Side Businesses, Communities and Missions

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell has a must-read on side-bet businesses that could help news organizations through their current woes.

For those who think this is something new, Mitchell passes along Michael Schudson’s observation that American newspapers got their start as advertisements for printers who made their money printing other things — as well as by offering postal services and serving as general stores. And he notes that today, the Washington Post gets the majority of its revenue from Kaplan, its education business.

Of course, few news organization are likely bets for launching test-prep behemoth, but smaller papers have done well with smaller ventures: The Pocono Record’s editor tells Mitchell that the paper does a nice side business selling reprints of photos taken at sporting events and festivals by the paper’s photographers. (Because the photo galleries are posted online, they also give the Record a nice traffic bump.) An Alaska TV station runs airplane flights and fishing trips. And lots of specialty news organizations offer special reports or host meetings.

Mitchell offers three considerations for news organizations considering such side-bet ventures. At the top of his list: “consistency with the organization’s values.”

Agreed — to which I’d add a wrinkle. To me, the core values of every news organization should include serving as a key member of a community and as a collection point/repository for information about that community. (Though not necessarily the sole such repository or the core of that community.) I think news organizations have accelerated their decline by losing sight of this mission, through cutbacks that have damaged their institutional memory and fetishizing empty traffic numbers that accompanied oft-meaningless “reach.” Some side-bet businesses of the sort discussed by Mitchell would simultaneously bring in more money and reinvigorate news organizations’ role in their communities.

The Pocono Record’s photo galleries bring in money, but I’d argue they’re also a community resource, a digital expansion of “refrigerator journalism” as discussed by Roy Peter Clark in the comments on this post. And I’d say the same thing about other side-bet businesses that connect readers with local businesses, particularly if they’re constructed to make the news organization a valuable middleman.

My folks have a summer house in Maine, and one of their local papers there is the Lincoln County News. Like the Record, the News posts photo galleries from local events and sells reprints. It also has Web forms for submitting events, birth announcements and news of engagements and weddings. For those who think small local papers are just shovelware, there are a lot of great, community-friendly features here. What else could the News do? A next step might be to tie together wedding announcements with local caterers, wedding planners, and the like, link birth announcements with florists, and so on. Tie the food/dining section in with reader reviews and location-based services. Instead of just linking to restaurants’ Web sites, offer to build or improve restaurant Web sites — or any potential advertiser, for that matter. Then the paper gets a cut of referrals. (You’d have to be careful, of course: Restaurant reviews, for example, couldn’t be dictated by business relationships. But bright lines have always had to be drawn, and small towns have always been webs of personal and business connections.)

For a local news organization that built itself out in this way, the business of news might seem secondary on the balance sheet: The organization would be a Web consultancy, photo service, community bulletin board and partner with many local businesses that also had some journalists on staff, raising the question of which business is the side bet. But from one point of view — a critical one for paying the bills — news has always been secondary, the stuff around the ads meant to connect businesses with local customers. All of these connections would support the news organization’s mission of participating in and supporting a community — just as those long-ago print shops provided valuable services to local businesses and individuals, sold useful items, served as a gathering place and even printed some news.

That Pew Report — and Other Monday Reads

There’s a new report out from Pew’s Excellence in Journalism project, and it’s a pretty fascinating snapshot of American news consumers and their habits. Nieman Labs has a good overview here, as does Pew itself.

Quick reaction: I found the report an interesting confirmation of how quickly news consumption is changing. Consider the following:

• 92% of respondents use multiple platforms to get their news
• 56% say they follow news all or most of the day
• 37% say they’ve helped create news, commented on it or shared it

That’s a sea change — the old print-only, brand-loyal news consumer transformed into one who’s often looking for news, getting it from multiple sources and on multiple platforms, and then doing something with it if they aren’t creating it themselves.

