The term “mainstream media” is now a perjorative and a story published yesterday by the New York Times, which also went around the nation on the Times News Service, serves as the latest example why.  Referring to the trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee as well as the shooting deaths of two shoppers in a Toys ‘R Us, the story by Stephanie Rosenbloom begins, “In a sign of consumer desperation amid a bleak economy, the annual rite of retailing known as Black Friday turned chaotic and even deadly, as predawn shoppers scrambled for holiday bargains.” The notion of “consumer desperation amid a bleak economy” is wholly unsupported anywhere in the following article.  In fact, shoppers stampeding store employees to buy products would seem to suggest a banner shopping season ahead.  The real story here would be to explain why shoppers are rushing to buy goods in such a bad economy.

Later, a professor at USC is quoted as saying, “I think it ties into a sort of fear and panic of not having enough,” and  “Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates, a retail consultancy, said there was shopping mania at Wal-Mart every year. But this year, he said, it seems ‘people are becoming irrational in their actions.’” Gee, a buying frenzy? That doesn’t sound like a “bleak economy” to me.  Rosenbloom clearly has a story line she’s going to fit this article into one way or another, and she fails miserably. Maybe her editors should explain to her the difference between an opinion piece and news reporting.

Even worse for “reporter” Rosenbloom and the Times is an AP story published today explaining that “Early data shows strong Black Friday shopping.” It may be that news with a bias is the future, but the Times has yet to explicitly accept it.  Until then, report the news or express an opinion, but don’t mix the two.

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There is no problem more pressing for publishers with legacy print products than the drop in value of a reader as he moves from print to online. A few weeks ago Ari Rosenberg addressed this problem in a post on Media Post’s Online Publishing Insider. Noting the incredibly low CPMs ad networks bring, he made a couple of points about how to move those prices up:

• Maintain pricing. He noted that Peter Naylor, the senior vice president of digital sales at NBC Universal, has advocated not filling an ad position if no ads are sold at a premium rate. “…just because there is an ad spot built into a page view doesn’t mean we have to serve an ad.

• Preemptable inventory. “Ad network buys we accept are preemptable — so why not apply that
  same logic with our own direct sales force? Stick a stake in the ground
  and tell your sales force that anything sold below a CPM of X has no
  guarantee of running.”

I would also add another growing trend – limit inventory.  Limited inventory means more visibility for ads that do appear and the ability to charge higher prices as demand grows. Ads should fit in with the design of the page, not be allowed to design the page because you need to constantly fit in another unit that just might sell.

In the comments, Leslie Laredo noted that we actually do a poor job of selling the real value of online advertising – the “ability to guarantee delivery of an ad unit to a page when readers
(eyeballs) are there is a huge value. No other media can demonstrate
actual delivery of eyeballs to an ad or content on a page.” While R.J. Lewis points out that the responsibility for the performance of an ad lies with the advertiser as much as with the publisher, but CPC pricing places the entire burden on the publisher (one reason why advertisers like it).

We really have to get out of constant panic selling, where we have to sell every bit of inventory at any price because it’s perishable.

The problem, of course, will always be one of supply.  It’s so easy to create online ad inventory that it’s hard to imagine a general supply shortage. While recognizing that we are ultimately selling audience, as publishers we must also sell our brand.  Sure, it’s a valid argument to make that an advertiser shouldn’t care where they find their audience as long as it’s the right audience, but there’s more to it than that.  An advertiser wants to be associated with credible, reputable, valuable content, even though their audience may at times view other content, and many times the right content can further qualify an audience beyond the capability of behavioral targeting methodologies.

In the end, if publishers can’t sell the value of their inventory, who can?

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Umair Haque published a blog post yesterday on the Harvard Business Publishing web site which, despite being driven to some embarrassingly fawning prose by the author’s joy over Barack Obama’s election win, offers some food for thought. Entitled, Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators, Haque suggests that Obama “is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today” and outlines 7 rules “for tomorrow’s radical innovators.”  In applying Obama’s campaign to these rules, Haque turns to making unsupported assertions that could probably be applied to any popular winning candidate from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan.  Nonetheless, there’s value there, and I couldn’t help but read the principles with digital news organizations in mind. Here they are with my own comments:

1. Have a self-organization design.  The end game here is the creation of a self-organizing business that combines the virtues of both tall and flat organizations.  With a “tightly controlled core, surrounded by self -organizing cells of” designers, programmers, and journalists, media companies may give themselves the best chance of weathering the storm they now face.

2. Seek elasticity of resilience. The goal is “not to maximize outputs, or minimize inputs, but to remain resilient to turbulence.” This is partly enabled by #1.

3. Minimize strategy. Sorry,I don’t get the point of this one at all.  Haque says that “strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.” Huh? Maybe he’s just saying not to get so wrapped up in the plan that you lose sight of the goal.

4. Maximize purpose. Make your goal big enough to matter. This was a problem I always had with Newspaper Next’s “Jobs to be Done” strategy – it just seemed so… small.  This is the same problem with the death by a thousand cuts cost cutting strategy that most newspapers are employing these days.  The goal is to cut some costs – a really shortsighted and small goal.  The real goal is to transform the news business.

5. Broaden unity. Yup, we need to unify our companies, not perpetuate silos.

6. Thicken power. Lead by example, not fear (and only a little bit of greed).

7. Remember that there is nothing more asymmetrical than an ideal. This is really part of maximize purpose, but the point is that no one gets excited about incremental improvement.  In times of great change and upheaval, you need to be driven by an ideal; a great purpose.

Good rules, now if only he told us how to implement.

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On October 24th I made a presentation on the Future of News to the Collegiate Network’s Western Division Editors Conference in Scottsdale.  The gist of the talk was that a religion, complete with its own dogma, has been created around the news “conversation” and it’s beginning to lead us astray.  The problem is that the religion’s high priests are focusing on the dogma to the exclusion of the future business model, solving real problems, but not those that are most critical.  This dogma is old now, and largely accepted by the industry.  Yes, there are disagreements over understanding, implementation, and speed, but the early battles are largely won.  Yet we still haven’t figured out the business model. I posit that the three puzzles we need to solve to truly bring news into the future are those of Relevance, Distribution, and Profit.

My presentation is below, although the slides alone don’t quite convey the full meaning.

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