe the funeral director being asked to perform his own autopsy and offer guidance from the other side on how to save the lives of others suffering the same malady.
[...]
So some pretty smart people were at the top of the company that owned the Rocky Mountain News. Yet none of that was enough for the Rocky to survive in the Internet era. The Rocky published its final edition on Feb. 27 of this year, the first major paper to shut its doors after the economic crash of the fall of 2008.
On the day the closure was
announced, Scripps CEO Rich Boehne told the staff assembled in the
newsroom: "You are the model of what a great newspaper should be. It's
a tragedy for the industry that you disappear."
[...]
As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, “We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”
Well, Scripps isn’t a newspaper company anymore in what was its biggest market. And today I’m going to walk you through the lessons I think might be taken from its largest paper’s failure. While this is going to be a newspaper-centric talk, I believe you’ll find that the lessons apply broadly across radio, TV, magazines and other media, too.
But before I subject the past to scrutiny, you need to know I don’t exempt myself from criticism. I was the top editorial person for the Rocky’s final 11 years and part of the business leadership team. I bear my own share of responsibility. It’s easy when looking back to see things that might seem obvious to us today, but it was a lot more difficult when we were in the thick of the fight, and most of the revenue growth and almost the total revenue pie came from the main newspaper product.
That said, the first lesson I hope people who care about the future of local news take from the Rocky’s experience is this: Being a “great newspaper” isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the Web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough anymore. Consumers today want services when, where and how they want them, and they want to be able to participate, not just receive.
Recently, when I asked my former colleagues at the paper for reflections on their experience since its closure, Bernie Lincicome, a fine sports columnist, wrote me back: “I feel like the cadaver being asked by the funeral director, how did you like the flowers?” I’m not sure what that makes this talk. Maybe the funeral director being asked to perform his own autopsy and offer guidance from the other side on how to save the lives of others suffering the same malady.
[...]
So some pretty smart people were at the top of the company that owned the Rocky Mountain News. Yet none of that was enough for the Rocky to survive in the Internet era. The Rocky published its final edition on Feb. 27 of this year, the first major paper to shut its doors after the economic crash of the fall of 2008.
[...]
As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, “We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”
Well, Scripps isn’t a newspaper company anymore in what was its biggest market. And today I’m going to walk you through the lessons I think might be taken from its largest paper’s failure. While this is going to be a newspaper-centric talk, I believe you’ll find that the lessons apply broadly across radio, TV, magazines and other media, too.
But before I subject the past to scrutiny, you need to know I don’t exempt myself from criticism. I was the top editorial person for the Rocky’s final 11 years and part of the business leadership team. I bear my own share of responsibility. It’s easy when looking back to see things that might seem obvious to us today, but it was a lot more difficult when we were in the thick of the fight, and most of the revenue growth and almost the total revenue pie came from the main newspaper product.
That said, the first lesson I hope people who care about the future of local news take from the Rocky’s experience is this: Being a “great newspaper” isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the Web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough anymore. Consumers today want services when, where and how they want them, and they want to be able to participate, not just receive.
[...]
The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News had competed for 100 years
and each saw the grand prize close at hand. Each wanted to become the
only newspaper in town - something we thought of as “owning the Denver
market.” We thought winning would guarantee a stable and profitable
future. We misunderstood the competitive landscape and put the vast
majority of our efforts into the print war.
The problem was we were fighting the last war. We didn’t understand what was happening to the playing field. Media companies used to think they were in control. That they could “own” a market. What we didn’t take into account is that in this new era, consumers were going to be in control.
[I used to try to make this point to folks when I was at CNN and things were so focused on Fox News as the "competition", especially in the ratings comparisons (I was at Turner during the time that Fox News ratings pulled ahead of CNN for the first time, in the early 2000s, a studio network with a third of the journalistic staff of CNN). Yeah, I was probably obnoxious about it, but I kept telling whoever would listen, "CNN's main competition isn't Fox News; it's the Internet."
It's like back when Amazon first launched, and Barnes and Noble and Borders thought they'd be able to swat down the upstart without breaking a sweat. I was obnoxious back then too, cuz I figured out that Amazon was laughing at B&N and Borders, even in the 90s. Amazon always knew its real competition was WalMart.
And you could press the analogy on Google too, for those folks (remember Lycos and Web Crawler?) who mistakenly thought Google was entering and competing in the search engine market, and doing so badly, because they didn't embrace the busy, shouting memes of the "portal". Man, I had a bead on the Great Goog from the get-go. They weren't in the search business. They were in the data-hoover business. Search was just an ostensible front service to allow the data-hoovering to go on quietly behind the scenes (and it didn't hurt that Google did search better than anyone else, apparently without breaking a sweat either. Why not? Consider the server farms...
Knowing what business you are really in. In some ways that meme itself has become a cliche, or maybe it just seems so to me, because I worked retail in high school and college, often in camera store and photomats. All the sales workshops I had to sit through, saying, "We aren't in the business of selling cameras! We're selling MEMORIES, of family holidays, vacations. Yeah, but unless we moved camera overhead, we were about to soon morph into a store that sold very little, except albums and reprints, this from a noble chain that once catered directly to very advanced hobbyists and home darkroom users.
But back to John Temple.]
[...]
