Why aren't publishers counting clicks?

I had  a nice surprise yesterday that made me realise there are publications that are beginning to see the opportunities in web-based media. In my inbox was a monthly report from Building Talk (part of the Pro-Talk network)giving me the statistics for a press release they published for a client in March. It told me which of my press releases had had the most views and how many views. It also told how many visitors had clicked on the link to visit my clients web site.

It also reminded me that a few months ago I had received a confirmation email from a journalist telling me that he had used the story and here was a link to it on the web.

The fact that these two happenings are pretty remarkable indicates how poor journalists are at dialogue - especially with PR people. (remember the PR blacklisting stories of recent weeks).

Now, as we keep being reminded that advertising revenues are falling, perhaps we could use some of the above to start developing a more workable business model for the publishing industry.

As well as monetising content, how about monetising information about content? There is lots of valuable metadata slopping around publishers, but no-one wants to use it. It was only this week that a vice-president of AP told the World Editors Forum in Gothenburg that metadata should be standard in digital publishing.

As a PR person I have to pay a lot of money to get that information second-hand from companies like Cision. Why aren't the newspapers and other publications gathering together to pool and sell the information they have? Right now if I get a story in the digital edition of Børsen or Berlingske Tidende, the most I can do is send a screendump to a customer and hope for a pat on the back.

For US-based web sites I can run them through Quantcast to see how many visitors a site gets and what demographic they belong to. But still nothing at the story level.

Think how much better it would be if I could have a report showing how many views a story had and where they went afterwards like I get from Building Talk.

Perhaps that's a job for all the ad reps who aren't selling ads?

All copy should be born with metatags that can guide it through its journey to the consumer. Not just to make that journey easier, but to help create a stream of revenue for that content. Think what it could reveal to companies about their potential customers, interests, habits, etc.

Right now publishers are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Who's afraid of the big, bad PR wolf?

The double-page spread in today's media supplement in the Danish business daily Børsen about the defection of journalists to PR in the country will nourish a feeding frenzy of media academics from years to come. What messages, what metaphors - what a load of rubbish.

Slap bang in the middle of the page is an illustration showing big business (yes he's smoking a cigar, yawn) ringed by faceless PR people in suits to keep away the poor, bemused journalist (yes, he's got a press pass in his hat bad).

And the headlines: "Media loses ground to PR", "Press departments threaten balance of power", "Course leader: We will not teach PR".

And all this comes on top of an excellent post by former FT journalist turned blogger Tom Foremski, MediaWatch: Why Some Journalists Won't Transition To The New Journalism  who references an excellent article by Amy Graham at www.poynter.org called Journalism: A Toxic Culture? (Or: Why Aren't We Having More Fun?)

Both the posts are about the inability of journalists to adapt to the new culture of internet-based media because of their unwillingness to accept change. One of the six reasons given by Graham and commented on by Foremski is:

• Priesthood syndrome: Traditional journalists are the sole source of news that can and should be trusted -- which gives them a privileged and sacred role that society is ethically obligated to support.

Now let's look at that Børsen story again in the light of the fading light of the priesthood of journalism and the growing legions of faceless PR people.

Well, as Gruppenführer in a PR company (actually,that's not my real title, but if we succeed in crushing journalism forever, who knows?) I think that the Børsen article is one-sided and under-researched.

That the demand for communications people is growing in Denmark is not in doubt, but the article fails to look at some key facts such as:

• Compared with other western, liberal economies, Denmark has a conservative business culture and has been way behind in their use of PR and communications people. The explosion of media outlets and the growing aggressiveness of primarily news journalists has meant they are playing catch-up.
• The article doesn't say how many of the newly appointed communication people are internal or external. Denmark excels in internal communication that is inclusive and comprehensive; the faceless PR people are in fact concerned and committed colleagues who have been known to walk rather than communicate badly.
• PR people on a global scale are also being challenged by the reduction in the number of journalists. We actually like journalists because they are the people we send our stories to.
• The whole traditional media model is breaking down and that will effect all aspects of the business. PR people are also struggling to embrace new PR or PR 2.0 or web PR, call it what you will.

