Interviewer: Hal Espo, President, Contextual Connections, LLC

Runs interactive division, both WaPo and Newsweek, Slate, The Root for African-Americans, Sprig. Most all sites are news and opinion, 250 million page views at WaPo, 9 million unique visitors/mo. Sites are very standalone from an editorial standpoint but back end is largely shared. Six years ago WaPo was distributed only in DC, discovered national and international audience via online. Slate online-only. Lots of content is shared in large part. On editorial side people recogninize advantages of Internet, Monica Lewinsky story was broken on WaPo.com, online paper is starting to look like a blog. Hard sometimes to focus on smaller businesses when larger businesses are changing so much.

Hal: What have you done to break down barriers between divisions and platforms.

Little: Lots of training, reporters on a beat know can do video, lots of time spent on helping management that fears shifting rewards. Sales feeds across print and online, content feeds both ways, content is also going back the other way, with online content making into print. Big challenges for local papers like WaPo is that there used to be little or no competition for ads or content, that doesn't transfer online, lots of sources for both content and ad placements for local markets. Not clear that newspapers will get same advantages as national brands. WaPo online audience bigger than paper, but already have 15 to 18 percent of revenues coming from online.

Hal: Locally you compete for advertising with Craigslist for online, are you competing with print for ads?

Little: We've seen people migrate already, top newspapers are Gazettes, Express operated by Post, people are going to pick what they want to pick, newspapers are not going to go away but the trend is towards less print reading, kids aren't picking it up, daughter sent a NYT article to her and apologized.

Hal: New site, why, why now?

Little: Have a high local audience for African-Americans, Skip Gates, professor, founded it with her boss, news, views and ancestry. Skip is involved in helping people trace their roots. One audience that's been underrepresented. Live three days, too early to tell overall, need to build audience organically, hard to do.

Hal: Where will consumer media look like three years from now?

Little: Disaggregation is taking off, not going to one place to get information. Google is taking market share away, but also partners, and a good partner, Google Maps are really good.

Hal: WaPo used to be a big player, not a big player anymore, what does that mean?

Little: Way more audience than ten years ago, story like issues at Walter Reed hospital matter nationally not just locally, but the hold on ad dollars isn't there.

Hal: Where do people really come from.

Little: Local audiences tend to use home page, check weather, national comes from blogger links and search, different proposition.

Hal: If you were in the midwest, how would you see things differently?

Little: Yahoo efforts helping local papers to build content, it's tough for them. As Craigslist grows we still have much larger auto and jobs listings, looking at Monster, career-building. Not going to outrun them overall, but we monitor effectiveness in selected verticals and go for it.

Hal: Facebook, friend or foe?

Little: Adults don't live on Facebook the way that kids do, have done a few widgets, tried to invest. Yields a fair amount of traffic, but did it a lot just to let people know that you're out there.

Hal: How do you exploit your natural advantages.

Little: Haven't really refined home pages, real redesign, looking at if you only had a local audience how did it look like, if you only had a national audience what would it look like. National audience really interested in opinions, so that will go "above the fold" in online edition.

Hal: What are your peers doing that you'd like to emulate?

Little: NYT does a great job with search engine optimization the past few months, Guardian.uk innovative, beta tests across site, opened up a lot to users.

Hal: WSJ - impact of subscription barriers changing?

Little: Murdoch says subscriptions stay, but NYT raised barriers successfully.

Hal: User-Generated Content?

Little: First site with comments, relationship with Pluck, in March you'll be able to upload photos, videos coming.

Hal: You're a lawyer, what's the state of IP law?

Little: Fair use is becoming broader than anyone anticipated, like to see proper attribution.

Question: Disaggregation of news, but RSS readers aggregate things again.

Little: More opportunity for news organizations to aggregate content from others, more ad networks.

Question: Licensing multimedia?

Little: More people watching multimedia, got a national Emmy award. Even with that said, we can't compete with a network [comment: But you don't have to, just choose the right channels].

Question: What is your financial model, will you be a Murdoch?

Little: Working for someone invested in the long haul, profitable for fourth year, biggest challenge is to keep investing in rapidly changing technology. Management breathes internet, the Kaplan group does a lot of online universities, they taught us about pay per lead and metrics, historically content has not been metrics driven. Inform is terrific, builds pages and topics on the fly, but needs to be more friendly for SEO purposes. Helps to drive people to site.

Good interview, Hal keeps the questions coming and coming and there were good audience questions. It's a good example of a strong local news organization with national impact that is still struggling to find growth in spite of being profitable. Caroline touched on one of the key issues when she mentioned the rise of ad networks. They have broken papers' lockhold on local ads and created far more competition for national and global ads. They are reluctant to move into virtual aggregation of local content and becoming ad networks in their own rights, yet that's where the money is going. Newsrooms are great resources, but I think that they'd do better to have those desks spend more time on virtual aggregation and focus in-depth on content that's most valuable in the moment.

Labels: news, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, washington post

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