A couple of points made me yearn for further exploration:

• Some examining the study’s conclusions have noted that just 2% of respondents rely on the Internet exclusively for news, but I think that’s less surprising than it is on first glance — few people are that absolutist in their consumption habits. I still get news from print sources and television, so I’d fall into the 98% category, but my print and TV consumption of news is a rounding error compared to what it was even five years ago.
• I was interested that 57% of respondents said they relied on just two to five Web sites for their news, suggesting that while news consumers graze, they may not graze very far afield. But if I were a publisher, I’d want more information before I drew a conclusion from that. For instance, I’d want to know if that answer takes into account material people read through email sharing and social networking, which could bring many more sources into the mix.
• When asked what they wanted more coverage of, respondents’ top choice was “science and discoveries,” at 44%. Bringing up the rear was local, at 38%. But when you look at the methodology, those numbers are essentially the same.

Finally, the report clearly shows some opportunities for publishers.

• The most popular online news subject is the weather (81%). As a callow journalist, I complained loudly about having to do weather stories. As a manager at an online news site, I never thought twice about our weather offerings. As a reader, I concur with the poll: Checking the weather is what I do the most. Moreover, I’d love to have more information about what the weather is doing, beyond forecasts. Case in point: My home just got socked by the weekend’s snowicane, and I found it very difficult to get an in-depth explanation of what this weird storm was and why it was doing what it did. The best explanation I found came from the Baltimore Sun, which has a wonderful weather blog by reporter Frank Roylance. Given what Pew has found and what our own experiences will tell us, why are weather blogs so rare?
• Pew found that 23% of social-networking users follow news organizations or individual journalists within social-networking sites. That isn’t taking into account social-networking users who interact with the news through a degree of separation by reading what friends and peers pass along, which is a much higher percentage. These people are specifically making news organizations or individual journalists part of their social-networking habits. Next time a publisher wonders about the value of social networking, there’s a stat for them.
• 70% of Pew’s respondents agreed that the amount of news and information out there available from different sources is overwhelming. There’s the case for curation and being a trustworthy gateway right there.

A couple of quick notes about other things:

My latest EidosMedia Web chat with my friend David Baker is available here. This time around, David and I are chatting about mobile strategy for news organizations. By the way, my thanks to David and Massimiliano Iannotta for their help with RTN’s recent redesign. (That cool image header is David’s doing as well.)

Over at the National Sports Journalism Center, I write about my spring-training news habits, and how I take in news from a huge number of sources that didn’t exist a few years ago. In discussing digital journalism, it’s easy to forget that while these are anxious times for publishers, consumers have never had it better in terms of how much information is available and how many choices they have.

Conversation Is Free-Range — Quit Building Corrals

By now news organizations know they have to be aggressive about social media — it’s a vehicle for distributing their content, commenting, criticizing and otherwise discussing it, and reusing it in various ways. And social media is a chance to rebuild ties with an audience that’s now so busy talking back and creating content of its own that the word hardly seems to fit.

But as is often the case with big opportunities, the question of how to dive in can be paralyzing. And I think that paralysis causes too many news organizations to choose the wrong social-media starting point. Social media is seen as another channel for disseminating news. It’s viewed as a mutation of discussions or article comments. It’s eyed as a new promotional vehicle. And none of those approaches is wrong, for social media can be any or all of those things. But thinking about social media in such narrow ways misses the bigger picture, and starting one’s social-media efforts from such points of view helps ensure that discussions will continue to be about trees, and not the forest.

Social media can seem new and complicated, but at its heart it’s old and simple. Before too long, it will be so woven into our daily lives that it will be invisible and the term will be generally meaningless. Which is as it should be: The underlying technologies and individual platforms aren’t nearly as important as what we do with them. And what is that? Interesting new things, to be sure, but mostly what we’ve always done: We talk. We ask questions and give advice and gossip and trade interesting stories and argue and try to sell each other stuff and be inspiring and be petty and self-promote and help each other and fall in love and pick fights and discover new ideas and seek refuge in old ones. And by doing all that, we create new bonds between people and reinforce existing ones. Whether we’re talking about fan pages or Twitter, it comes down to talking and listening.

