Ghost Town Extra

Local news is nowhere on the Web, and it’s our fault. The good news is that the problem is also the fix

I’ve been managing King Features Weekly Service since 1999, and although we try to keep in touch with editors and publishers through email and customer surveys and the like, my grasp of what they think about the business of newspaper publishing often feels fleeting.

Sensing that time is running quickly though our glass, I picked up the phone and started making calls. (Old school! Landline phone!) My contacts represented the gamut of interests we serve: weekly and monthly newspapers, rural and urban markets, shoppers and bilinguals and mom-and-poppers, too.

I asked about a lot of things — how long they’d been at it, how their need for products was changing, who they felt was their strongest competition was coming from, what their biggest challenges were.

Answers varied widely. Most were feeling the positive effects of a recovering economy. Some are secure in their niche; others were struggling to find advertising dollars (for example, big box retailers with regional offices elsewhere are increasingly difficult to approach). Papers in nearby markets or TV stations were eating into the revenue pie.

If there was one common refrain, it was that attempts to build a digital platform have been largely slow and nonproductive. Comments included:

- No one wants to pay for online stuff.

- Paid subscriptions don’t penetrate far enough.

- We don’t have a digital rate card.

- No advertising dollars comes from digital.

- We don’t use our social media channels.

- We post weekly to our website.

- We only post our page PDFs to it.

- The website serves mostly as a billboard for our print product.

- We don’t have a website.

That doesn’t mean there’s any dissent about the need for digital channels. The “print side” is seriously eroding, with ad revenues now fallen to 1950 levels, a third of all newsroom jobs cut and circulation declined by half. Printing presses, once the bread-and-butter of a local newspaper, is increasingly a financial albatross because competitors can now distribute content digitally at a fraction of the cost.

However, going wholly digital isn’t the answer; the money just isn’t there yet.

The best strategy was articulated this way by Penelope Muse Abernathy in Saving Community Journalism:

Community newspapers simply cannot cannibalize the print edition (which at most papers currently furnishes more than 90 percent of the revenue) without also having in place a well-though-out strategy for significantly boosting the audience, revenue, and profitability associated with their digital editions. Therefore, they need to be simultaneously pursuing a three-pronged strategy of aggressively shedding outdated and inefficient costs associated with the print edition and then investing the savings in building a vibrant community of readers on multiple platforms, which then allows the advertising department to begin pursuing new revenue opportunities.

Metro newspapers are withering so fast that they’ve made a much more determined attempt at developing digital channels. The smaller newspapers — my clan — are for the most part responding to a slower-developing challenge (no one is exactly racing into digital in Smalltown, USA) by trying to transform themselves in the most fruitless of ways.

These sentiments were resoundingly echoed by Matthew Hindeman in his no-nonsense, roll-up-your-sleeves paper, “Stickier News: What Newspapers Don’t Know about Web Traffic Has Hurt Them Badly — But There is a Better Way.” (You can read it here.)

Citing numerous data sources, Hindeman says that local newspapers currently get almost no slice out of the overall pie of web traffic, calling its share “just a rounding error on the larger Web”:

… Web users spend a lot of time with Google and Facebook and pornographic sites. They visit Yahoo and Bing, they shop, they read their email.

Against this broad backgroup, news sites get only three percent of web traffic. Even worse, a huge majority of that audience goes to national news outlets instead of local news organizations … only about one-sixth of news traffic — half a percent overall — goes to local news source. (4)

But that half a percent gets worse:

With local traffic split between newspaper sites and television stations, local papers are left with just a quarter of a percent of time spent online. The typical local newspaper gets about five minutes per capita per month in Web user attention, less than a local TV stations earns in a single hour. (4)

By Hindman’s dismal count, local newspapers are attempting to business in the 21st century as an exile from its dominant medium.

Those are some lousy starting blocks, for sure.

Hindman offers some remedies, but all of them are data-driven — a cure less palatable to old newshounds than castor oil.