So that brings me to Lesson #2: Know your competition. If we had spent more time trying to build the depth of our connection with the community using online tools from the very start, perhaps the outcome for the Rocky would have been different.
[...]
The Rocky’s first foray onto the Web came in 1995. The newsroom provided a Cox-owned site called Fastball with Colorado Rockies stories and data. To give you some perspective, that same year Colorado’s leading television station put up a Web site, but all it had was a picture of the station’s building, its address and phone number. No links or news at all. At that time, believe it or not, much of the talk about “new media” at many newspapers was about things like AudioText, where users could call in and select different categories of news. There was also fax on demand. And 900 numbers, for such things as out-of-state lottery numbers or sports scores, horoscopes and even a dating service.
The Rocky had been burned in the new media world before. In 1990, it made what it considered at the time a major play, launching an electronic service called the A LA CARTE EDITION. The paper sent software to a few thousand users, many of whom had 400 baud modems.
[Oh yeah, I remember those days!]
[Holy Fishwrap, Batman! 2006?! What happened between the Gulf War (1995) and 2006?! Y'all were burned and slammed the door shut, no revenue model? That is not just massively shortsighted. That's like ostrich with head in the sand blind. There were a few other things going on online during that time. Just a few. Like in 2000, CNN.com had built its staff up to 400 people, and then in 2001, fully half of them were laid off.]
[That was standard operating wisdom in most chain newspaper newsrooms since the late 80s, the whole time siphoning 20-30% profits back to stockholders from the communities where the newspapers were based. There was not a newspaper in the U.S., even the very best of them, and the Rocky was one of the best, that didn't operate under an SOP win-by-cost-cutting mentality. I mean, read that one sentence again: "We cut about 30,000 circulation, or 10% of our total, in one day."
That's outrageous! And yet, that was the equation, the algorithm, as well as always reducing coverage, always reducing staff, narrowing pages, going after EVERY cost center with an exacto knife, as if shaving shaving shaving were going to make readers like the paper more.
Actually, that's the absurd part. It is revealed in that algorithm, that unthinking newsroom management wisdom assumption--which was blasphemy to question back in the day--that circulation was seen as throwaway. That READERS were not the real audience of the paper. They were ostensibly the audience, but always, always always, the real audience was advertisers. The real readers were advertisers. The kabuki performance in the name of readers was always under the surface really being enacted on behalf of the advertisers, to convince them that XX numbers of people were reading the paper (instead of lining the bottoms of their birdcages with it?), up YY% over the last quarter, even when newsprint technology could not really track and tell you exactly what people were reading and looking at.
In short, it was a lot easier to convince advertisers that you were the only game in town to reach eyeballs when the actual reaching of the eyeballs was left as an ultimate crapshoot, from the real POV of advertisers, who are now busy adjusting costs in terms of real numbers from online tracking.
It was an inflated, monopoly-driven economy, in other words, the entire print newspaper (and magazine) ecoysystem, reinforced by hardened arteries of convention (those voices who say "but all publication ad cards are priced according to this formula...").
Inflated ad dollars, Exacto-knife-shriveled staffs forced to behave like one of the most profitable industries in the world was in a constant state of recession-like cutbacks, and then when a real recession hits at the same time that the field is finally embracing the structural shifts of the online world, and we lose the Rocky Mountain News.
Which remains a real loss for real readers who care about real journalism. I'm still sad about it.
[This is such a great talk, and I feel bad for picking out these things, but they just jump out at me. Like the line above: "We weren't a consumer-driven company, except that we knew our priority was to get the papers on the porch on time in the morning."
How did that disconnect happen? (it was common across the field at that time, and in other times, due to the focus on the real meal ticket, the advertisers, who also tended too forget that they wanted their messages to fall on receptive ground and instead seemed most to strive to rhetorically manipulate passive consumers--even the word "consumers" denotes their passivity--rather than actually COURT anyone, hat in hand)
How does getting the papers on the porch mean that the stuff in the papers was needed, desired, even important to the people in the houses, if you didn't think about them? These weren't citizens interacting with the civic structures of their lives, needing information to participate fully in a democratic society. They were pawns, who would switch to the competitor for a thicker stack of coupons or slightly flashier features! Not because of well-earned Pulitzers!
In the race to the bottom dumbing the newsprint down, Rocky held the fort in some areas, while by necessity due to chain media conventions joined the race just like all the other big papers. That is so sobering to read.]
[Aha! Here is the answer to my question up at the top, about what happened between 1995 and 2006 online for the Rocky!
Generally, I am wholeheartedly pro-union and will back any union with real grievances. But unions have been broken in the U.S., and broken long before they were really broken.
I heard a program on this recently... where was that? Bill Moyers? Rachel Maddow? About a shift within strong unions during the McCarthy Era, when the red scares turned union agendas into a laser focus in wage and benefit increases, exclusively, a pawn of the system. I think the piece cited a key presidency of the AFL-CIO that sapped the unions of their far left wings as being "too red," and thus they lost their hearts and became pragmatic negotiators. Wish I could remember where I heard that story. I listen to too many podcasts, and they all run together sometimes.
Anyway, as someone who used to work on small presses and with plates and page negs, I always talked to the guys in the printing plants at the various places I worked, just cuz I liked looking around at the presses. And I remember some FREAKY rules. In some places, I wasn't allowed to touch the waxers or move copy from one spot to another on a page. Union rules, I was told. I don't know of a single paper that wasn't hamstrung technologically by arcane rules that, if they had had their way, would still be protecting the jobs of people who set type with lead by hand in a case!