Conversation doesn’t just happen in specific places, but everywhere. Yet in approaching social media, news organizations tend to see their role as starting conversations, or providing settings for them. On the surface, this seems logical: News organizations already host discussions. Playing host to conversations reinforces news organizations’ sense of self-worth, and seems to promise greater control over them. And starting conversations feels like a fit for news organizations’ desire to serve their communities.

All of these are logical or laudable impulses. But that playbook stopped working a generation ago, as newspapers ceded their place as community centers and connectors. The conversation doesn’t need to be restarted, for it never stopped — it just needs to be joined. The community doesn’t need to be built — it’s already there. Instead of thinking of themselves as the potential seeds or centers of communities, news organizations need to see themselves as parts of larger communities that already exist, and find roles within them.

How can we do this? For starters, consider Twitter lists. It’s great to have a Twitter list of staffers, but it’s much more powerful to have a Twitter list of leaders in various communities of interest, and then integrate those lists within your site as low-maintenance, real-time news feeds. For examples, check out the Texas Tribune’s Tweetwire, or the ideas in this Mashable post. Now, think how many such communities your average metro paper could dip into and display. Every local sports franchise can have a feed that includes the news organization’s own sportswriters, other news organizations’ writers, smart bloggers, players and club officials. By putting together a feed that includes music writers and members of local bands who tweet, you’ve created a nightlife guide and an interesting collective musicians’ diary. Politicians and civic leaders should have their own feed, of course — joined by City Hall reporters and spiced up by the tweets of community gadflies. And so on.

Such feeds are fundamentally out of control? That’s OK — so’s conversation itself. Readers are increasingly sophisticated consumers of content — they’ll understand. (And you can always remove any truly bad actors from your feeds.) These feeds could direct readers to your rivals? So what — you’ll get more credit as a gatekeeper than you will by pretending your rivals don’t exist.

Such efforts are just the beginning, and only one way of joining conversations and communities. They’re early experiments — but experiments that begin with the right starting point, and so will lead to much more. Conversations and the communities engaged in them are free-range — we need to resist the impulse to create corrals.

Digging Into the Abernathy/Foster Report

The latest attempt to summarize the challenges facing newspapers and recommend a course of action is out, with the alarm bells being sounded this time by veteran media executive Penelope Muse Abernathy and former McKinsey director Richard Foster.

The study (linked from Bill Mitchell’s overview as a PDF) struck me as a fairly familiar overview, though the writer/editor in me appreciated that it’s admirably succinct, and written with a welcome bite. (And I laughed out loud at the examination of Hindu and Judeo-Christian demises.) Certainly Abernathy and Foster find the right targets and hit them hard.

For instance, they nail the industry’s major disadvantages in the digital era:

• the high cost of printing and distribution
• the loss of geographically protected market dominance
• the loss of high-margin advertising to online competitors

And their proposed plan of action seems sound as well:

• shed legacy costs as quickly as possible
• recreate community online in an effort to regain pricing leverage
• build new online ad revenue streams

For me the best section of the plan is the one concerned with community, particularly how it’s defined and how it should be approached. A theme of the report is that news organizations keep using new digital tools in an effort to repurpose old models, when they ought to be reinventing things from the ground up. For instance, Abernathy and Foster note that pre-digital newspapers aggregated content and defined community largely based on geographical and political boundaries, but the new aggregators — search engines and commerce sites — do so around special interests. That simple, essential shift may be obvious to Web-business types, but I think it’s a blind spot for newspaper veterans.

Their advice: Rebuild newspapers around specialized audiences and communities (including hyperlocal), instead of continuing to try and reach a single mass audience or community. Start with niche audiences that papers are already serving. Become their aggregators, and customize stories for them — for example, instead of writing one big story about the health-care debate, write different versions tailored for those different specialty audiences. Such reinvented papers, they say, might be able to charge advertisers a premium to reach those communities, and charge customers for unique information.

An interesting point I hadn’t encountered before is that Abernathy and Foster say there’s a precedent for this — magazines responded to the threat posed by television by migrating to serve specialized niches or interest groups and charging advertisers a premium to reach them. Newspapers, on the other hand, have largely reached for eyeballs, putting themselves in competition with better aggregators such as Google.