I started in this business as a journalist on a local paper more than 20 years ago and that has always informed my work in internal communications and PR. The "us and them" model doesn't work anymore. In the networking society where PR people and journalists live side by side on a LinkedIn profile, we are just kidding ourselves if we think it does.

Why social media is like newspapers - not news stories

Chris Brogan has an interesting take on social media. He suggests companies look at Sunday newspapers when considering how to approach social media. It isn't as daft as it sounds.

Its good to see some more nuanced discussion about the different forms of media instead of the whole "dead tree" mainstream media diatribe. I really get annoyed when people from the online media world trash newspapers on the basis of comparing their business models. For me this is quite wrong. I have spent a lot of energy arguing against the dreaded "web writing is sooo different from writing for newspapers"

Yeah, right. Try telling that to a sub-editor (copy editor in the US) who has to cut down a 700-word outpouring to a 150-word brief, or to write a grabbing headline or standfirst that will advertise the story and work graphically as well. Or a magazine editor who has to work with pictures and typography to create a compelling layout. There may not be hyperlinks, but the good print journalist writes in the hyperlinks so you don't have to go somewhere else to get the story.

It's true many news stories are not suitable for publication on the web - but in the same way that broadsheet articles aren't suitable for publication in a tabloid. A good sub-editor could soon sort that out though.

Too many people look at the newspaper as a content delivery system instead of looking behind this to see a content creation system. Too many people judge newspapers on their circulation and advertising revenue - the business side - rather than the dynamic process of how content is created.

Of course the role of paper is going to be reduced - but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies : [chrisbrogan.com]

The subject of objectivity

Objectivity and its implications for ethics in the PR and journalism communities is an issue at the moment and has been neatly covered by Peter Brill at Net.Mentor.

Ethics seems to be one of the new battlegrounds in the media industry. While PR and journalism have always had a love hate relationship, it seems to me that things have been worsened by the advent of social media. It was easier when you were defined by which side of the publishing fence you were on, although as Peter describes there has always been that grey area in trade/business to business publications.

But now, PR professionals and journalists are meant to be all things to all men and also have to compete with all men when it comes to breaking news, spreading news and having an opinion about. It's difficult to feel sure about yourself when the basis for your existence starts dissolving. The results?

• Established media pour scorn on bloggers and social media sites for their lack of professional rigour and pandering to the lowest common denominator
• Bloggers ridicule PR people for treating them like a 'channel' and publish their names to shame them
• Bloggers condescendingly refer to the 'msm' (mainstream media)
• Traditional PR people ridicule those who are experimenting with and even developed social media tools
for drinking too much 'Kool-Aid'.
• 'New' PR people can't quite seem to work out whether they are in PR, marketing or advertising and are trying to grab as much territory as possible to make sure they don't get overrun by the departments with the big budgets.

All in all it could be pretty depressing - I for one have a foot in all these camps and I know others as well. After years of knowing what to do and how to do it, its hard to be confronted every other week with a new idea you have to take a position on. But, you know what? I think it is pretty exciting. We are on a moving escalator and no amount of whinging or complaining or disagreeing is going to stop the escalator. (Although sometimes it is difficult to see whether it's going up or down).

I'm not depressed because I try and look for the wood and not the trees. I have a sneaking sympathy for all sides. So until things change again I'll carry a newspaper because it is still the ultimate format for readability and portability, I'll keep a tag on my industries through trade mags and the growing number of web sites that complement them, I'll post on forums, receive messages on email subscription lists, follow my friends on Facebook, keep tabs on my professional life through LinkedIn, read opinions on blogs fed to my RSS reader and use Twitter and Jaiku because I might need to know about them in the future.

Despite their differences, most people in these various camps, despite what their detractors say and what they say about others, are not looking for what's best, but what works. That can only be positive.

