thoughts on media, part… I can’t remember which part
I’ve got a response to this below:
Well, the STrib needs to cut 25 more newsroom jobs, local TV station staff are being laid off, the Tribune company is filing for bankruptcy, and Mischke is going to another radio station.Shit’s getting crazy around here.
Let me take a quick second to inject a few points into the media discussions that are currently going on in this poop storm of activity.
First, it was something like a year and a half ago that I started saying that the Star Tribune was going to close up shop in 2009.
Even then, the red flags were already waving. The paper went through another (early) cut of layoffs, the rumors about the land sale were circulating, the paper was groping around for new media services, and content was being targeted for new, wealthier (MARQ, which was awesome) and younger (vita.mn) readers.
A lot of people thought that 2009 was just too soon, but the media market in the Twin Cities is just too cramped for an organization to be run be pranksters like Par Ridder and numbers folks like Avista partners.
Don’t get me wrong, the STrib folding is a bad deal for everybody. There are some very talented and hard working folks at the Strib that deserve big salaries and big followings (Rand). But at this point, that transformation seems less likely than the prospect of the paper closing seemed a year and a half ago.
With all the media stuff going on, let me throw another two cents out there. Here are a few more, if not a bit wonkish, points and predictions from discussions that I’ve been having lately with some other media mavens around town.
First of all, staff cuts aren’t necessarily going to fix anything. Here’s why—organizations should have by now understand the differences between work hours in respective mediums.
It takes a certain amount of time to write a short piece, and it takes more time to write a group of short pieces to organize into a publication or broadcast. But it takes even more time to post that content to the web with keywords, links between each piece, and attach the appropriate imagery.
Yes, the web brings more efficiency and democracy to the media game—anyone can publish to the web, a $200 DV cameras can produce online video, and durable content can stay online for a longer time than papers and magazines on shelves and shows on air.
But someone has to actually get that stuff in there and get that stuff up on the web. And despite efficiency and democracy, you also still get what you pay for. If you’re trying to create a rich user experience, you need dedicated work hours to do that.
Having said that, new technologies allow writers, producers, journalists, editors, whoever, to do so much more and do it better. And if you’re at a media organization, you should be learning these new technologies as fast as you possibly can.
Here’s an analogy: social media applications are to journalists as wrenches and screwdrivers are to mechanics.
At Thanksgiving, I was talking to my cousin who, now that he’s back from Iraq, works as a mechanic for John Deere. I wasn’t at all surprised at how well John Deere has come into the digital age, since the company is so well known for, as my cousin puts it, making sure their shit works right.
If a $3 million tractor breaks down in the field, the owner can call up a repair tech who will get in his truck, drive to the field with a laptop, plug the laptop into the tractor, and send the diagnosis over a satellite connection to JD HQ if need be.
The laptop is just another tool for the mechanic to fix the tractor, as untraditional as it may have seemed a few years ago. Social media and social applications like Facebook and Twitter, and even mobile services like txt msging, are tools that journalists can use to communicate with their audience(s).
Even though those methods might be a bit untraditional, they’re still extremely effective. Josh Marshall, who rules on a number of levels, and his site Talking Points Memo had 8 million pageviews in October of this year. The Times Nicholas Kristof has a great Twitter feed — “Tribune company filing for bankruptcy! For Christmas, I want a new business model for newspapers”. MPR has an iPhone app that’s a hit with the kids, etc., etc., etc.
Another nice part of this analogy is that mechanics don’t monetize tools, they monetize their repair services. The digital revolution seemingly has knocked the footing so far out from under most institutions that they try to make money off anything and everything, so much so that it hampers their service.
And that’s not the worst of it. Look how advanced something like MySpace is in terms of connecting a musician to an audience via the web. It’s the same with many of the new tools. But with these new approaches so advanced, why are institutions (and to be fair a lot of advertisers) still stuck on old ad models that operate on logos and cutting into content?
Let’s imagine you’ve got access to a person’s Facebook account, and essentially all their personality traits, their sociability, their communication and consumption habits—why on Earth would you want to hit them with an ad that doesn’t apply directly to something that would bring them into a sales transaction?
(Although I will say that the rolling razor on Facebook does have me a bit intrigued. If I ever click on a web ad, it will be that one.)
Monetization is of course the biggest issue in the transition of media, but without getting all crazy about Vendor Relations Management (VRM), let me just throw this out there: if you’re looking for a mechanic, do you want the one who can come out to your tractor, give you an on-the-spot diagnosis, and right there tell you what’s going on… or do you want a “traditional” mechanic who needs you to get towed to his garage?
Here’s a related rhetorical question: if there was an Angie’s list for journalists, who would be on it (besides Craig Cox and Tim Gihring)? And how would they get on it?
Here’s a great point that Ed very nicely summarized when we chatting the other day: journalists, like realtors, need to build their personal brands, and they do that by providing great news and information in a variety of forms. That then means that institutions need to start building up their journalists to use new communications tools, give them the time to use those tools (with the expectation of efficiency), and then monetize the services provided by the journalists.
With all that out there, here’s the predictions.
First, following up on the STrib shuttering, by second quarter 2010, the Twin Cities will only have two TV stations doing local newscasts. (Two of them will stop doing news, and instead possibly syndicate national sports and weather info.)
Next, and I don’t know who’d verify this, maybe Iconoculture, but whatever, the key demographic of the 21 - 35 year old AND the next demo up in age with get more than half of their news and information directly from an online source, and a majority of them will be through social media applications.
Last, by first quarter 2011, one of the top 4 news outlets in the Twin Cities will have started operations after 2007.
Yo, I bet you could use Mturk.com to categorize and add keywords to content on media sites. Actually, you can. What I mean is that I bet YOU could for around 3 cents per task.
Many sites using algorithms to handle related post (like TheDeets.com) and scripts to identify location names and automatically link them up. This is something that’s been done for at least 10 years by companies like Yahoo who has used PERL scripts to automatically add links to stock quotes next to mentions of company names. Wordpress has free plugins for this.
These efficiencies just haven’t been discovered yet by mainstream media where things remain way too labor intensive. Labor intensive on mundane stuff rather than creating content and selling ads.
Knowing someone’s demos on Facebook doesn’t guarantee they’re ready to buy, but does give advertisers control over who they advertise to. Facebook’s biggest ad relevancy problem right now is caused by advertisers sitting on the sidelines rather than whipping out their credit cards to give it a try. It’s often the crappier advertisers who are first movers.
I think your predictions are off on the decline of local newscasts. There are still a ton of tricks they can do to cut their costs such as getting rid of entire divisions. For example, they could still do local weather without a weather department. KQ manages to do the weather just fine every morning on the radio.
Packaged news at a specific time will be around for a long time, but the value of that time slot will decline further since people will know more and more of the stories they care about before they air.