There are some rather searing quotes in the report. Here’s one: “Unless news organizations simultaneously invest in re-imagining and re-inventing the online edition, there is no transformation of the traditional newspaper and the industry dies with its aging loyal readers, who pay an ever-increasing price to receive the ‘last’ printed copy of the newspaper.”

Ouch. And the report is nicely short on Pollyanna-ism, as this warning makes plain: “[a]n enterprising executive may accomplish all three goals … and not achieve the operating margins typical of news companies in the last quarter of the 20^th century, since those profit levels were largely the result of being de facto geographic monopolies.”

Abernathy and Foster are sympathetic to companies that know they need to change, but find those changes difficult to implement. As an example of how to escape that trap, they cite Intel, and its change from making DRAMs to microprocessors. That difficult transition was finally made, they write, when Gordon Moore and Andy Grove asked themselves a brutally simple question: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?”

It’s a good question. Here’s hoping it gets newspaper executives nodding, and causes them to take action.

Long-Form Journalism, and Other Friday Reads

Yesterday the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach explored narrative in the digital age, beginning with the great Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith and wending his way through the distractions of Facebook, Twitter and the rapidly changing newspaper business.

It’s a rather tortured, ambivalent read. (That’s not meant as a criticism — discomfort and ambivalence are part of figuring stuff out.) On the one hand, Achenbach has faith in the power of narrative to survive amid distractions and fads, writing that it’s not “merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this. They know that the story is the original killer app.” On the other, he frets that “narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise” and worries about newspapers’ embrace of charticles, content creation and aggregation — as well as readers’ love of blogs and Facebook. (“It’s hard to sustain a story on a page designed to put you in contact with your 1,374 close personal friends.”)

There are some overgeneralizations here — I could have done without Achenbach’s dismissal that “to a remarkable degree, bloggers aren’t storytellers.” (Read most anything by Joe Posnanski. Or, if I may be horribly self-promotional, one of my own attempts at blog storytelling.) And after firing somewhat random shots at Facebook and aggregators, he notes that the Internet can send good stories winging from user to user — which is one of the things I love most about social media and aggregation done right.

I think Achenbach nails it when he notes that “the Internet can be, for the very best stories, an accelerant, not a retardant, of great narrative. But mediocre stories need not apply.” That’s right — but it skips over the fact that long, mediocre stories never worked in print — or in any other medium. (Picture a bunch of ancient Greeks walking out of a tavern in the middle of a dull tale, leaving behind a blind storyteller you’ve never heard of.) If the Web has put more pressure on long-form narratives to pull their considerable weight and engage readers, that’s not a bad thing.

Yes, there’s a lot of noise in the digital world. But good storytelling is signal. Done skillfully, long-form narrative works online — just as it does anywhere else. Gary Smith works. And so does Joel Achenbach, ambivalence and all.

Ah, but there’s a rather important question worrying Achenbach that I’ve left out: Who’s going to pay for those long stories?

I don’t know that — nobody does. But I do stubbornly maintain that long-form journalism will be a big part of whatever answer emerges.

One of the engines of hopefully creative destruction for the newspaper industry is that the Web has destroyed papers’ old geographical protections, throwing them all into a common pool. That pool is full of commodity journalism, which is useless for enhancing a newspaper’s brand and impossible to charge for. On top of that, the lifespan of a scoop has dwindled from days to minutes. Too many newspapers have been revealed as a veneer of local news over a lot of me-too stories you can read done better elsewhere — and endless rounds of cost-cutting have just made papers thinner and poorer.

But slowly but surely, papers are waking up to the idea that they have to stop doing what everybody else is doing and find ways to be unique. (This is one factor driving the renewed interest in local news — the old geographical protections still apply.) And this is why I maintain long-form journalism — whether it’s investigative journalism or just superb storytelling — will not only survive but emerge as more important than it is today. Unlike a lot of other news stories, long-form journalism can’t be copied quickly or easily. That will make it valuable.