He asserts that all web traffic is increased by what is called stickiness.

Stickiness is like a compounded Internet interest rate: it measures how likely users are to visit, and how often they go beyond the first click to the second or the third. Sits with above-average stickiness grow their audience share over time, by definition: those with below-average stickiness shrink. (2)

Successful media ventures from Google and Facebook and even the New York Times test everything they do for stickiness — site design and layout, page load time, frequency of posts, headlines (at Upworthy, staff are required to write 25 headlines for every story), art or other multimedia elements (like video), optimization for social media, and accessibility from a variety of tablet and mobile devices. All of these must be factored into the daily, or rather, hourly operation of a newspaper website.

Sound forbidding? Surely for most smaller newspapers it is. Cost alone is daunting, not to mention how much editors and seasoned journos need to re-thread the wires inside their heads to grasp this weird digital bulb. But since the price of doing nothing is growing faster than cable TV cancellations, publishers will have accept the added cost of doing business the way the times demand. “Technical staffers are just as much a distribution cost as printed presses,” he writes, “and just as necessary.”

However, to achieve any serious growth, smaller newspapers will need to share research and resources and expertise with each other — meaning, THEY HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER — to successfully game the new digital curve.

Google and Yahoo can test many thousands of potential improvements using their massive traffic, and the Guardian newspaper spreads its analytics across hundreds of thousands of readers; for smaller newspapers, cooperation is the only path to survival. Hindman writes,

The advantages of cooperation are many. Newspapers can pursue a far broader research agenda and limit redundant effort. Analytics expertise is one of the scarcest resources in journalism, and sharing allows those skill to be leveraged highly. Joint work provides greater statistical power — especially important with smaller audiences and long testing windows — and it ensures that important results replicate. (30)

The biggest block to this, of course, is the fierce sense of independence newspapers have and the loyalty they have to their readers. The local newspaper is as much a geographical entity as the hardware store on Main Street, servicing a local readership with the highest caliber local information it can muster.

In the realm of digital media, those geographical boundaries are thinning, and the traditional franchise of newspaper readers is inexorably dying off. My Facebook feed puts my local paper (when it rarely appears) right next to The New York Times and the Sierra Club and newspapers in Waco and Mount Shasta and Paoli.

To me, it gets down to two questions: How much are those boundaries still enforced by competition between newspapers for readers and advertising dollars? And second: How great is that competitive threat compared to the common peril all newspapers face?

Which brings back to all this talk of metrics. Many fear that newspapers will separately vanish into them, replaced by eight thousand Buzzfeeds. I worry about that, too. A recent New York Times op-ed piece by Steve Kettmann, “Don’t Let Statistics Ruin Baseball,” he bemoans the current state of stats-driven baseball reporting — journalistic Moneyball. “These days there are some great baseball beat writers,” he writes, “but too many — especially among the younger ones — are so awash in stats that they can’t seem to see the game beyond the numbers.”

Are journalism’s core values being similarly betrayed by counts above and below the median? Hindman says those who complain about metrics “have the issue backwards”:

Journalists portray themselves as indispensible public servants: as Kovach and Rosenstiel aptly put it {in their book Elements of Journalism}, the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” But audiences are so shockingly low that newspapers are clearly failing in their civic role. (31)

There’s is a silver lining, he concludes, is that the function’s worst enemy may turn out to be its best friend:

… Journalists have a new toolkit with which to diagnose and mend the problem. Big scientific leaps have often followed improvements in measurement, as when Newton’s laws followed the invention of the telescope. Journalism today is at a juncture. Journalists no longer have to rely on the so-called “imagined audience” or faulty conventional wisdom. For the first time, individual journalists can directly measure the readership their stories receive. (31–2)

If you think it’s time to grab this bull by the horns, Hindman’s article will gore you some but leave feeling much clearer about what we all need to grasp, right now and how.

— David Cohea