Wait, I do know of a single paper, cuz it was the one where I had to do a little of everything. That was how I learned all those arcane newsroom jobs. No union there, at the Frontiersman in Alaska.
It still feels like a cheat to bitch about printers' union rules, when journalists very often were not organized and needed to, and should have, to stand up stronger against the hollowing out of real journalism in the face of monopolistic metro-daily-chain paper conventions. And could have stood up more for the needs of real readers. Ordinary journalists were as conditioned by the carrots and the sticks held out before them by the big chains to disenfranchise the real civic life of their communities as anyone else.
But then that other labor question comes up. See, these hollowed out newsrooms had to move online, but their staffs were already worn out from decades of Exacto-knife layoffs, each doing the work of several people, putting in ghastly overtime, for the print product. And what does management typically do (and still does, an old friend told me on Facebook not too long ago, at Gannett, with a journalists-must-blog mandate), but inform the overworked journalist that the work for the online edition must be done on top of his or her existing assignments and beats, and oh yeah, it has to be fresh, and in a bloggy-tone, with all facts verified and copyedited before it goes live, you know, every 2-3 hours.
Yeah, right. It's about labor. I bet.]
[I have another thought about these labor issues. First, you don't tell an exhausted, overworked and undercompensated editorial staff to suddenly adopt a "start-up mentality." That's absurd.
If the papers across the board were not hollowed out in the first place, they could have shifted into start-up mode, but you have to have buy-in. Journalists buy in to the religion of journalism. They'd act like a start-up if they felt that was what they were doing. They put up with those salaries and layoffs and abuse because they love their religion more than their religion loves them. In that sense, journalists have endured decades of "start-up mentality." Management usually could not be counted on to adequately defend the faith, however (I mean management in general, not John Temple in particular. He seems a particularly passionate defender of the faith).
But actually, I think the problem is a humanities/editorial task was built on an industrial production model. Yes, thinking was involved in this enterprise at one point, but at some other point, who can say exactly when? the industrial model took over, assembly line copy sent over to assembly line copy editors sent over to assembly line page building, with copy and images as so many widgets of filler around the ads (even in TV-land, news producers fill blocks of time with widget stories by "stacking a show.").
The exigencies of deadline pressure, the fear, when short-staffed, of missing some drop dead deadline that keeps the paper from getting out, that keeps the show from crashing, not making air, that all enforces the assembly line model.
And there's few opportunities to step back and think about readers, viewers, citizens, co-participants with you in the dialogue of your endeavor.
[A theme keeps emerging. The important deal-breaker was advertisers. Not readers. Not people, whom, presumably, the advertisers wanted to reach. Disenfranchise 10% of your subscribers in a single day, but don't touch that ad money river! The seductions of the flush till, and courting those who made the till flush.
I was reading Umberto Eco's wonderful medieval mystery the other day, The Name of the Rose. It is an occupational hazard for all who would set themselves up as high priests, isn't it? Just now, thinking about how advertisers kept chain papers flush on rich ad revenue at the expense of creating a product for real readers, I'm struck by how Eco presents the corrupt priests, monks, the Abbot, in those dark days for the Catholic Church, when it got so very very rich, and so drunk on secular power, that it almost could forget entirely about ordinary people, except to burn them as potential heretics.
[This is such a great talk! Stuff that really needed to be said.]
[I see this happen over and over with newspaper sites. They kill their own permalinks every time they do a redesign. They turn up their noses at the historical records of their own archives. Most newspaper sites have to be navigated by Google because their own nav systems are so godawful.
It's like seeing your friends walking around with a strip of toilet paper dangling from the waistband of their pants and not being able to tell them about it. Or you do try to tell them about it, and they have a dozen important sounding business reasons why those things don't matter. It's just so sad.
I still see some magazine ventures trying to develop non-bookmarkable "reader" software that would display on the web with little raw HTML at all, and you just have to sigh and wonder what anachronistic universe they wandered in from.]
[Hear hear!]
[Yup. This next bit just blows my mind. I mean, it is amazing to see someone who had been on management side saying it.]
The problem was we were fighting the last war. We didn’t understand what was happening to the playing field. Media companies used to think they were in control. That they could “own” a market. What we didn’t take into account is that in this new era, consumers were going to be in control.
[I used to try to make this point to folks when I was at CNN and things were so focused on Fox News as the "competition", especially in the ratings comparisons (I was at Turner during the time that Fox News ratings pulled ahead of CNN for the first time, in the early 2000s, a studio network with a third of the journalistic staff of CNN). Yeah, I was probably obnoxious about it, but I kept telling whoever would listen, "CNN's main competition isn't Fox News; it's the Internet."
It's like back when Amazon first launched, and Barnes and Noble and Borders thought they'd be able to swat down the upstart without breaking a sweat. I was obnoxious back then too, cuz I figured out that Amazon was laughing at B&N and Borders, even in the 90s. Amazon always knew its real competition was WalMart.