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From the MinnPost’s Joel Kramer, here’s more evidence of the trend for publishers to value the loyal few over the empty many. (See also Slate’s David Plotz on core readers vs. drive-bys, and my own conversation about traffic stats with Greg Harmon.)

After I tweeted about this, a friend of mine raised an objection: How you can sell the “loyal few” to advertisers, given agencies’ struggles with understanding digital as it is? My answer was that different advertisers want different things. Publishers are only now realizing that big traffic numbers piled up by non-local drive-by readers are useless to local advertisers — they need real numbers about local loyalists who might actually buy something. There are global/national advertisers for whom pure reach is important, but they’re not the only game in town — and probably not the most valuable one.

On Reconstructing Journalism (and Other Things)

Like most folks concerned with the future of newspapers, I spent a good chunk of the morning reading “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” the Columbia School of Journalism report by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson. (It’s available here as a PDF.)

I’ve read the report, and I’m afraid I don’t have an immediate reaction that makes for a great blaring headline or a thundering blog post.

First off, I felt it was a terrific, dispassionate overview of how we came to this pass, and the many enterprises and undertakings that are experimenting with public-affairs journalism amid newspapers’ decay. And for much of the first half of the report I found myself filled with hope — hope to see the dots connected between the Voice of San Diego and Spot.Us and ProPublica and the HuffPo Investigative Fund and the Texas Tribune and MinnPost and NPR. I’d read about all those intriguing experiments, but piecemeal, and taking them in all at once made me think that surely some of these organizations will succeed, with their stories pointing the way for others. I also thought the report was evenhanded about blogs and the so-called MSM — it was refreshingly free of mother’s basement cliches and blogger revolution talk from the Too Much Red Bull crowd.

Which brings us to their conclusions. Here’s the clarion call:

The days of a kind of news media paternalism or patronage that produced journalism in the public interest, whether or not it contributed to the bottom line, are largely gone. American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting independent news reporting in this new environment — as society has, at much greater expense, for public needs like education, health care, scientific advancement, and cultural preservation — through varying combinations of philanthropy, subsidy and government policy.

It’s tempting to look at all the worthy experiments spotlighted by Downie and Schudson and conclude that at least some of them will work, and therefore it’s better to let the market sort things out, without getting the government involved or trying to replace press-baron journalism with an uncertain era of philanthropist-baron journalism. But what worries me is the potential “dip” involved, and the efficacy of the current model’s replacement as a watchdog on government and the powerful.

If we think that the next three to five years will see various non-profits and collectives and Web-only papers assume their place next to shrunken but still robust digital-first newspapers, and if we think that combination of news organizations will be able to pursue effective public-affairs journalism, then by all means let the market work. But what if it will take much longer than that? And what if the actors in this new media ecosystem prove too small to be “stable organizations that can facilitate regular reporting by experienced journalists, support them with money, logistics and legal services, and present their work to a large public,” to quote from the report’s endorsement of newsrooms? If either or both of those fears are realized, what happens to public-affairs journalism and civic life for 10 years, or a generation, or longer?

This isn’t to doubt the promise of various post-print approaches; rather, it’s to worry about their effective reach. And if we’re sufficiently worried about the answers to those questions, I don’t see dismissing out of hand the proposals from Downie and Schudson for redistributing existing taxes or raising new ones in support of public-affairs journalism. Has government support of science or the arts tainted those endeavors? (Maybe it has. I admit this is new to me.)

I reserve the right to change my mind, of course — there’s a lot more to think about here. But however muddy it may be, that’s my initial reaction.

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Mathew Ingram offers a defense of serendipity in newspapers, finding value in being able to skim the newspaper and read about Muslim hockey players, Paul Shaffer, the band Gossip, city-council politics and retirees’ pension troubles, to name stories that caught his eye in a recent Globe and Mail. His column is a belated but heartfelt rejoinder to Clay Shirky’s assertion that the idea that someone doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about a Honduran coup or the Lakers is and always has been nonsense.

