By Mark Fitzgerald
EditorandPublisher.com

A new survey of news consumption in Britain should comfort newspaper publishers everywhere, according to McKinsey & Co. Adults under the age of 35 have significantly increased their consumption of news in the past three years -- and they profess a growing interest in getting news from print newspapers.

The McKinsey survey, reported by Philipp M. Nattermann of the consulting firm's London media and entertainment practice, says average daily news consumption in the U.K. increased to 72 minutes from 60 minutes three years ago -- "an increase driven almost entirely by people under the age of 35."

There's also more urgency to get the news first in this group, McKinsey found, with about 40% saying they needed to be the first to hear breaking news. This need for immediacy is reflected in younger news consumers' choice of media: they overwhelmingly prefer to get their news from television and the Internet," the report says.

But newspapers remain the most trusted medium, with 66% of respondents describing the paper as "informative and confidence inspiring." That compares with 44% for television and just 12% for the Web.

"This suggests that newspapers have further scope to go beyond news, to drive reader interest and advertising revenues at the same time," Nattermann writes.

And "interest" in getting news from newspapers has grown, the survey found. Among people aged 16 to 24, interest in newspaper news grew to 64% from 53% in a 2006 survey. In the 25-34 cohort, interest grew to 61% from 51%.

There is an on-the-other-hand, though. This survey finds what countless others have: Little enthusiasm for paying for newspaper online content. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

NAA.org

Newspaper Advertising Cited as Most Trustworthy; Newspaper Web Sites Ranked First Among All Sources of Local Information in Usage, Credibility, Being Most Informative

Newspaper Web sites continue to be the most used and valued sites for consumers seeking credible and trustworthy local content and advertising online, according to a new survey conducted by comScore for the Newspaper Association of America. Approximately 57 percent of the 3,050 respondents identified local newspaper Web sites as the top online source for local information -- ahead of the totals for all other media. That percentage grows for upper income households (63 percent) and for the college educated (60 percent).

The strength of local newspaper Web sites was made clear when respondents to the survey, entitled Site Matters: The Value of Local Newspaper Web Sites, were asked to identify sites they used most often for specific types of local content. Newspaper sites ranked first as a source for local information (29 percent), local sports (27 percent), local entertainment (26 percent) and local classifieds (39 percent), ahead of both local television Web sites and online portals.

“This important research provides further evidence of newspapers’ successful multiplatform transition, with the medium serving as a continuous local resource for consumers,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “While newspaper Web sites often face dozens of competitors touting their own local offerings in any given market, they have been able to thrive by leveraging trusted brands and strong local content to appeal to consumers and advertisers alike.”

Local newspaper Web sites ranked first among all sources for trustworthiness, credibility and being the most informative place to find local content of all types – including news, information, entertainment, sports and classified advertising. When respondents were asked what sources were most trustworthy or reliable, local newspaper Web sites bested local television sites by twelve percentage points for local information (34 percent vs. 22 percent), by six points for local sports (30 percent vs. 24 percent), by 10 points for local entertainment (30 percent vs. 20 percent) and by 29 points for local classifieds (42 percent vs. 13 percent).. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Josh Chasin
Chief Research Officer, ComScore
mediapost.com

The following are excerpts from Josh Chasin's post on Mediapost's "Metrics Insider" column:

There's a growing sentiment that everything -- and certainly everything digital, everything "made of ideas" -- should be free. Which means all media content. You know those guys billing you for cable access and selling magazine subscriptions and charging for satellite radio? Hopelessly Old Economy, every one of them. (I'm sure your company, dear reader, has long stopped charging for stuff.)

But if the content should be free, then of course the ads all this free content are designed to push should carry a premium price, right? (The premise being, free content supported by ad revenues.) Well, it turns out, not so much; ad and data exchanges are offering end-around access to publisher audiences -- even, sometimes, lookalikes of your own hard-earned visitors -- for pennies on the dollar.

So don't monetize content, and let someone walk away with the majority of your ad sales income.

Am I just hopelessly out of touch with the ways of the New Economy? Because I still think the best business model is charging for stuff. . .

