The Newspaper Crisis, By the Numbers

Here's a sobering--but realistic--look at what's happening in the newspaper industry. These are the first few paragraphs -- to read the entire article, click here.

The newspaper crisis, by the numbers

Roughly a decade after the commercial debut of the Internet, America’s newspapers posted record high advertising sales of $49.4 billion in 2005, leading many publishers to think their businesses would not be seriously affected by the digital revolution. But they were wrong.

Since hitting that high note in 2005, the industry has undergone a dramatic and traumatic contraction, losing nearly half of its print readership and more than a third of its revenues. With the pre-tax profits of the publicly held publishers cut by 39% since 2003, newsroom staffing has dropped to a historically low level. In spite of the declared determination of most publishers to pivot from print to pixels, the industry's share of the digital advertising market has plunged by more than 50%.

Charging for the Campus Newspaper?

University newspaper gains 500 subscribers after implementing paywall

With many campus newspapers struggling with the same challenges as their mainstream counterparts, one university newspaper has succeeded in charging for its content, signing up 500 paying online subscribers.

In 2011, Oklahoma State University’s Daily O’Collegian became the first university publication to begin charging for its content, instituting a metered paywall for readers who were not university students or employees. For $10, readers outside these categories could access unlimited content on the paper’s website.

At the time, newspaper general manager Ray Catalino said that the value of the content produced by the student journalists extended beyond the paper’s free distribution.

While a revolutionary move in the college media industry, critics were not optimistic about the paper’s approach.

According to Dan Reimold, Assistant Professor of Journalism at Saint Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, United States), campus newspapers have the advantage of low staffing costs combined with the lack of expectations to generate profits.

“Along with potentially turning away readers without generating much revenue, paywalls at heart also go against the purpose of the student press. For the moment, campus media are still learning vehicles more than moneymaking ventures,” Reimold wrote on his blog College Media Matters. “In that spirit, students must be able to share, share, share their work with others, without restriction, enabling them to join a larger conversation and learn firsthand about reporting and interacting with the public beyond the classroom or campus.”

The goal for the first year was a paid subscription base of 100. The newspaper exceeded expectations, picking up 173 paying readers.

However, three years later, the newspaper’s landmark strategy is continuing to pay dividends. In an interview with WAN-IFRA, Catalino said that there are now approximately 500 paying customers.

The price of the subscription has also increased.

“We have raised new subscribers' fee from $10 the first year, $15 the second, and now $20 for the year,” Catalino said. “Subscriptions are automatically renewed each year, unless cancelled by the customer. Renewal costs remain the same as the initial year the customer signed up.”

The draw for readers is that campus newspapers cover their universities far better than other publications.

“Campus newspaper like ours cover the campus better than commercial newspapers in almost every college market I am familiar with. We do not use any wire service, so we generate all content ourselves,” Catalino continued.

Catalino said that there are no plans to charge students.

Thus far, the three year experiment has proved to be a success, but as WAN-IFRA detailed in December 2013, The Daily O’Collegian isn’t the only student newspaper finding innovative solutions to the challenges facing all print media.

George Washington University’s The Hatchet began offering sponsorship opportunities in its facilities, while the University of Oregon Daily Emerald rebranded itself as the Emerald Media Group, updating its student media offerings.

As these publications have proven, some forms of student media are thriving in the changing digital environment.

This post has been updated to correct that The Daily O'Collegian is the newspaper at Oklahoma State University, not the University of Oklahoma

5,000 New Media Jobs in Six Years!

How many reporting jobs have new online news organizations created?

Pew Research Center has tried to put a number on it: 5,000.

The center's annual State of the News Media report, released on Wednesday, includes a first-of-its-kind tally of jobs at 30 big websites, like Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post, and 438 smaller startups.

"In a significant shift in the editorial ecosystem, most of these jobs have been created in the past half dozen years, and many have materialized within the last year alone," write the authors of the 2014 report, who credit the startups with bringing "a level of energy to the news industry not seen for a long time."

To read the entire article, click here.

New Christian Women's Magazine Launches

New Christian Women’s Magazine Launch

A team of AWSA (Advanced Writers and Speakers Association) members under the banner of Right to the Heart Ministries, has launched a new online magazine for Christian women called Leading Hearts. The magazine launched online to an audience of 60,000 and has been met with excitement and praise from women around the globe, garnering thousands of hits in the first few days of its release.

Best-selling Baker Revell prayer author Linda Evans Shepherd, the magazine’s publisher explains, “I’m delighted by the response. This magazine meets a real need because it reaches out with Godly advice as it encourages women who lead hearts at home, church, work, and community.”

The magazine’s pages are filled with articles from bestselling Christian authors including Pam Farrel, Lisa Troyer, Karen Whiting, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, Dr. Edna Ellison, Andrea Breidenbach, Rebekah Montgomery, Kathy Collard Miller, Sharon Elliott, Michelle Cox, and Rhonda Rhea who write on the topics of mentoring, marriage, mothering, community, ministry, time management, health, book and music reviews, bible study and prayer.

Amber Weigand-Buckley, an award-winning magazine editor, serves as editor for the publication. In addition, several CBA publishers are acting sponsors including Baker Revell, New Hope, Leafwood Publishers and Bold Vision Press. The magazine is free and is available to read on PC, Mac, iPad and Android.