The debate reminded me of one of my favorite Real Time columns for the Online Journal — my attempt to demolish the myth that serendipity is one of print newspapers’ hallmarks, and missing online. As I argued then, print serendipity is limited by the layout of the paper and the reader’s own habits — if you toss aside the business section (or sports) in the morning, you’ve already limited the number of happy discoveries. And if you miss that great unexpected story today, you’re not going to find it in tomorrow’s paper.

The Web, however, is a marvelous serendipity engine — and newspapers harnessed it a long time ago with Most Popular. Most Popular is a Goldilocks path through the paper — stories chosen by a cohort of relatively similar readers, but not limited to a given section or day. (This is why I dislike “Most Read in This Section” or “People Who Read This Story Also Read” — they’re too fine-grained for serendipity.)

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My most-recent column for the National Sports Journalism Center looks at the very different (and very effective) habits of two Twitterers — the Daily News’s Ralph Vacchiano and Golf Digest’s Dan Jenkins. It’s a column about sportswriting, but hopefully there are some potentially useful thoughts for journalists of all stripes.

Video: Four Perspectives on Journalism

Back in June I got together with three other journalism veterans — John Berman of ABC News, Susan Chira of the New York Times, and Alexander Heffner of Scoop44 — to discuss journalism and where it might be headed.  I’m surprised at how optimistic I was about the subscription model back then; I’ve definitely grown more pessimistic as time has gone by.

Video is below — for those who don’t have an hour, there’s also an edited transcript starting on page 24 here. (Opens a PDF.)

Journalism Roundtable on Vimeo.

Reactions to Nieman, Part 2

Yesterday’s post was becoming a goat-choker, so I split it up into two parts. Here’s some more reaction to the excellent Nieman Report on journalism and social media:

Steve Buttry writes about the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel’s running “locals” in the 1970s — short items “submitted by area busybodies, telling who was visiting whom, who was ill and who had just returned from vacation.” His remembrance, in turn, made me recall that such columns were in their final days at the New Orleans Times-Picayune when I arrived there as the World’s Greenest Intern in 1989.

Like Buttry, in my youth I regarded the locals as an odd sideshow to the business of “real journalism.” Now, they look like the kind of small-scale, intensely community-focused news we perhaps ought not to have abandoned, and might revisit as part of the effort to rebuild ties with readers. Buttry, referencing his own “C3″ model, imagines community moments like those noted in the locals as gateways for connecting readers with sellers of gifts and flowers. For me, it’s a valuable reminder that the past can be an instructive prelude. The locals were Facebook with faces. They were user-generated content when it wasn’t a buzzword. They were hyperlocal without the prefix. (Or maybe with a different, mellower prefix? Easylocal!) In trying to rebuild community, why not look at how we used to do it?

As for MyReporter.com, it’s brilliant. As Vaughn Hagerty explains, readers ask questions of the newsroom of the Wilmington StarNews, and the newsroom tells the questioner its plan for handling the question, then assigns someone to answer it. (If questions are too specific or meant to resolve disputes, the paper suggests possible resources for the questioner.) The idea came out of a challenge to the staff to be a help desk for the community, and it’s been that. It’s also creating a Wiki of resources for the community, and proving a source of story ideas. (For instance, Hagerty says it’s led the StarNews to focus more resources on transportation and development issues.) I also imagine it’s a great way to rebuild trust between the community and the newspaper.

One article in the report struck me as off the mark, though — Robert Picard’s urging that newspapers reconsider the mantra that they make their news available “anytime, anywhere, on any platform.” Noting papers’ constrained budgets, Picard thinks newspapers should demand to know how new technologies will generate money, and look askance at technologies for which there isn’t an answer.

As with Paul Farhi’s suggestion that papers retreat from the Web, this would be perfectly sensible if the newspaper industry’s current business model was the right one for a healthy, long-term future. But I don’t think it is. To steal from my own comment on Picard’s piece, the print-centric business model is a burning raft — and when you’re on a burning raft, you have to plan differently. True, that dark spot on the horizon might not be the mainland. It might be a little island where we’ll live rather limited lives. It might not have water or a source of food. It might only be a mirage. We don’t know what will happen when we reach it — but we can predict what will happen if we stay here.