. . .Information, we are told, wants to be free. Well, teenagers want to eat junk food, get high and have unprotected sex, but that doesn't make it a good idea (and it sure doesn't make it a business model.) I think perhaps it's time we sat information down for a heart-to-heart.

Remember back in the '90s when everyone was calling the Internet the Information Superhighway? At the time I disagreed. I thought it was going to be the Information Supermarket: everything that could be rendered in zeroes and ones would migrate online for distribution. Admittedly, this changes the cost structure of industries. In a near-worst-case scenario, digital distribution of music undermined the record business, not because "music wants to be free," but because the record business had evolved into a manufacturing and distribution business, not a music business, and the need for physical manufacturing and distribution went away. But I have friends who are musicians, and believe me when I tell you, music doesn't want to be free.

Let's think about newspapers. Yes, the newspaper business has a problem, because readers are moving online, and it is more difficult to monetize a digital than a print reader. But this doesn't mean "journalism wants to be free." It doesn't mean "valuable local content wants to be free." All it means is that when you remove the printing press from the equation, the economics change. Personally I think newspapers will thrive when they work out a way to get over the "paper" part of their business model and focus on the "news" part. But that's tough to do with that big monster of a press thundering in the basement. . .READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Jim Romanesko
poynter.org

Based on a Society for News Design release.

The Society for News Design has selected three newspapers ­including the German papers der Freitag of Berlin and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and The New York Times as the World's Best-Designed in this year's "The Best of News Design" Creative Competition.

Meeting at Syracuse University in New York, an international panel of judges selected the papers from among hundreds of entries worldwide. The judges evaluated issues published in 2009.

(What they said about each paper can be found here .)

Overall, judges said they saw "a fascinating mixture of bad news with good. The reality of distress in our business is obvious. There are many signs of reduced resources, including smaller news holes with crowded words, less local news, an abundance of feature stories on the front page, a continued shortage of good photojournalism and more use of stock illustration. An overall feeling of looking a little confused and perhaps a bit stuck, prevails."

"But wait. The good news is that far from going away or giving up, we saw much earnest effort towards reinvention."

They said we are now in the age of "the thoughtful designer. Your efforts must be as considered as they are creative. We hope these three papers can serve as sources of inspiration." The international competition, co-sponsored by SND and Syracuse University¹s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, recognizes excellence in newspaper design, graphics and photography. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Frédéric Filloux
mondaynote.com

An excerpt from this February 14th post follows:

For publishers: How much money is lost because of stolen contents? Of that, how much can be realistically reclaimed? . . .

How important is this stolen content? “For newspapers and the three main wire agencies, the net present value of stolen content is about $250m on the American market alone”, says Jim Pitkow whom I met last week in Paris. To come up with such estimates, Attributor counts the advertising associated with the infringing content and multiplies it by the CPM (cost per thousand) and the audience of the site. Last December, Attributor released a study that showed for the first time the extent of the illegal reuse of news material.

The study covered a corpus of 100,000 articles from 157 American newspapers monitored for one month. Here are the key findings:

- 112,000 unlicensed, full copies of US newspapers articles were found on more than 75,000 sites across the internet. Full copy means more than 80% of illegal reproduction of the original article.

- If we extent the notion of copy to excerpts (i.e.: less than 80% of the original story but more than 125 words — roughly half a typewritten page), we add 163,000 more references.

- On average, an article is illegally reused 4.4 times, whole or in part; but for large national papers reuse can go up to 15 times per story!

- On the money side, not surprisingly, Google captures 53% of the value that is unrealized by publishers; next is Yahoo (19%); Microsoft (5%); scientific sites (5%); AOL (3%); the rest is atomized. Bloggers represents only 10%.

Books are not spared. Again according to another research project conducted by Attributor, online book piracy represents about 10% of total book sales in the US. The most stolen genres are business and investing books with an average of 13,000 downloads per title, followed by professional and science titles. On these categories, Attributor found out that each title was losing over $1m to online piracy! . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By David Johnson
poynter.org

How much media could you buy for $1,189? That's the first-year cost to own the top-of-line 3G iPad before buying any content to view on it.

