Mobile, hyperlocal, Twitter: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Hooray for the weekend! Time to read.

"Ready for the Mobile Ad Revolution?" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter, in a piece for Editor & Publisher, offers a look at some of the mobile technology that currently seems so very Buck Rogers. Yet for all the gee-whiz, "the true power of mobile advertising is its ability to put the right ad in front of the right person in the right place at the right time," Mutter says. And for how long have we been talking about newspapers' need to get out in front in mobile? Certainly a lot longer than this. (Note the posting date is a year ago to the day.)

"Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience" (StreetFight): This new website, which bills itself as covering the business of hyperlocal, offers a Q&A with Mark Potts (Recovering Journalist), a mainstream veteran who has tried his hand (and failed) at the hyperlocal space, for some perspective on what does and doesn't work. (Potts touches on mobile, too.)

"Handwritten Newspapers from Ravaged Japan at Newseum" (Newseum): Here's the kind of inspired journalism we all admire, going after the story and publishing against all odds -- even the monstrous earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The Newseum in Washington, D.C., relates how it came to acquire copies of one daily newspaper that were handwritten and published pen-on-paper in the days after the Japanese disaster. They will be put on display as "a powerful testament to the timeless human need to know and to journalists' commitment to providing that information."

Musical interlude.

Short takes:

• "Rolling Stone Writers Talk Long-Form Journalism at Housing Works" (Bookish): Can long reads survive in a short-attention-span world? Yup, according to this account of a standing-room-only talk at a NYC bookstore: "A great story is a great story."
• "No, Bob Woodward, Google Did Not Kill Newspapers" (The Atlantic): The celebrated Washington Post writer and editor is chastised for comments made at a college near Chicago. While the narrative is nothing new, the accompanying graphic on newspapers' ski-slope-like circulation decline is eye-popping.
• "Trouble@Twitter" (Fortune): Or, will the 140-character site survive its leadership vacuum?

Bonus read:

"The Straight Dope: Bill Moyers Interviews David Simon" (Guernica): A superb conversation with the one-time Baltimore Sun journalist who created The Wire, the HBO series that told the story of life in Baltimore through its institutions. I'm not an HBO subscriber, so I missed the series when it ran for five seasons on television (2002-08). But I've been making my way through the 60 episodes on DVD as a patron of my local library. (The library is even springing for a new Season 1 DVD set, which had been listed in its online catalog as "lost." W00t!)  

Music bonus: The Wire theme from Season 5, which focuses on the media as an institution. 

Weekend reading: Can hyperlocal work?

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Here's the latest installment of things worth reading:

"Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven't Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?" (ReadWriteWeb): With Aol's deal to acquire neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in as a backdrop, author Marshall Kirkpatrick tries to figure out why various attempts to develop sites in this niche have yet to work. Is it an idea ahead of its time? Don't enough people care about what's happening down the street? Is the revenue model too elusive? "I care about what's happening in the neighborhood around me," he writes, "and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn't even know I had yet."

"Q&A: Jim Brady on the Death of TBD" (Columbia Journalism Review): Brady was one of the brains behind TBD, the online-only local news site in Washington, D.C., that saw the rug pulled out from under it by parent Allbritton Communications just six months after launch. Here he offers an extended post-mortem on the rise and fall of the site, which he says has been wrongly characterized as a hyperlocal effort.

Musical interlude.

"Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change Is Not Helping" (GigaOM): Check out the graphic in this post by Mathew Ingram, which originally accompanied an analysis by Frederic Filloux of the disruptive changes now facing traditional media. It shows how rapidly print advertising revenue has declined -- with the Washington Post as a model -- vs. the slow rise in online revenue: there's no intersection of the lines as "digital pennies" are no match for "print dollars." For the Post, it means in real terms the loss of $5 in print revenue for every $1 gained in online revenue.

"Journal Register's Localized Video News Strategy Is Driving Profitability: CEO John Paton" (Beet.TV): In a video interview, Journal Register Co.'s John Paton explains the technology his "digital first, print last" company uses to get video to the web quickly -- including eliminating the bottleneck (emphasis added) of central editing.

Bonus reads:

"A Day in the Life of a Liveblogger" (MobileCrunch): This is a delightful, insightful tale of live-blogging, as one reporter psyches himself and syncs his mobile "office" to cover the folderol of new tech-product releases.

"So Long Again, Chicago Daily News" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Newsosaur Alan Mutter reminisces about the 1978 closing of the afternoon paper in Chicago. "But this isn't just ancient history," he offers. "It is a valuable reminder to today's media companies of what happens when you run out of readers, revenues and ideas all at the same time."

