Moderator: Tad Smith, CEO, Reed Business Information
Panelists:
Vivian Schiller, SVP/GM, NYTimes.com
Rich Skrenta, Co-Founder & CEO, Topix
Ken Stern, CEO, NPR
Kara Swisher, All Things D
Tad: What's the zeitgeist in the newsroom these days? Kara: Awful. Left a newsroom, saw the water was rising and the Web was higher land. People needed to be changing things rather than bellyaching. Ken: Our zeitgeist is rather good, has doubled in recent years, a market for serious and in-depth news. Tad: How do you avoid blood on the streets? Ken: Social media business model feels comfortable to us, get contributions from audience and corporations, foundations, government is about ten percent, listener donation growth has fueled in their growth. Tad: What's ailing newspapers generally? Vivian: Ad market is declining, but online is growing, we're in the process of rebalancing the business to shift more online. But there's no rainbow on the horizon for print newspapers. Focusing on the big opportunities in digital. Report says online ad revenues have stalled out, true? Vivian: yes, it has stalled, still most revenues come from print. Tad: Rich, do you make money? Rich: Yes, ten million uniques on our site, news by zip code commands good CPMs, ambitious plans for news in every zip code, went and got every bit of content, including blogs, and there wasn't enough. Nobody would cover routine news in Sunnyvale, had to turn to social media. Newsrooms are shrinking especially at the local level, if they're NYT is struggling what about the Palo Alto Daily News?
Tad: What is news today? Rich: New restaurant in your town could be news, no longer looking at what's news from a j-school perspective. Kara: That's very valid, doesn't have to be one way or the other, but when stuff gets corrupted by reporters or bloggers with a conflict of interest you get protection. Our disclosure is about 50 pages long, none of us is fully without something to disclose. It's not journalists are not going to say that fries are on sale at a local restaurant. Ken: There's information and there's news, there's a sense out there that we can get rid of reporters but we invest in editors and reporting. I worry about the space for serious journalism shrinking, people going to newspaper conventions are clinicially depressed. Rich: We see journalists are going away before their very eyes, the paper doesn't go away, it becomes a paper with more wire content. There's a lot of stuff floating around in places like Yahoo groups and it's not discoverable. Classified ad dollars going away, Craigslist destroyed 65 million dollars in classified ad dollars in Bay area. Without grass-roots news gathering we're looking at pre-radio days.
Tad: Is there a role for serious journalism? There's always a role for authoritative quality journalism, not scaling back our newsroom at all, looking at how we can do to make sure that we have the financial support for journalism in the long term. Kara: You are under pressure from investors, but a family controls the company, as with other papers, they don't have to worry about the bottom line as much. Vivian: Yes, but let's not loose sight of the fact that NYT and others are extremely profitable, we're talking about growth rates, it's not a business on its last legs. When we started a little publication we saw real opportunity in standards-based content with high quality, can't stand depression part. Why do you have to roll over and play dead? Ken: Do you have to pair with About.com? What about serious investigations? Kara: It's the mid-size papers that are struggling the most with quality.
Tad: Branding, how much does the brand matter to the average person? Kara: Had an argument with the 12-year old who runs Google News, he was saying that nobody cares where the news is from, people don't want to read about the White House from the Rajastan Times. Have to tip your hat to paidContent.org, went to publisher and said the blog thing was going to be big, now we can do it to.
Tad: Founding fathers and court decisions, protection? Rich: DMCA protects us, every day we get legal issues out of our forums, lawyers say that it's opinion, we try to apply a journalistic angle, does it actually look like libel but without some judgment you don't get discussions. We see cases of people flooding us with mail and it's not a valid case. Is it in the public's interest to see something. Tad: Is there a conflict between social media and news that serves the public good? Ken: There are places for a free-for-all, we're one of the few organizations that doesn't review everything before it goes up. Vivian: Major news orgs are some of the few that moderate comments, it's really about relevance and a great user experience. We want to make sure that comments are on message.
Tad: Is there an economic return from high-quality journalism? Is it shrinking? Kara: Always discussions at WSJ, maybe not, doesn't matter where it is, if they want it on salami put it there, focus on the high-quality product. Vivian: Instead of being afraid of the Diggs, bring it on. Kara: individual brands is inmportant, Mossberg is a Brangelina-scale brand. (COMMENT: Newspapers haven't figured out how to monetize journalists effectively in The New Aggregation, especially when a Google Print-like product kicks in. They're losing brand equity to user-aggregators and they haven't compenstated adequately). Question: How soon before citizen journalists win The Pulitzer Prize? Tad: Soon. Question: How do you make money? Kara: We have a really tiny site, our costs are incredibly low, easier to make money overall. Vivian: Constantly innovating. Ken: We ultimately sell in an uncluttered environment.
Question: Google? Kara: Google is a parasite but a helpful parasite. Vivian: We love Google, we get half of our traffic from Google. 35 million worldwide, good SEO. We fall down squarely on the friend side. Rich: syndication made a lot of sense in print, if Google can't do the best job of telling people the copy that you wrote maybe you should reconsider your syndication strategy. Kara: In ten years we'll look at today's Google and other search engines as very primitive. Question: WSJ clings to its pay wall, does this concern you that you're not being found? Kara: ATD is free, we feel free is better, it's better to be part of the conversation. WSJ provides a mass of information. Wouldn't dream of our stuff not being free.
Rafat: Variety dropped the firewall, how is it going? Variety: The early results are strong, looked at how the traffic is growing, felt that for the audience it was worth it. Have 20,000 subscribe online. Kara: so you'll never get to a million. WSJ Online: Online journal now 930,000 paid, trying to have it both ways, trying to offer up a free paragraph in a month, looking at lifestyle content that's not that well consumed behind the firewall. Kara: you can pick your way to sell.
Tad: Social media and the news, the best of times or the worst of times? Vivian: The best of times, new platforms have opened up ways to get the dialog out there. Every day there's a new way to communicate with their readers. Rich: There's no paper in my town, San Francisco paper still shows up but it's not quite as good as it used to be. Looking at the Cherry Hill Observer the news staff is going away while you watch. Ken: Good time to be in nonprofit journalism, a great time for public conversation, but it's a punishing time if you take off the cream. Kara: Grandfather said if someone's going to eat your lunch it might as well be you, people are hungry for great stuff, there's an opportunity for people with high standards to jump in there, sites like paidContent.org are not that hard to make.
Great panel, but clearly the model is going towards supporting independent journalists in context.
Labels: econSM, events, news