That's 60 books or DVDs (at an average of $20 apiece), 119 movie tickets ($10), 238 magazines at the newsstand ($5 apiece), or 24 AAA games for the Xbox 360 or a similar console (at an average of $50 apiece). Sure, you could economize by going for the lowest model at $499 with just Wi-Fi, or by buying the $15-a-month data plan, but wouldn't it be nicer if you could simply tether your iPhone data connection and get more value for that expensive service?

With each new device, and each new connection to the grid, the consumers are coming to the marketplace with less money in their pocket, because the cost of simply being on the grid has skyrocketed in the past 10 years. This should be a concern for all content publishers, whether The New York Times, MediaNews or any one of thousands of local news operations, that think each new device is a silver bullet that will make a magic pay wall strategy work.

We all know a lot has changed since the '90s, as Howard Kurtz documented in a year-ender on the evolution of media in the "aughts." Angry Journalists are coming to grips with a new media environment and are bantering about business models.

But there is one change over the past decade that I haven't seen anyone address adequately: Personal and household connectivity charges have quietly and steadily increased by as much as 4.3 times over the past 10 years. There is one notable exception to this lack of reporting: those who have noted the costs of the iPhone to consumers and profits for the players.) And I think this has a major impact on any chance of success for paid content strategy. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

Randall Rothenberg
President and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau
huffingtonpost.com

Newspapers, say the talking heads, are dying - chewed up for four decades by television, and finally digested during the last tenner by the Internet. Information wants to be free, the chatterers opine, and that means "the news" will evade the papers' attempts to confine it inside a paywall. It will escape, and proliferate, becoming a slippery commodity unsupportable by either subscription fees or advertising. Requiescat in pacem, cuculli piscibus.

I beg to differ. It's not that newspapers aren't troubled; like all consumer media, they've been decimated by the recession that began in 2008, which smacked advertising more severely than it did the broader economy. And even the most ink-stained among us must concede that the combination of iPhones, notebook computers, digital video, Google, blogs, Twitter, Yahoo, Gawker, and Digg has challenged the hardiest of wood-based journalism enterprises.

No, my objection to the conventional wisdom is based on a more intimate economic observation: Newspapers will thrive because Walt Whitman dines at Goat Hill.

I'll explain, but not before providing some perspective. As the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, I guide an unruly, adolescent industry that's taking a fair share of blame for undoing newspapers' two-century long, largely unchallenged dominance of the advertising industry. As recently as 10 years ago, newspapers claimed nearly a quarter of all ad spending in the United States, ahead of broadcast television, cable TV, radio, and the infant Internet. Today, newspapers' share of domestic advertising spend hovers around between 14 percent and 18 percent, according to the Group M and Magna media-buying agencies, with the Web due imminently to catch up. The root cause for the falloff derives from Econ 101: Because economic demand for advertising has been, through boom and bust, relatively stable for decades (at about 2 percent of GDP), ad growth in one medium tends to mean ad loss in others. Moreover, new media are creating vast new supplies of advertising inventory, pushing down prices for existing media that historically lived within reasonably secure oligopolies.

But when you peer under the hood, the math isn't as simple as all that. Newspapers remain a vital force - and maintain a strong business position - in a place where the Web-centric technorati of the Left Coast rarely look because they spend too much time in their cars and their cubicles: the community. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Seth C. Lewis
niemanlab.org

What media economics research can teach us about valuing paid content

The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another question to be untangled here — perhaps one more relevant to the smaller papers who might be thinking of following the Times’ example:

What is the underlying economic value of online news, anyway?

Media economist Iris Chyi [see disclosure below] has a few ideas about this problem. An assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, she has been researching the paid-vs.-free, print-vs.-online conundrum since the late ’90s. Her research has consistently found that even while online news use continues growing, its preference lags behind that of traditional media. In other words: Even as audiences transition from TV/print news consumption to the web, they still like the traditional formats better for getting news, all other things being equal.

Now, this seemingly makes no sense: How could a format as clunky, messy and old-school as print “beat” such a faster, richer and more interactive medium on likability?

