NEW YORK — Experts at the Mediabistro Circus yesterday predicted that the business of publishing will change fundamentally and showed how it’s already changed a great deal.
Times have been tough since at least 2000 for traditional publications as readers moved to the Web, according to John Byrne, executive editor of BusinessWeek.com, and now is no time to stand on industry tradition.
“We are in world of hurt,” he said. “But as bad as the past few years have been, the next few will be more gruesome.”
“Media properties are in a death spiral,” he added.
The decline is visible. He said that empires fall in five stages:
Stage one is hubris born of success, which leads directly to stage two, the undisciplined pursuit of more.
“Media companies made acquisitions and started new things whether they made sense or not. One case in point might be the acquisition of the Boston Globe by The New York Times,” he said.
Foolish growth leads to denial that there’s a problem. “People who speak truth to power are put down as not being a team player or not being an optimist.”
Once reality sets in, companies enter the “grasping for salvation” stage.
“Media isn’t in a recession; it’s in an advanced stage of depression,” he said.
He added that a general decline in readership has been aggravated recently by the collapse in advertising, creating depression-like conditions within media while the rest of the economy merely goes through a recession.
The final stage is the stage that GM has just reached, characterized by “capitulation to irrelevancy or death.”
What to do
Companies must change and Byrne was in a position to offer advice. The online version of BusinessWeek is doing well. “Companies need a deep and intimate engagement with their readership. Many companies preach this but in fact there is little actual engagement.”
He added that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) makes this vital as all searches ignore site brands. He added that over half of BusinessWeek.com‘s traffic comes from Google.
He said that advertisers don’t need media properties. “We’ve all been so thoroughly cookied to death — why would anyone go to BusinessWeek.com at a $40 CPM
The challenge for BusinessWeek.com’s is to enable its editorial staff of 220 to compete with The Wall Street Journal’s staff of 2,800 across several brands. “They cover everything that moves. We play the engagement game,” he said.
“Digital technology allows us to collaborate with our audience at every step from idea to story to aftermath,” he said.
Aftermath? Journalism doesn’t have an aftermath. “Stories are like a campfire around which we gather people for a conversation,” Byrne said.
Be careful about how you measure engagement, he added. Measuring engagement by time spent on the site prejudices the number in favor of video and also those stories whose readers have walked away from their computer.
He said that he tracks the volume of text published in response to a story and is aiming for a 100:1 ratio but that the current rate of over 30:1 is nevertheless impressive.
“If you cannot prove to advertisers that users are meaningfully engaged on the site, you won’t be able to sell at a good CPM,” he warned.
(Next page: Building the campfire
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Building the campfire
Everyone has to collaborate. In order to encourage comments, BusinessWeek.com built a list of best comments called “In Your Face”
for the home page and for each channel page. Each comment has the author’s photo as well as what they said. This feature was sponsored by an alcohol company at press time.
“Sometimes our reader comments get more traffic than the original story,”
said Byrne. “Some stories get 5,000 comments.”
In order to encourage journalists to interact with readers, the company created a section called “Dialog With Readers” and if a journalist’s story gets enough comment, it can stay on the front page, in that section.
Emotionally charged topics from pay cuts to Microsoft search do well there.
The site executes a story based on a reader’s idea once or twice each week, and posts it in the “What’s Your Story Idea?” section along with the reader’s photo and short bio. One recent suggestion was a story on the debt load of recent graduates, suggested by a woman who herself carries $90,000 in debt from the undergraduate, masters, and MBA degrees she earned.
BusinessWeek.com does publish stories written by readers, but only occasionally. “We don’t take reader submissions,” said Byrne. “We invite our best commenters, about one each week.”
Using the Web
BusinessWeek.com has over 50 writers and editors on Twitter, Byrne said. One writer, Steve Baker, tweeted the topic sentences of each paragraph of an article recently and the user input made it a better story and also ensured a higher than usual readership. He was eager to point out that The Wall Street Journal sharply restricts its employees’ use of Twitter.
“Many are misusing Twitter to drive traffic to their site,” said Byrne.
“Just spitting out headlines and decks is counterproductive.”
Perhaps the biggest violation of media tradition at BusinessWeek.com is the Business Exchange site. “Editors don’t control the product and it links to other sites,” he said. “We scrape the Web for content, for headlines and decks.”
The goal is to create several sites each day, each around a specific key word. The initiative started in September of last year and there are now about 1,500 sites, Byrne said. At press time, the site for the U.S. Economic Stimulus contained content from major news sites as well as fringe conspiracy theories, but Byrne claimed in his speech that the site features an intelligent human filter.
He noted that topics on Business Exchange include Starbucks, commercial space travel, HR policy and materials science. Of the 1,500 sites, he said 200 are indexed in Google.
Those using the site import their LinkedIn profile. “We post it and monetize it,” said Byrne. “It’s a huge advertising success,” he added. “We sold out.”
The site sells because it delivers unique, specialized, microtargeted sites. “If a customer is interested in environmental sustainability, we have over a dozen topics that we can sell as one package,” he said.
“It delivers high CPMs, one of the highest on the site,” he said. The site has two full time staff, an editor and an intern, and utilizes contributions from the other editors.
(Next page: Disintermediation
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Disintermediation
As the Web changes the relationship between reader and journalist, it is setting some journalists free of the workplace but also eliminating many journalism jobs. “I used to joke that I was documenting the demise of my profession, but it’s not a joke anymore,” said Jeff Howe, Wired editor and the author of the book Crowdsourcing.
He said that the changes that occurred in professional photography were simply a forewarning of what will happen in every other industry. “I recently got a call from a journalist at the Washington Post covering crowdsourcing in the restaurant industry,” he said. “I did not know it was happening but some foodies got together and chose the design and the menu and a raw foods vegetarian restaurant will soon open.”
Other newly crowdsourced industries include customer service specialist Get Satisfaction and Innocentive, which delivers innovation to corporate customers. It is even transforming the practice of ornithology.
“One of the key ideas of crowdsourcing is that the people who do the best work aren’t always who you’d expect,” Howe said.
“It doesn’t eradicate the business but it does change it,” he added. “We buy from companies but also participate in the process of creation.”
He said that when it works, participants become evangelists. Tee-shirt vendor Threadless has many fans because it has made products from some of their
Perhaps the future of journalism lies in reader-funded sites. “TalkingPointsMemo is to some extent crowd-funded,” said Howe. The site was founded by Joshua Michah Marshall in 2000 and in addition to blogging, he writes for mainstream publications.
Spot.us lies further outside the mainstream of U.S. journalism. The site raises money from visitors to fund journalism projects in the East Bay area of San Francisco, said Howe.
He said that the site has funded 24 stories, of which half are complete and some were purchased by local newspapers. “If a paper purchases the story, the contributions are refunded,” he added.
Topics up for funding include an examination of school lunches, of the reason for storefront vacancies, and an investigation of violent incidents with the local police force. “There’s some advocacy journalism on the site,” said Howe.
The pitch for an investigation of why storefronts remain vacant is from Mission Loc@l, a blog project of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
“Information is power,” said professor Lydia Chavez in her video pitch on Spot.us. “It’s about knowing your neighborhood and getting more engaged in your neighborhood.”
It might change people’s minds. “This whole issue started when a local paper wrote an editorial that we should take American Apparel in our neighborhood because there were 29 vacancies,” she said.
A partial investigation revealed that landlords have been holding five storefronts off the market. “It’s important to know that in some cases, it’s not vacant because of the economy — it’s vacant because the owner wants it vacant,” Chavez said.