Given that the raft is burning, now’s not the time for a symposium on the ROI of rowing.

More Evidence That Local Is the Place to Transform

The latest Pew Research survey of how Americans view the press is out, and offers more evidence that local coverage is the best focus for newspapers trying to transform themselves for the digital age.

When asked where they get most of their national and international news, 71% of survey respondents said television, little changed from recent years. 42% said the Internet, compared with 24% in September 2007. And 33% said newspapers.

When respondents were asked where they get most local news, television still won with 64% of the vote. But 41% said newspapers, compared with just 17% who said the Internet. And among respondents aged 18-29, the numbers were 67% for TV, 39% for newspapers and 21% for the Internet.

There’s the opportunity — if newspapers will take it.

Discussions of how newspapers lost their competitive advantages often focus on the barriers to entry that have fallen.  The Web allows anyone who wants to be a publisher to be one — you no longer have to buy presses and lots and lots of former trees. But for years the limits of geography also protected newspapers from competition:  Unless you were willing to pay extra for an unsatisfying national edition of some out-of-town paper, your local paper was your default source for most news, from international and national to movie reviews. (This also made the wires invaluable to many papers.)

Now that’s gone: You can read dozens of different papers’ takes on international and national stories and spend the duration of a movie reading its various reviews. With the geographical boundaries down, we have a glut of news in some categories. Within them, competition for readers is national — and increasingly global. Faced with this, digital-first papers should be asking themselves a) if their efforts are good enough to compete nationally; and b) if the expense of a wire service is justified when they could just link to other papers’ efforts.

None of this is a revelation — it underpins Jeff Jarvis’s mantra of “do what you do best and link to the rest,” for instance. But the Pew numbers remind us that it isn’t the rule across all categories of news just yet. When it comes to local news, newspapers still enjoy the protections of geography. And those protections will remain in place — at least when it comes to competing with other newspapers.

But other newspapers aren’t the only source of competition. Neighborhood blogs are springing up everywhere. A bevy of companies are experimenting in an effort to mine the promise of “hyperlocal.”

And the Web itself is changing.

Today’s Web is great for searching globally, but lousy at filtering locally. If I want a flat tire fixed in Brooklyn Heights, it does me no good whatsoever to discover I can get it done really cheaply in Cleveland or that some guy in San Jose is great at it. But this weakness is temporary: Geotagging and location-aware services are driving constant innovations in the local Web, and companies new and old are competing to reap the benefits.

Newspapers’ best chance at transformation is local. As Pew has shown, local is where they still retain readers who otherwise have turned to other sources of news. Local is where the advertising market remains largely untapped. Local is where real-world communities are still searching for a virtual expression. And local is where newspapers still have advantages in institutional knowledge, newsgathering skills and a historically valued place in civic life.

But time is of the essence. Because these advantages won’t last.

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You can read my first column for Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center here. I’ll be writing weekly about sportswriting and new media, something that’s dear to my heart as former co-writer of WSJ.com’s Daily Fix column and co-author of Faith and Fear in Flushing. I’ll be writing alongside Dave Kindred and Eric Deggans, which is immensely flattering and daunting in equal measures.

Paul Farhi’s Very Strange Advice

(Greetings Romenesko folk — my latest blog post is a reaction to Matt Thompson’s thoughts on the failings of the traditional news story. And the blog’s main page is here. Thanks for stopping by!)

I’m a fan of Paul Farhi’s — he’s a terrific writer and rarely gets snagged in the brambles of conventional wisdom. But I found his prescription for newspapers in the American Journalism Review at first baffling and then profoundly depressing. It’s a proposed course of action that sounds bold but is fundamentally a surrender — a suggestion that we go as gently as possible into that good night.

Farhi’s advice is that downplaying or dropping the Web entirely would be smart and potentially life-saving for the newspaper industry. Going print-only, he thinks, would eliminate the glut of commoditized Web news, put aggregators out of business and let newspapers avoid the pitiless and unproven economics of Web advertising.