Chyi believes she found the answer in the economic principle of “inferior goods.” The idea is simple: When income increases, consumers buy more “normal goods” (think: steak) and fewer “inferior goods” (think: ramen noodles). When income goes down, the opposite occurs (again, all things being equal in economics terms). Inferiority, in this case, isn’t so much a statement of actual quality as it is of consumer perception and demand. If we get richer, our desires for steak go up and our desires for ramen go down.

What does this mean for journalism? “Users perceive online news in similar ways — online news fulfills certain needs but is not perceived as desirable as print newspapers,” Chyi said. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Mark Cuban
blogmaverick.com

One of the key core competencies of a publication is the process of selecting “all the news thats fit to print”.

No one can read every news story. Instead of even trying to consume everything, we all have a process we go through for discovery of news, information and topics of interest to us. We have sources we trust for our news and information. It may be a printed paper or magazine, a website, tv news, facebook or twitter updates, or some combination of everything we have access to.

No matter how we get information there is one certainty, there is a finite number of sources we will use.

When someone selects google news as their destination for news discovery it is probably at the expense of another destination or product who aspires to be a “discovery destination”. But lets pretend it is just an incremental source. That for a while at least a consumer will both go to Google News and to the website of their local paper. What is the branding message the consumer is receiving ?

When that newspaper allows itself to be included in Google News it becomes a de facto endorsement of Google News as an acceptable and probably preferable “discovery destination” . The branding message to the consumer is “I dont need to go to the newspaper homepage. Everything the newspaper has is referenced here in Google News. So if there is something of interest to me from the local paper, Google News will send me to their site. I don’t need to go to both sites any longer. I can just go to Google News.

Thats not good for the publication brand and business. They just lost their position as a trusted source where real people make decisions on what content they think their readers will want to discover – to an algorithm.

But wait it gets worse.

When that consumer goes to Google News, it lists the number of sources. You immediately become one of 2,172 articles. It is never good for a brand to be considered one of 2,000 plus sources. Ever. That makes you a commodity. All that promotion you did saying how good your reporters are ? On its way to becoming worthless. To the consumer there are 2,000 other people able to do the same thing (even though there really arent 2k sources, thats not what the branding message they get from Google)

And the bad news will keep on coming.

As a newspaper or other information source, you can never discount the very real possibility that Google starts becoming a content creator. Why couldn’t they hire reporters? Why couldn’t they give their content priority over all others? More importantly, why wouldn’t they? . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Jack Loechner
Mediapost.com

According to a recent Adweek Media/ Harris Poll, 23% of adult Americans believe that newspaper and magazine advertisements are where they can find the best bargains. 18% believe online advertisements are most likely to help them find the best bargains. 10% say direct mail and 12% catalogs, 11% television commercials, and just 2% say radio. And, 34% of Americans believe the type of ad makes no difference when they are looking for the best bargain.

When looking for the best bargains, different age groups have different ideas of where to look:

- 18-34 year olds are more likely to say online ads (22%) and television commercials (17%) are the best places to go
- 35-44 year olds go online (26%)
- 24% of those 44-54 and 33% of those 55 and older say newspaper and magazine advertisements those are media most likely to help them find the best bargain

Among the genders, women are more likely than men to say newspaper and magazine advertisements, and direct mail and catalogs are more likely to help them find a bargain. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to say online advertisements are more likely to help them find a bargain.

There is also an interesting educational difference in the media people believe can help them find the best bargains. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

The Newspaper Project, the grassroots organization launched last year to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers, has just released an updated version of its Super Bowl ad,available now on the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association website and at The Newspaper Project's website.

The ad reads, "More people will read a newspaper today than watched yesterday¹s big game. With a combined print and online audience of 171 million readers, newspapers are a tremendous scoring opportunity." The ads are available for download free of charge and come in various sizes and formats.

About The Newspaper Project

The Newspaper Project was launched in 2009 by a small group of newspaper executives who wanted to support a productive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers.

The original founders of this effort are Randy Siegel, President of Advance Publications Local Digital, Donna Barrett, President and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. and President of Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA), Brian Tierney, CEO and Publisher of Philadelphia Media Holdings, and Jay Smith, former President of Cox Newspapers and past Chairman of the Newspaper Association of America. Read more!