Weekend reading: Experiments in journalism

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Let's get right to it:

"As TBD Staff Tweet News of their Layoffs, a Look at the Rise & Fall of Innovative D.C. News Site" (Poynter): Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore offers a timeline on the unexpected and surprising reorganization of TBD, a Web-only news site in Washington, D.C., that had been hailed as a new-models-for-journalism experiment. Launched by the folks who successfully founded Politico, the site was seen as way to up the ante on local coverage in much the same way as Politico focused intensely on politics. But six months into the experiment, parent Allbritton Communications pulled the plug. Some say Allbritton wasn't up to the task; others say the experiment was flawed from the get-go.

"Rockville Central: Set to Become a Facebook-Only Outlet" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Here's another new-model experiment worth watching: making Facebook the platform for a hyperlocal news site, rather than putting time, energy and money into a separate online address. Nieman offers a look at some of the pros and cons of this idea.

Video interlude: Beware of "churnalism," or the overuse of press releases in news stories. A new website offers to uncover the problem.

"New Yorker, Harper's, NYRB and TNR Editors on the Dearth of Female Bylines" (The Sisterhood): Occasionally, concern will surface that women aren't widely represented in the media: as guests on the Sunday news shows, as commentators or experts in public radio stories, as executives in media organizations. The latest discussion is on female bylines in national journals of opinion, which a handful of magazine editors acknowledge here is lacking. A writer at The New Republic has another idea, though: that opinion journalism "disproportionately attracts men."

"The Fast-Finger Twitter Dilemma: A Small Confession" (George Brock): Given the fast-paced events in Libya, Egypt and the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, here's a reminder from London journalism professor George Brock that you still should think before you (re)tweet:  "It’s so simple ... to bypass the usual check in your head. Do I know that this is true?"

Musical interlude: Blast from the past.

Sales, hyperlocal, social media: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Time to catch up on some reading:

"Robust Ad Recovery Bypassed Newspapers" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter offers his latest take on quarterly ad sales, noting that while results have turned positive for all other media, newspapers still had a stinky Q3. What's more, he says, the other media generally went from red to black by the second quarter, while newspaper ad sales continued to drop -- although industry executives contend the rate of decline has slowed. Be sure to take a look at the chart Mutter includes on various newspaper ad categories (auto, real estate, help wanted) that compares third-quarter numbers today with those of five years ago. The decline in ad revenue is striking.

"McClatchy CEO: Death of Newspaper Classifieds Greatly Exaggerated" (Poynter): As a bit of counterpoint to the above, McClatchy's Gary Pruitt indicated at a UBS investors' conference that he sees growth at his chain in classified ad sales, one segment of newspaper revenue punched repeatedly by the Internet and the likes of Monster and Craigslist. Interestingly, he credits much of the reversal to the shift to online classifieds.

Video interlude No. 1: Clever (and oh-so-discouraging) commentary on the state of freelancing.

"Determining Paths to Financial Sustainability: The Release of Our ‘Cookbook’" (Local Fourth): A class of graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism was given the assignment of figuring out how to make online hyperlocal news financially viable. As one of those students said in this post:

After 10 weeks of researching the subject, interviewing academics, residents, hyperlocal journalists and editors, one thing is for certain: there is no “secret” to making money in this space.

Bummer!

But the students did come up with a "cookbook" -- what they call "a step-by-step process that can be used to create a business out of a hyperlocal news website." Also take a look at other entries about the project on their class blog.

"Aron Pilhofer and Jennifer Preston on the New Shape of Social in The New York Times' Newsroom" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Not that long ago, it seemed that every media outlet was appointing a social media editor. Now, though, the thinking goes, there's less need for one individual to prod legacy newspapers toward social media (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) and engagement with readers because they're rapidly coming around. Key evidence in the about-face: the New York Times returning its former social media editor to a reporter's role. (News of the change originally broke on Poynter; another discussion on audience engagement is here.)

Also recommended:

• "The Foreign Correspondent is Dead. Long Live the Foreign Correspondent" (Guardian.co.uk): An appreciation of journalists' work in far-flung, often-dangerous places and why it's still important. 
• "Survey: iPad Newspaper Apps Could Slash Print Subscriptions" (paidContent): Could it be that the iPad is not the manna from heaven that newspaper publishers had hoped it would/could be?
• "J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players" (MediaShift): Geneva Overholser, director of the journalism school at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, says the media revolution/evolution has offered new roles to j-schools. 

Video interlude No. 2: Confused about WikiLeaks' cable leaks? Here's a 3-minute summary.