And you could press the analogy on Google too, for those folks (remember Lycos and Web Crawler?) who mistakenly thought Google was entering and competing in the search engine market, and doing so badly, because they didn't embrace the busy, shouting memes of the "portal". Man, I had a bead on the Great Goog from the get-go. They weren't in the search business. They were in the data-hoover business. Search was just an ostensible front service to allow the data-hoovering to go on quietly behind the scenes (and it didn't hurt that Google did search better than anyone else, apparently without breaking a sweat either. Why not? Consider the server farms...
Knowing what business you are really in. In some ways that meme itself has become a cliche, or maybe it just seems so to me, because I worked retail in high school and college, often in camera store and photomats. All the sales workshops I had to sit through, saying, "We aren't in the business of selling cameras! We're selling MEMORIES, of family holidays, vacations. Yeah, but unless we moved camera overhead, we were about to soon morph into a store that sold very little, except albums and reprints, this from a noble chain that once catered directly to very advanced hobbyists and home darkroom users.
But back to John Temple.]
So that brings me to Lesson #2: Know your competition. If we had spent more time trying to build the depth of our connection with the community using online tools from the very start, perhaps the outcome for the Rocky would have been different.
[...]
The Rocky’s first foray onto the Web came in 1995. The newsroom provided a Cox-owned site called Fastball with Colorado Rockies stories and data. To give you some perspective, that same year Colorado’s leading television station put up a Web site, but all it had was a picture of the station’s building, its address and phone number. No links or news at all. At that time, believe it or not, much of the talk about “new media” at many newspapers was about things like AudioText, where users could call in and select different categories of news. There was also fax on demand. And 900 numbers, for such things as out-of-state lottery numbers or sports scores, horoscopes and even a dating service.
The Rocky had been burned in the new media world before. In 1990, it made what it considered at the time a major play, launching an electronic service called the A LA CARTE EDITION. The paper sent software to a few thousand users, many of whom had 400 baud modems.
[Oh yeah, I remember those days!]
[...]
You can see from this introduction to our first electronic service that we thought of ourselves as newspaper companies right from the start. We wrote that the goal of the new edition, was “ultimately to strengthen and preserve the printed daily newspaper.”
The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because “we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue.”
Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.
The Rocky’s first Web site, this is the home page on the very first day, grew out of the newsroom’s night copy desk crew, a few of whom had learned some HTML. It was a bottom up effort. There was no advertising involvement. Under the direction of the senior night editor, a small team built a Web site that went live on March 1, 2006.
You can see from this introduction to our first electronic service that we thought of ourselves as newspaper companies right from the start. We wrote that the goal of the new edition, was “ultimately to strengthen and preserve the printed daily newspaper.”
The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because “we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue.”
Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.
The Rocky’s first Web site, this is the home page on the very first day, grew out of the newsroom’s night copy desk crew, a few of whom had learned some HTML. It was a bottom up effort. There was no advertising involvement. Under the direction of the senior night editor, a small team built a Web site that went live on March 1, 2006.
[Holy Fishwrap, Batman! 2006?! What happened between the Gulf War (1995) and 2006?! Y'all were burned and slammed the door shut, no revenue model? That is not just massively shortsighted. That's like ostrich with head in the sand blind. There were a few other things going on online during that time. Just a few. Like in 2000, CNN.com had built its staff up to 400 people, and then in 2001, fully half of them were laid off.]
[...]
The launch of the site was a perfect example of how the attention of the paper’s leadership was on print, not on new possibilities. We were wrestling with a decision to pull back print distribution to 13 counties adjacent to Denver, a money-saving move to match the $5 million in savings we believed the Post had achieved by narrowing its printed page. We cut about 30,000 circulation, or 10% of our total, in one day.
The launch of the site was a perfect example of how the attention of the paper’s leadership was on print, not on new possibilities. We were wrestling with a decision to pull back print distribution to 13 counties adjacent to Denver, a money-saving move to match the $5 million in savings we believed the Post had achieved by narrowing its printed page. We cut about 30,000 circulation, or 10% of our total, in one day.
[That was standard operating wisdom in most chain newspaper newsrooms since the late 80s, the whole time siphoning 20-30% profits back to stockholders from the communities where the newspapers were based. There was not a newspaper in the U.S., even the very best of them, and the Rocky was one of the best, that didn't operate under an SOP win-by-cost-cutting mentality. I mean, read that one sentence again: "We cut about 30,000 circulation, or 10% of our total, in one day."
That's outrageous! And yet, that was the equation, the algorithm, as well as always reducing coverage, always reducing staff, narrowing pages, going after EVERY cost center with an exacto knife, as if shaving shaving shaving were going to make readers like the paper more.
Actually, that's the absurd part. It is revealed in that algorithm, that unthinking newsroom management wisdom assumption--which was blasphemy to question back in the day--that circulation was seen as throwaway. That READERS were not the real audience of the paper. They were ostensibly the audience, but always, always always, the real audience was advertisers. The real readers were advertisers. The kabuki performance in the name of readers was always under the surface really being enacted on behalf of the advertisers, to convince them that XX numbers of people were reading the paper (instead of lining the bottoms of their birdcages with it?), up YY% over the last quarter, even when newsprint technology could not really track and tell you exactly what people were reading and looking at.
In short, it was a lot easier to convince advertisers that you were the only game in town to reach eyeballs when the actual reaching of the eyeballs was left as an ultimate crapshoot, from the real POV of advertisers, who are now busy adjusting costs in terms of real numbers from online tracking.