For more information about the magazine, sponsorships, or to view it online, go to: www.LeadingHearts.com

What's Behind the Plateau in e-book Sales?

BISG members respond to the "e-book sales plateau"

As part of BISG’s single-question surveys, members responded to "What is behind the plateau in e-book sales?"
• 20% -- "E-books have found their level; the market is saturated for now"
• 25% -- "Current e-readers are too limited in terms of rendering design and illustrations"
• 55% -- "E-reader acquisition has slowed as the market has matured, so the customer base for e-books has slowed as well"
• 20% - "What plateau?"

Money is the Bug That Crashes Hyperlocal News Sites

The story behind why boutique and hyperlocal digital journalism efforts fail is simple: The money is never enough, and it runs out.

That's what happened to DeadlineDetroit.com, which announced last week it would lay off its entire staff April 4 as it seeks new investors — a development that comes on the heels of Patch.com in January idling most of its staff around the country.

To read the entire article, click here.

What's "Explanatory Journalism?"

From Digiday:


Explaining what’s behind the sudden allure of explanatory journalism

John McDermott | March 17, 2014

You might have been hearing a lot about the increasing popularity of explanatory journalism in the digital publishing industry. But, ironically, there is a dearth of good explanations as to what exactly explanatory journalism is all about. After all, isn’t all journalism about explaining stuff?

Here, then, is the Digiday explainer for explanatory journalism.

What it is
Explanatory journalism is a form of reporting that attempts to present nuanced, ongoing news stories in a more accessible manner. Many high-profile news events — such as the Edward Snowden leaks about the U.S. government’s surveillance apparatus, or the current showdown between Ukraine and Russia — develop over the course of weeks, months or, sometimes, even years. An article about the latest incremental development in such a situation may thus be inscrutable to readers who haven’t been following the issue from the beginning. Explanatory journalism aims to demystify those complex topics by providing that context. A good example is what you’re reading right now. Also, this, this and this entire series.

The players
The New York Times announced on Thursday it will soon be launching an explanatory journalism vertical called The Upshot, and it published this article on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell as an example of what to expect. Bloomberg launched a similar section last October called QuickTake. QuickTake has published 78 stories to date, according to its editor Jonathan Landman, including recent explainers on Bitcoin, legalized marijuana and the Russia-Ukraine showdown. BuzzFeed publishes numerous explanatory stories a day. Slate has the aptly titled vertical The Explainer. Nate Silver came to fame by taking a data-driven approach to explanatory journalism with 538, an election blog that will soon launch as its own digital media property. And, of course, Ezra Klein left The Washington Post to start explanatory journalism site Vox, whose tagline is simply “understand the news.”

The history
Explanatory journalism may be having a moment, but it’s certainly nothing new. Magazines and newspapers have long used an array of photos, sidebars, charts, graphs and bullet points to make otherwise sprawling stories easier to digest. Explanatory journalism was a Pulitzer Prize category from 1985 to 1997. Since 1998, there has been a Pulitzer given out each year for excellence in explanatory reporting. Publications are now applying these content-packaging techniques to the Web, the latest instance of digital media’s maturation.

Why now?
The resurgence is driven by the Internet, albeit for two seemingly contradictory reasons. One of the many seismic changes the Web has unleashed on the written word is a fundamental change in tone. Whereas print media was decidedly authoritative, the Internet is a more colloquial medium. “For a long time, there was a notion that a conversational tone was inappropriate for serious subjects,” Upshot editor David Leonhardt said. “That’s certainly changed in the last decade.”

But the newfound interest in Web-based explanatory journalism is also aimed at making the Web more authoritative. The Internet has given rise to numerous digital publications and, for better or worse, voice to anyone with a dial-up and a keyboard. The downside of the Web’s democratic design is it allows for the quick dissemination of misinformation. Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, for instance, members of link-sharing site reddit wrongly accused several people of having committed the crime. Reddit general manager Erik Martin apologized for the “online witch hunts.” These new efforts in explanatory reporting aim to take advantage of the Web’s wealth of information while being reliable. Landman called it a “reaction to the shattering of the package that the Internet has caused. What you get now is a kind of machine-gun barrage of news. It’s harder to find the context.”

The audience
Explanatory reporting is meant to appeal to more casual news consumers. The stories are written for people who have heard about Bitcoin, but might be unfamiliar with the name Satoshi Nakamoto. “I think this kind of journalism can appeal to experts,” Leonhardt said. “But we don’t want to appeal only to current Times readers. We want to write about health policy for teachers, Wall Street policy for carpenters, education policy for doctors and housing issues for people on Wall Street.”

The commercial promise
“It’s a fairly difficult category to monetize,” Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at Poynter, said. “The reader who’s seeking out perspective may not be as dedicated and motivated to come back time after time.” The Times is still evaluating how Upshot stories will work within its paywall.

The optimistis view is that the inherently broad appeal of explanatory stories will translate into real traffic (and thus ad impressions). Whether or not there’s a large enough audience to sate the business needs of all these sites remains to be seen. Edmonds said the market will likely play out like any other; some will succeed, others won’t. Leonhardt, however, is optimistic not just for The Times but for the entire category. “There’s a huge pent-up or latent demand for this,” he said. It’s completely rational to think that they can help grow the overall audience for this kind of work. I can guarantee you you will find frequent links on our site to 538 and to Vox.”