It requires mental gymnastics worthy of Nadia Comaneci to accept the premise that newspapers could act in concert to turn off their Web servers. It takes a pretty profound suspension of disbelief to think that doing so would truly choke off other sources of news to which online readers would turn. (Would local TV news outlets also pull the plug on their Web operations? Would CNN and FoxNews?) But for a moment, let’s grant that these things could happen. Would the “massive migration back to print” that Farhi hopes for really follow?

I have my doubts, to put it mildly. Farhi himself notes that classifieds have dried up “like a desert lake,” hammering newspaper revenue, and that circulation declined 13.1% between 1999 and 2008. Yet eliminating online news wouldn’t bring classifieds back into print newspapers — they’d stay on Craigslist. Nor would job listings return to print papers — they’d stay on Monster.com. Those sources of revenues haven’t gone to the online side of the news house — they’ve left the house entirely. Car dealers and furniture stores wouldn’t shut down their Web outposts, or stop trying to reach online audiences directly. The essential problem with Farhi’s fantasy is that turning off the Web-news spigot would not restore newspapers’ historic, geographically based monopolies and their lost status as a key conduit by which businesses reached customers. Even playing by his odd house rules, most of the money that’s been lost wouldn’t return.

Nor, I suspect, would the readers. Newspaper circulation had been dwindling for some time when the Internet was still the province of scientists and academics. Yes, print readers are a loyal bunch. They’re also, on average, 55 years old. Younger generations, meanwhile, are no longer following the once-well-trodden path of settling down, raising a family and becoming civic-minded enough to start getting the paper — instead, they’re sticking with their youthful habits of grazing for news online. Farhi suggests these Web-reared readers would return to print, but there’s no return involved — they weren’t reading print in the first place. The problem would be the same: Print subscribers dying and not being replaced.

Meanwhile, on the Web side of the house Farhi hears birth pangs and calls them death throes.

Yes, online newspapers face significant challenges. Most newspapers still run their businesses as if the physics of geography and physical distribution protect them from competition, which is what has led to the glut of commoditized news that Farhi notes. (Again, how many movie critics do we really need?) Online, measures of advertising’s effectiveness are based on numbers rather than faith, and that has indeed made Web advertising much less rewarding than print. It’s far from certain that most newspapers will be able to pay the bills through subscriptions, donations or micropayments. All granted.

But online news is still very, very new — and still struggling to disengage itself from print models and print frameworks. It seems unlikely that Web-first newspapers will ever be as profitable as the print papers of years past, and it’s possible they will never be profitable. The peril of the online business model is its uncertainty.

Ah, but the print business model is even more perilous because of its certainty: an actuarial dwindling of audience amid a further leaching of advertising revenue. The fact that that business model is far more robust in the short term is a comfort only to those who aren’t looking beyond the short term. What Farhi is really proposing is a death sentence — that newspapers retreat to a single channel, become niche products that are decreasingly relevant, and then disappear.

There are no guarantees with digital-first newspapers, but there is hope — hope that repeated experimentation will point the way to an as-yet-elusive online business model, one that adapts newspapers’ traditional strengths and appeal to the new medium in which people increasingly live their lives.

The most promising way to find it? You don’t have to look far. “To compensate for the loss of immediacy, [newspapers] would have to be distinctive and singular, offering something that no Internet competitor could,” Farhi writes of his Web-free world. “They would have to differentiate themselves with exclusive information — all fresh, all local — compelling photography and courageous commentary. They’d still have to cover the news, but in a way that offered additional perspective, beyond the broad outlines available elsewhere. Even more than telling readers something they don’t already know, newspapers will need tons of hustle and enterprise and a unique personality.”

Farhi doesn’t seem to grasp it, but he’s just offered excellent advice for Web newspapers. He seems to think the hallmark of the Internet is immediacy, but it’s not — the Web is awash with up-to-date news that’s bland, interchangeable and essentially worthless. What succeeds online? It’s being distinctive and singular, offering something that can’t be copied. It’s offering perspective. It’s hustle and enterprise and personality.

It’s everything, in short, that Paul Farhi seems to think can only exist in print.