It was an inflated, monopoly-driven economy, in other words, the entire print newspaper (and magazine) ecoysystem, reinforced by hardened arteries of convention (those voices who say "but all publication ad cards are priced according to this formula...").
Inflated ad dollars, Exacto-knife-shriveled staffs forced to behave like one of the most profitable industries in the world was in a constant state of recession-like cutbacks, and then when a real recession hits at the same time that the field is finally embracing the structural shifts of the online world, and we lose the Rocky Mountain News.
Which remains a real loss for real readers who care about real journalism. I'm still sad about it.
[...]
There was no promotion of the Web site. Our PR efforts at the time were attempts to control the damage from cutting off 30,000 paying customers.
The message to the newsroom at that time regarding the Web site: “Do not let it interfere with the print edition.” And as managing editor, I made sure that we kept our focus on the print competition.
We knew the Web was a place we needed to be. But we didn’t have a clear strategy. Mission. Or objective. It was a “complement to the paper,” as we said in our initial “About us” page.
[...]
Senior management’s focus in the 1990s was on keeping the newspaper alive. Again, to be clear, that’s understandable, at least to a point. We were fighting for our lives and the money then lay in print. We didn’t understand the Web or new technology and didn’t have the time to learn much about it. We weren’t a consumer-driven company, except that we knew our priority was to get papers on the porch on time in the morning. Otherwise, we feared our subscribers would switch to our competitor.
There was no promotion of the Web site. Our PR efforts at the time were attempts to control the damage from cutting off 30,000 paying customers.
The message to the newsroom at that time regarding the Web site: “Do not let it interfere with the print edition.” And as managing editor, I made sure that we kept our focus on the print competition.
We knew the Web was a place we needed to be. But we didn’t have a clear strategy. Mission. Or objective. It was a “complement to the paper,” as we said in our initial “About us” page.
[...]
Senior management’s focus in the 1990s was on keeping the newspaper alive. Again, to be clear, that’s understandable, at least to a point. We were fighting for our lives and the money then lay in print. We didn’t understand the Web or new technology and didn’t have the time to learn much about it. We weren’t a consumer-driven company, except that we knew our priority was to get papers on the porch on time in the morning. Otherwise, we feared our subscribers would switch to our competitor.
[This is such a great talk, and I feel bad for picking out these things, but they just jump out at me. Like the line above: "We weren't a consumer-driven company, except that we knew our priority was to get the papers on the porch on time in the morning."
How did that disconnect happen? (it was common across the field at that time, and in other times, due to the focus on the real meal ticket, the advertisers, who also tended too forget that they wanted their messages to fall on receptive ground and instead seemed most to strive to rhetorically manipulate passive consumers--even the word "consumers" denotes their passivity--rather than actually COURT anyone, hat in hand)
How does getting the papers on the porch mean that the stuff in the papers was needed, desired, even important to the people in the houses, if you didn't think about them? These weren't citizens interacting with the civic structures of their lives, needing information to participate fully in a democratic society. They were pawns, who would switch to the competitor for a thicker stack of coupons or slightly flashier features! Not because of well-earned Pulitzers!
In the race to the bottom dumbing the newsprint down, Rocky held the fort in some areas, while by necessity due to chain media conventions joined the race just like all the other big papers. That is so sobering to read.]
[...]
Because the Rocky’s newsroom was unionized, management felt it had to quickly make a decision about where to house the new service. The fear was that union rules governing the newsroom would limit what we could do with the Web and potentially increase operating costs at a time when there was no revenue to speak of associated with it. So the newsroom lost its role on the Web until five years later, after the “war” was over.
Because the Rocky’s newsroom was unionized, management felt it had to quickly make a decision about where to house the new service. The fear was that union rules governing the newsroom would limit what we could do with the Web and potentially increase operating costs at a time when there was no revenue to speak of associated with it. So the newsroom lost its role on the Web until five years later, after the “war” was over.
[Aha! Here is the answer to my question up at the top, about what happened between 1995 and 2006 online for the Rocky!
Generally, I am wholeheartedly pro-union and will back any union with real grievances. But unions have been broken in the U.S., and broken long before they were really broken.
I heard a program on this recently... where was that? Bill Moyers? Rachel Maddow? About a shift within strong unions during the McCarthy Era, when the red scares turned union agendas into a laser focus in wage and benefit increases, exclusively, a pawn of the system. I think the piece cited a key presidency of the AFL-CIO that sapped the unions of their far left wings as being "too red," and thus they lost their hearts and became pragmatic negotiators. Wish I could remember where I heard that story. I listen to too many podcasts, and they all run together sometimes.
Anyway, as someone who used to work on small presses and with plates and page negs, I always talked to the guys in the printing plants at the various places I worked, just cuz I liked looking around at the presses. And I remember some FREAKY rules. In some places, I wasn't allowed to touch the waxers or move copy from one spot to another on a page. Union rules, I was told. I don't know of a single paper that wasn't hamstrung technologically by arcane rules that, if they had had their way, would still be protecting the jobs of people who set type with lead by hand in a case!
Wait, I do know of a single paper, cuz it was the one where I had to do a little of everything. That was how I learned all those arcane newsroom jobs. No union there, at the Frontiersman in Alaska.