Hyperlocal idea raises some serious dough

Jane Bryant Quinn in a 2006 appearance
on the Tavis Smiley show on KCET. 

I don't recall how I stumbled on Main Street Connect, the franchiser of hyperlocal news sites that just raised $3.97 million.

It was last fall or summer, I think, when I saw a mention of it, another in a long line of ideas that continue to surface in the wake of mainstream media's implosion.

What initially caught my eye was the involvement of Jane Bryant Quinn, who once wrote a syndicated newspaper column on personal finance. I was the business editor at one daily when she ended her newspaper run soon after 9/11 -- and, boy, did readers squawk. But she continued to publish columns in magazines, talk about personal finance on TV, and write bestsellers.

Now she's editorial director of Main Street Connect, which she and husband Carll Tucker founded in mid-2009 after the local weekly serving their country home in Dutchess County, N.Y., ceased publication. Tucker, once a staff writer for the Village Voice, ran a company in suburban New York City that published community newspapers, which he sold to Gannett Co. Inc. in 1999. At Main Street Connect, he's editor, publisher and CEO.

Their company offers technical know-how and other support to entrepreneurs who want to operate an online local news site: "... programs, launch capital, training, and ongoing guidance our local partners need to succeed," says Main Street Connect's mission statement.

The Nieman Journalism Lab likens what the company offers to the franchised burger model: "A local team assembles the journalists who will cover a community, then Main Street Connect provides the framework for everything else, including the technical setup (and ongoing support), plus an underlying business strategy." For its work, Main Street Connect gets what amounts to a royalty fee of 17 percent of revenue.

So far, the company has helped launch seven sites in Fairfield County, Connecticut: Norwalk, Darien, Westport, Weston, Wilton, New Canaan and Fairfield. They're crisp and clean looking, full of school and community news (some shared, some distinct to each town) and ads.

The goal is 3,000 sites across the country by 2013.

In a column over the weekend (that, incidentally, is listed as among the most viewed), Tucker says the sites don't offer ads but "Annual Visibility Packages": "It's the idea that the way to build your business is to remind your neighbors not only of the quality of your goods and services, but also about who you are and how you contribute to the community."

Package "sponsors" (aka "advertisers") pay not according to page impressions but a flat contract fee. In return, they get not only what looks like a tile ad on the site (what Tucker dubs the "shop window on the Digital Town Green"), but also space to salute customers and others with small head-shot displays called "Our Customer Comes First" and "Local Heroes."

They also get pictures of special events -- what jaded journalists call "grip and grin" shots -- on the site's Celebrate! page, and, according to Nieman, a guaranteed number of stories that run in the site's Features section -- what newspaper traditionalists would see as a breach of the advertising-editorial divide.

In an offering filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Main Street Connect said it raised nearly $4 million from 21 investors in May. (The filing put the minimum investment from any outside investor at $50,000 and the total offering amount at $10 million.) No broker fees or sales commissions were paid.

Here's a promotional video posted to Vimeo on Main Street Connect. Two of the featured speakers, Peter Georgescu and Stephen Sadove serve on the company's board. Georgescu is chairman emeritus of PR/advertising powerhouse Young & Rubicam Inc.; Sadove is CEO of high-end retailer Saks Inc., which advertises on the Fairfield County websites.

Note Sadove's comment that the sites provide the opportunity for a company like Saks to meet its goal of "shifting [ad] dollars from national to local."


Main Street Connect: Norwalk from Mark Joyella on Vimeo.

Interest in online advertising high, but revenue lags

Borrell Associates, a research firm that crunches numbers on local advertising trends, today hosted Day 1 of a two-day, sold-out conference in New York City focused on online advertising.

The company predicted last fall that local interactive advertising would grow by a "relatively paltry" 5.6 percent this year, to $14.9 billion, and begin to level off by 2011. That's compared to annual growth rates in double digits over the past five years -- a worrisome development for legacy media hoping online sales might offset the precipitous drop seen in print ad revenue.

And while CEO Gordon Borrell -- a onetime newspaperman -- says he's "highly skeptical" that hyperlocal news on the Web can generate enough advertising to sustain itself, he's willing to keep an open mind.

Indeed, he posted on his company blog an interview with Jeff Jarvis, head of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, whose passion for the industry he praises.

Borrell says he has that passion, too, but is concerned a sustainable business model for local news on the Web hasn't been found yet. Jarvis led the Borrell panel today on "Turning Hyperlocal into Hyperprofit."

Here's the interview with Jarvis that Borrell Associates posted to YouTube. It's a bit long, but, yes, you can hear the resolve for keeping journalism alive.