Skype investor buys Danish free paper

Slightly batty Danish IT investor Morten Lund has taken over control of the Danish free newspaper Nyhedsavisen (Newspaper in English). The Danish media have reported the story with a mixture of amazement - the paper has made a loss since it launched in October 2006 - and glee. The glee of course coming from the fact that one of the many upstarts in their business is losing money faster than they are - slightly faster anyway.

But hang on. While Morten gives the impression of being slightly disorganized in his blog writing he has made some shrewd decisions over the years about where to put his money (such as being an early investor in Skype). He has a thoroughly good grounding in the workings of advertising, media and the internet that could stand Nyhedsavisen in good stead.

While most reporters have focused on Morten buying a newspaper, it'll be interesting to see how much paper is actually involved. I'd take a bet that what he has actually bought is a content platform that spans the virtual and the real worlds.

Morten Lund køber Nyhedsavisen - Medier & reklame

Online newspaper advertising presses forward

Forwarded without comment...

Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) report that advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 21.1% in the third quarter of 2007 versus the same period in the previous year.

In dollars and cents,that represents a total of $773 million in online ad spending in the third quarter. The increase is the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for online newspaper advertising recorded since the NAA started tracking online ad spending in 2004.

Online newspaper advertising now accounts for 7.1% of total newspaper ad spending, compared with 5.4% for last year’s third quarter.

On the downside, total advertising expenditures at US newspapers were only $10.9 billion for the third quarter of 2007, a 7.4% decrease from a year earlier.

“Broad economic issues are impacting our industry the same way they are impacting other media,” said NAA CEO John Sturm. “The continued fallout from declines in the housing market clearly affects real estate, recruitment and retail advertising.”

Death of an ad salesman

I've commented before on figures that show falling adsales for newspapers and how some think that means the end of the industry. Figures from this week show that advertising sales are continuing to fall.

I've never really understood why so much emphasis is placed on advertising in the newspaper business model - alright I know why, I just think that the emphasis is misplaced. On a very basic level it makes up for all the times as a journalist I was told by ad salesmen that they "pay my wages" with a superior air. All my spluttering anger trying to justify that it was my fantastic words that sold the paper or magazine are now coming back to haunt them.

Because if anything is proven by the downward spiral of ad revenues it is that content matters.

Papers aren't precious, but journalists and other content creators are. It is time for publishers to realise that there's nothing wrong with the reading public, just the publishers' business model.

While ad revenues drop for newspapers, the picture is different for business to business magazines. However, there aren't many media correspondents or pundits that focus much attention on the b2b number sector. In fact, the number of new magazines remains stable with a slight increase. While ad revenue is falling, b2b magazines are actually increasing revenues when you include online, trade shows and other spin-offs.

To underline: yes, paper editions may soon be lining the bottom of the budgie's cage. However, the content lives on is RSS feeds, on blogs, in databases, on social bookmarking sites.

Now who's paying whose wages?

The death of print media - again, again

http://www.pr-consultant.co.uk/2007/08/citizen-journalism-print.html

... and just to prove my point

Morten Lund (who will forever be known as a Skype investor although he does other things) has blogged this. It is a web service that sits on the end of a PDF workflow and converts the files into a virtual book or magazine that is searchable by Google
http://www.pagegangster.com/

Now if you can just combine this with a feed into the local digital printer who can rattle you off a copy and post it to your home address...

The death of print media - again

Forbes has a story about how online media is going to put an end to print media

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/16/redherring-print-blogs-tech-media-cx_bc_0716techmedia.html

It's a good story, but in these days when xml is separating content and structure I can't help thinking that the reporter is barking up the wrong tree. The big fuss about paper vs. screen is about a delivery mechanism and how you attach ads to that mechanism. We should be focusing on content and then delivering that content in the way people want it - paper or screen. The production systems need to be flexible enough so people can choose. Its the news that ought to matter, not the box in comes in.

And I wouldn't rule out paper just yet - when everyone is competing for space on a screen, a well-timed delivery of good old fashioned paper might just be a refreshing change. If it were me, I'd make people subscribe to the content and let them choose how they want to read.