It still feels like a cheat to bitch about printers' union rules, when journalists very often were not organized and needed to, and should have, to stand up stronger against the hollowing out of real journalism in the face of monopolistic metro-daily-chain paper conventions. And could have stood up more for the needs of real readers. Ordinary journalists were as conditioned by the carrots and the sticks held out before them by the big chains to disenfranchise the real civic life of their communities as anyone else.
But then that other labor question comes up. See, these hollowed out newsrooms had to move online, but their staffs were already worn out from decades of Exacto-knife layoffs, each doing the work of several people, putting in ghastly overtime, for the print product. And what does management typically do (and still does, an old friend told me on Facebook not too long ago, at Gannett, with a journalists-must-blog mandate), but inform the overworked journalist that the work for the online edition must be done on top of his or her existing assignments and beats, and oh yeah, it has to be fresh, and in a bloggy-tone, with all facts verified and copyedited before it goes live, you know, every 2-3 hours.
Yeah, right. It's about labor. I bet.]
[...]
Lesson #5: Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old. Over the years, the company had agreed to conditions it might not have liked but could accept because revenues of the newspaper made them possible. The problem was they would strangle a startup.
It was probably a smart move to get the Web out of the newsroom. It made it possible for the Web staff to carve their own path. But it also separated the newsroom - the paper’s most valuable asset - from its new online product for five years. And that clearly had its downside.
Lesson #5: Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old. Over the years, the company had agreed to conditions it might not have liked but could accept because revenues of the newspaper made them possible. The problem was they would strangle a startup.
It was probably a smart move to get the Web out of the newsroom. It made it possible for the Web staff to carve their own path. But it also separated the newsroom - the paper’s most valuable asset - from its new online product for five years. And that clearly had its downside.
[I have another thought about these labor issues. First, you don't tell an exhausted, overworked and undercompensated editorial staff to suddenly adopt a "start-up mentality." That's absurd.
If the papers across the board were not hollowed out in the first place, they could have shifted into start-up mode, but you have to have buy-in. Journalists buy in to the religion of journalism. They'd act like a start-up if they felt that was what they were doing. They put up with those salaries and layoffs and abuse because they love their religion more than their religion loves them. In that sense, journalists have endured decades of "start-up mentality." Management usually could not be counted on to adequately defend the faith, however (I mean management in general, not John Temple in particular. He seems a particularly passionate defender of the faith).
But actually, I think the problem is a humanities/editorial task was built on an industrial production model. Yes, thinking was involved in this enterprise at one point, but at some other point, who can say exactly when? the industrial model took over, assembly line copy sent over to assembly line copy editors sent over to assembly line page building, with copy and images as so many widgets of filler around the ads (even in TV-land, news producers fill blocks of time with widget stories by "stacking a show.").
The exigencies of deadline pressure, the fear, when short-staffed, of missing some drop dead deadline that keeps the paper from getting out, that keeps the show from crashing, not making air, that all enforces the assembly line model.
And there's few opportunities to step back and think about readers, viewers, citizens, co-participants with you in the dialogue of your endeavor.
[...]
But the Web leadership kept changing, which meant new marching orders; there was tension between corporate and local leadership about direction on the Web; and staff turnover was heavy. Indicative of the struggle to find a strategy was how the name of the site kept changing. It started as Denver-RMN.com. (A really catchy url.)
We ventured deep into high school sports. This is an early example of a RockyPreps page, incredible detail about girls volleyball. This was the first time we thought Web first, posting results online immediately and then outputting select data to print. It was popular with readers. But advertisers shunned it.
[...]
Then we changed the site’s name to InsideDenver.com. We thought the Web was going to be more about what to do than about news. (The story is that Denver.com was available but the $50,000 price tag was considered too steep.)
Finally, we chose to go to our newspaper name, RockyMountainNews.com, despite how unwieldy it was as a url.
This was an era where we didn’t fully believe in the value of the web. So, like other papers, we created the bundle, selling web space as an add-on for print advertisers.
But the Web leadership kept changing, which meant new marching orders; there was tension between corporate and local leadership about direction on the Web; and staff turnover was heavy. Indicative of the struggle to find a strategy was how the name of the site kept changing. It started as Denver-RMN.com. (A really catchy url.)
We ventured deep into high school sports. This is an early example of a RockyPreps page, incredible detail about girls volleyball. This was the first time we thought Web first, posting results online immediately and then outputting select data to print. It was popular with readers. But advertisers shunned it.
[...]
Then we changed the site’s name to InsideDenver.com. We thought the Web was going to be more about what to do than about news. (The story is that Denver.com was available but the $50,000 price tag was considered too steep.)
Finally, we chose to go to our newspaper name, RockyMountainNews.com, despite how unwieldy it was as a url.
This was an era where we didn’t fully believe in the value of the web. So, like other papers, we created the bundle, selling web space as an add-on for print advertisers.
[A theme keeps emerging. The important deal-breaker was advertisers. Not readers. Not people, whom, presumably, the advertisers wanted to reach. Disenfranchise 10% of your subscribers in a single day, but don't touch that ad money river! The seductions of the flush till, and courting those who made the till flush.