By Jennifer Saba
EditorandPublisher.com

Aggregator sites -- especially Google -- really are hurting newspapers as more people increasingly simply skim the news headlines without bothering to click to linked newspaper Web sites, a new report finds.

This alarming trend for newspapers is occurring as more people are getting their news online and through aggregators, according to the report from Outsell Research. In fact, just as many people turn to aggregators to get news first thing in the day as people who crack open a newspaper.

The “News Users 2009” study conducted by Outsell Research affiliate analyst Ken Doctor found that 19% of people accessed Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL News for news in 2009, up from 10% in 2006. For newspapers, 19% of those polled went there first, a drop from 23% in 2006.

The report makes a distinction between newspaper print editions and newspaper Web sites. When isolating newspapers online, 6% of those surveyed went to newspaper Web sites first thing in 2009, up from 3% in 2006. Other sites dedicated to specific subjects, such as sports or business, were up 7% in 2009 from 4% in 2006.

The study finds that together, aggregators, newspaper Web sites, and other sites account for 57% of where people turn to first for news, up from 33% in 2006.

When it comes time for people finding local news, newspapers -- particularly their Web sites -- still shine. The study shows that over three years, newspaper Web sites have more than doubled their share to 17% from 8%, while aggregators grew to 4% from 1% during the same period.

Outsell's research shows that readers tend to only skim headlines at aggregator sites -- specifically Google -- for news. . . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Alan D. Mutter
newsosaur.blogspot.com

A puny 2.4% of print subscribers is the average number of people paying for online content at the handful of daily newspapers that have been bold enough to erect pay walls, according to a new survey.

In the first comprehensive study of actual consumer willingness to pay for online news, ITZ/Belden Interactive delivered both good and bad tidings to publishers hoping to begin charging for their content.

The bad news, of course, is the limited number of online readers who were willing to pay for online access to the 26 U.S. dailies included in the survey.

The good news, as you can see in the table (here), is that the few consumers who are willing to pay for online content appear to be largely indifferent to how much it costs. . .

. . . Noting that there is no one-size-fits all solution to charging for content, Harmon said paid access is not going to be the “silver bullet to save the newspaper industry.”

To the degree its is successful at all, he continued, publishers have to approach charging for content “as a new business opportunity, not simply as a means of walling off content to defend print.”. . READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Richard Perez-Pena
nytimes.com

There are more places to go for local news but less news to find there, and the great majority of actual reporting still comes from newspapers, according to a study of the Baltimore area that is scheduled to be released on Monday.

Looking at six major story lines that developed over one week last July, 83 percent of the reports in local news media “were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information,” said the study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center.

Despite diminished resources of established news organizations, “of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95 percent, came from old media — most of them newspapers,” it said. “These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.”

The study found 53 different sources of local news — general-interest newspapers like The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and their Web sites, several smaller papers in the region, publications devoted to a niche like local business, local television and radio stations, and new online news sites and blogs. Even the reporting done by traditional media was driven mostly by government statements rather than journalists’ own digging, the study found. . .READ FULL STORY Read more!

By Joe Strupp
EditorandPublisher.com

The newspaper industry got too complacent with its success years ago, says Warren Buffett, and failed to change its business model to grow with the times.

"It is so easy when you've got a wonderful business," Buffett told E&P during a recent interview. "Complacency is pretty easy and it is why they weren't looking over their shoulder at what was happening."

Buffett, the billionaire owner of The Buffalo News and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, spoke with E&P for an upcoming story in our January issue on the News, which he has owned since 1977.

Saying his interest in owning a newspaper "is not totally rational," Buffett says he is content with just one. But he also sees that the industry as a whole did not properly utilize the Internet when it came on the scene.

"When the Internet came along, you gave away your [online] product for free and charged for it in another place [print]," he says. "I'm not positive what you would have done differently, but not figuring out some kind of business model was a mistake."

Buffett, who sits on the board of The Washington Post Company, also points to circulation revenue as a missed opportunity: "They should have probably tried to get more revenue from circulation over the years. Newspapers were essential years ago," he states. "If they had trained [readers] to value it more, they might have had a model that worked in this environment.". . READ FULL STORY Read more!