The Future of Print Media on Aggregate.

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read in months, and the most interesting on the print media since reading Flat Earth News earlier this year. Its a study from journalist Tyler Marshall and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, about in the US print newspaper sector today.

Its a fairly detailed piece and well worth reading, but the outcome is summarised in the article I've linked to on Journalism.org's site - key findings are:

- The majority of newspapers are now suffering cutbacks in staffing, and even more in the amount of news, or newshole, they offer the public. The forces buffeting the industry continue to affect larger metro newspapers to a far greater extent than smaller ones. In some cases, these differences are so stark it seems that larger and smaller newspapers are living two distinctly different experiences. Fully 85% of the dailies surveyed with circulations over 100,000 have cut newsroom staff in the last three years, while only 52% of smaller papers reported cuts. Recent announcements of a further round of newsroom staff reductions at large papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, indicates these differences may be widening further. Our survey found that more than half of the editors at larger papers and a third at smaller ones expect more cutbacks in the next year. But a weaker-than-expected economic performance during the first half of 2008 and grimmer forecasts for the rest of the year suggest some of those cutbacks have already been implemented and darken these projections even further.

- Papers both large and small have reduced the space, resources and commitment devoted to a range of topics. At the top of that list, nearly two thirds of papers surveyed have cut back on foreign news, over half have trimmed national news and more than a third have reduced business coverage. In effect, America’s newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads.

- The culture of the daily newspaper newsroom is also changing. New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy, but they also cite the departure of veteran journalists, along with the talent, wisdom and institutional memory they hold as their single greatest loss. Clearly stretched to describe what is unfolding in their newsrooms, editors use words like, “exciting,” “extraordinary,” “nerve-wracking” and “tumultuous.”

- Newspaper websites are increasingly a source of hope but also of fear. Editors feel torn between the advantages the web offers and the energy it consumes to produce material often of limited or even questionable value. A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards. Yet a similar plurality (43%) thinks “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.”

This is essentially a description of an industry in the process of creative destruction - this is not the endgame, its the end of the beginning of the process. We have seen this occur before in other industries such as manufacturing in the 1980's and later IT in the 1990's, as their value chains were restructured by new technology and cheap offshore labour.

The endgame will be driven by the fundamental economics of online Media, which are:

(i) Content is now a commodity - if I want say foreign news or tech news I can get it in spades
(ii) Distribution of digital media is 2 orders of magnitude lower than print media - you can't compete with those economics
(iii) Customer attention is increasingly moving online, pulling revenues with it.
(iv) With the end user devices of today it doesn't really lend itself to reflection, but to byte sized consumption - and the interactive nature seems to reinforce this "Continual Partial Attention" model.

In other words, in the value chain, the value of content creation, distribution and consumption are dropping - leaving merely the Aggregation function as a value creation engine - and that is where we believe the Online Media endgame will reside. Aggregation has 3 key functions:

- Finding the relevant media you want,
- Ensuring that what you get is the best quality, and
- Making sense of it

In other words the searching, winnowing and organising that is the core of the editing function. All the world may not be journalists, but they are certainly writing. As Technorati notes, there are 70m blogs in the world and some of them must be good - the trick is to find them. Also, as there is now such a slew of contradictory content, the importance of making sense of it all rises.This we believe is the endgame of the Media - to be excellent aggregators.

And in the convergent comms emerging, the media will be on video, audio, text etc.

I'll reference here an earlier Gapingvoid post on the subject, which I thought was quite perceptive (ie agreed with me ):

Yes, again, it's all about what Clay Shirky said four years ago, in a wonderful interview he did for Gothamist:

"So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

I had coffee with Clay a couple of weeks ago. A totally great guy. We didn't talk about blogs much. Nor did we talk much about Twitter or Facebook.

We talked about something conceptually far simpler: Cheap. Easy. Global. Media.

CheapEasyGlobal is the big story. And it's here now. It has arrived. And it's permanent. And there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it, save for a nuclear holocaust.

Some people will do very well by it. Other people will prefer to stay on the sidelines instead, using the internet to yak yak yak endlessly on about what other people are up to, holding the "players" to far higher standards than they will ever attain themselves. These lovely armchair quarterbacks will be swiftly forgotten by history. Same as it ever was.

Restating that in the economic terms of the value chain above:

- Easy - cheaper, easier to use gear makes everyone a potential content producer
- Cheap - lower entry and transaction costs makes content collation and distribution economics a low barrier to entry
- Global - the content, and the audience, can be found everywhere

(By the way, this also implies that as well as every person being a journalist - in - writing, just about every company in every industry will be a media business too )

One can register concern that all this is also driving a dumbing down of the media we once had, and there is some validity in that argument - but the unpleasant truth is that a large number (majority?) of human minds seem to like being dumbed down (cf average TV program ages etc, the rise of Sleb magazines). Ditto it is now possible to consume news that is already pre-slanted to your own predilections without an opposing thought ever seeing the light of day (a move from "Broadsheets" to "Narrowsheets", as Chris Hambly notes in the comments section).

But one suspects it was ever thus, and the "qualities" will thus also emerge in their own right, be they blogs, 'zines, or online newspapers - and these may have to be paid for, as pure Ad driven media usually dives straight for the lowest common demographic (compare the London free papers and the paid for others for example) - though it looks like the rise of the Freesheet is ending, if Kristine Lowe's post is on the money..

What is quite interesting is to think about where paper media will remain - no new media totally replaces the old - at least not immediately - so the real issue will become "where is there still additional value in the printed medium". We see 5 major areas over the next few years:

- where one cannot get easy access to high enough quality online displays (ie some media can go mobile, but much cannot)
- where it is still hard to read long and/or complex tracts easily with todays' devices
- where Advertising economics still favour print
- as a status marker, or a sign of higher value (we can imagine upmarket media for example differentiating itself via being printed - No FT, no comment....)
- where privacy / exclusivity is key - or at least low cost repeatability is the last thing one wants - and has value in its own right that comes from being in print.

But one thing is for sure, if you were building a media empire today from a blank piece of paper, you wouldn't structure it the way most are at present. And for anyone in the industry, its a sanguine exercise to think how you would build a media organ today, note the differences, and note your part in the value chain. Things will not change overnight, but as this study shows, they are changing quite fast.