I was reading Umberto Eco's wonderful medieval mystery the other day, The Name of the Rose. It is an occupational hazard for all who would set themselves up as high priests, isn't it? Just now, thinking about how advertisers kept chain papers flush on rich ad revenue at the expense of creating a product for real readers, I'm struck by how Eco presents the corrupt priests, monks, the Abbot, in those dark days for the Catholic Church, when it got so very very rich, and so drunk on secular power, that it almost could forget entirely about ordinary people, except to burn them as potential heretics.
[...]
We generally saw the web as a few advertising boxes we could sell. We didn’t see the value of audience. Scripps bought sophisticated software to run its cable and newspaper Web sites. Although it tried to put the focus on readers, in the end it let technical people develop a culture based on how they wanted technology to work - stable and secure - rather than putting the priority on remaining nimble in a rapidly changing world.
[...]
What did we discover? That the people running a new business need to be free to do what’s best for that business, regardless of the potential impact on the old. That’s lesson #6. Why couldn’t newspapers have invented something like Yelp? Probably because editors would have gone ballistic over reader reviews with misspelled words and would have felt uneasy with reader contributions being given priority.
We generally saw the web as a few advertising boxes we could sell. We didn’t see the value of audience. Scripps bought sophisticated software to run its cable and newspaper Web sites. Although it tried to put the focus on readers, in the end it let technical people develop a culture based on how they wanted technology to work - stable and secure - rather than putting the priority on remaining nimble in a rapidly changing world.
[...]
What did we discover? That the people running a new business need to be free to do what’s best for that business, regardless of the potential impact on the old. That’s lesson #6. Why couldn’t newspapers have invented something like Yelp? Probably because editors would have gone ballistic over reader reviews with misspelled words and would have felt uneasy with reader contributions being given priority.
[This is such a great talk! Stuff that really needed to be said.]
[...]
A pivotal moment - perhaps the most telling about the paper’s approach to the Web - came on the morning of April 20, 1999 when two students opened fire at Columbine High School. The world was watching.
At that time, we had one content producer whose job was essentially to shovel the newspaper onto the Web. The Web team was on the first floor of our building. The newsroom on the third. After news of the shooting broke, the producer came to the newsroom and asked the city editor for any news he could give him. “I’m not giving you anything for the Web site,” he remembers being told. “They’ll steal it.” They, in this case, was The Denver Post. The culture of the newsroom at this point was still to save any possible scoops for the morning paper to keep the Post a day behind us. The Rocky’s Web team ended up relying on our TV news partner for its reports.
[...]
The newspaper industry today talks a lot about the need to get paid for its content online. But in the late ‘90s, Denver was an experiment in essentially free newspapers. By the peak of the newspaper war, more than 400,000 subscribers to the two Denver papers were paying a penny a day for home delivery. The Rocky was bleeding money and the Post was heading the same direction. So the owners called a truce, asking the Justice Department to approve what’s known as a joint operating agreement, which allows newspapers to merge business operations while maintaining separate and independent newsrooms.
[...]
The JOA is a complicating factor in the Denver story. I’m not going to explore it today, except to say that such agreements lead to economically inappropriate activities that ultimately undermine a business. And that’s part of the explanation of what happened to the Rocky.
The JOA did offer one significant benefit to our Web efforts. It gave the papers enough economic cushion to make them feel comfortable enough to negotiate new flexible contracts with the Newspaper Guild to move the Web editorial team and programmers back into the newsroom - this time at the very center of the room, not in a dark corner on the 1st floor, a symbolic move to try to indicate the site’s importance to our future.
This was critical to the multimedia and database creativity that followed on the Web. And I think it was critical to our growth in traffic, from roughly 600,000 uniques a month in 2001 to 2.2 million a month when the paper was put up for sale.
[...]
Lesson #7: If you want to compete in a medium, you have to understand it. The newspaper industry didn’t understand the web in the beginning. That’s understandable. But it’s not clear that the newspaper industry understands it today. That’s partly because you need to get the right people into an organization, people who can see and seize new opportunities.
[...]
A good example of our lack of understanding of the Web came in 2005 when Denver took its first big leap online under the JOA. This was the same year YouTube went live. Executives in Denver perceived a need for a vehicle to compete with weekly newspapers, which they thought were taking local ad share. In response, the Rocky launched YourHub.com, a network of more than 40 “citizen-journalism” web sites serving the Denver metropolitan area. All content appeared online first. Most came from readers. The best content of the week - again, almost all from readers - was published in 18 weekly zoned print sections. The first site went live that spring. But guess what? Google couldn’t find it.
A pivotal moment - perhaps the most telling about the paper’s approach to the Web - came on the morning of April 20, 1999 when two students opened fire at Columbine High School. The world was watching.
At that time, we had one content producer whose job was essentially to shovel the newspaper onto the Web. The Web team was on the first floor of our building. The newsroom on the third. After news of the shooting broke, the producer came to the newsroom and asked the city editor for any news he could give him. “I’m not giving you anything for the Web site,” he remembers being told. “They’ll steal it.” They, in this case, was The Denver Post. The culture of the newsroom at this point was still to save any possible scoops for the morning paper to keep the Post a day behind us. The Rocky’s Web team ended up relying on our TV news partner for its reports.
[...]
The newspaper industry today talks a lot about the need to get paid for its content online. But in the late ‘90s, Denver was an experiment in essentially free newspapers. By the peak of the newspaper war, more than 400,000 subscribers to the two Denver papers were paying a penny a day for home delivery. The Rocky was bleeding money and the Post was heading the same direction. So the owners called a truce, asking the Justice Department to approve what’s known as a joint operating agreement, which allows newspapers to merge business operations while maintaining separate and independent newsrooms.
[...]
The JOA is a complicating factor in the Denver story. I’m not going to explore it today, except to say that such agreements lead to economically inappropriate activities that ultimately undermine a business. And that’s part of the explanation of what happened to the Rocky.
The JOA did offer one significant benefit to our Web efforts. It gave the papers enough economic cushion to make them feel comfortable enough to negotiate new flexible contracts with the Newspaper Guild to move the Web editorial team and programmers back into the newsroom - this time at the very center of the room, not in a dark corner on the 1st floor, a symbolic move to try to indicate the site’s importance to our future.
This was critical to the multimedia and database creativity that followed on the Web. And I think it was critical to our growth in traffic, from roughly 600,000 uniques a month in 2001 to 2.2 million a month when the paper was put up for sale.
[...]
Lesson #7: If you want to compete in a medium, you have to understand it. The newspaper industry didn’t understand the web in the beginning. That’s understandable. But it’s not clear that the newspaper industry understands it today. That’s partly because you need to get the right people into an organization, people who can see and seize new opportunities.
[...]
A good example of our lack of understanding of the Web came in 2005 when Denver took its first big leap online under the JOA. This was the same year YouTube went live. Executives in Denver perceived a need for a vehicle to compete with weekly newspapers, which they thought were taking local ad share. In response, the Rocky launched YourHub.com, a network of more than 40 “citizen-journalism” web sites serving the Denver metropolitan area. All content appeared online first. Most came from readers. The best content of the week - again, almost all from readers - was published in 18 weekly zoned print sections. The first site went live that spring. But guess what? Google couldn’t find it.
[I see this happen over and over with newspaper sites. They kill their own permalinks every time they do a redesign. They turn up their noses at the historical records of their own archives. Most newspaper sites have to be navigated by Google because their own nav systems are so godawful.
It's like seeing your friends walking around with a strip of toilet paper dangling from the waistband of their pants and not being able to tell them about it. Or you do try to tell them about it, and they have a dozen important sounding business reasons why those things don't matter. It's just so sad.
I still see some magazine ventures trying to develop non-bookmarkable "reader" software that would display on the web with little raw HTML at all, and you just have to sigh and wonder what anachronistic universe they wandered in from.]
[...]
Which brings me to Lesson #9: Ask yourself: Without R&D, how are local news companies going to get out on the edge and develop new offerings? Now that newspaper companies are filling the bankruptcy courts, they’re scrambling to find ways to survive on the Web. But their efforts seem mostly about making money off their current offerings. You don’t see them developing Yelp, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think they still could develop successful new services. But it would require something they haven’t historically done, research and development. The Rocky looked to other newspapers and news sites to assess how it was doing. We should have been looking more closely at pure-play Web operations.
Which brings me to Lesson #9: Ask yourself: Without R&D, how are local news companies going to get out on the edge and develop new offerings? Now that newspaper companies are filling the bankruptcy courts, they’re scrambling to find ways to survive on the Web. But their efforts seem mostly about making money off their current offerings. You don’t see them developing Yelp, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think they still could develop successful new services. But it would require something they haven’t historically done, research and development. The Rocky looked to other newspapers and news sites to assess how it was doing. We should have been looking more closely at pure-play Web operations.
[Hear hear!]
To conclude, Scripps, the owner of the Rocky, is about 130 years old.
It’s survived a lot of change. I wouldn’t count it or other historic
titles like Hearst or The New York Times out. But I’m concerned about
their future. There’s still too much of a sense of entitlement in the
industry. The Associated Press spends too much time making the case
that copyright violation is the problem bringing the industry down when
the industry should be focused on building new and better products and
services. Are companies making the same mistake in this decade that the
Rocky made in the ‘90s, not understanding the competition? I think so.
[Yup. This next bit just blows my mind. I mean, it is amazing to see someone who had been on management side saying it.]
Which brings me to the final lesson: Know your customers. If newspapers
would spend more time trying to understand their customers instead of
focused on their own internal issues - such as which newspaper
department should get credit for Web revenue - they’re more likely to
be successful. That’s a hard switch for traditional manufacturing
operations like newspapers to make. But I don’t think I need to explain
why it’s essential. The following quote explains the dilemma newspapers
found themselves in.
“We were not used to the market telling us how things should be. We were used to telling people what we thought they needed and how they needed it,” is how a Scripps marketing exec put it. That has to change.
“We were not used to the market telling us how things should be. We were used to telling people what we thought they needed and how they needed it,” is how a Scripps marketing exec put it. That has to change.
[That is such a potent mouthful, I just have to stop there. And no apologies for this being so long! I wrote it as notes so I could remember it myself! The speech was long, and wonderful. Go read his advice for going forward your own self!
Well, OK, one last postmortem more. I'll leave Mr. Temple with the last word.]
[...]
Newspapers should give consumers more control. They’re still thinking too much about themselves and not enough about what the consumer wants.
Newspapers should stop looking longingly in the rear view mirror at 30% margins. It sometimes seems the whole game of the industry leadership is trying to find a way to get back to their old margins. (Because of the competition, by the way, the Rocky never had those kinds of margins.)
Comments