TV-Newspaper Staff Mergers LIkely

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Alan D. Mutter Reflections of a Newsosaur

Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Next big thing? TV-newspaper staff mergers

Newspaper and TV newsroom mergers could become the next big thing as profit-pressed publishers and broadcasters seek to cut costs and strengthen their digital presence.

But will hybrid newsrooms live up the promises of producing better journalism? The performance of the longest-running major newsroom merger – the combination 10 years ago of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA – is far from encouraging.

The latest cross-media merger was announced yesterday in Salt Lake City, where the Deseret News said it planned to shed 43% of its staff and move into the newsroom of the KSL-TV, an NBC affiliate that also operates AM and FM news radio stations. All four properties are owned by Deseret Media Companies, which in turn is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints.

The draconian effort to save some semblance of the News comes in spite of the fact that it long has participated in another supposedly advantageous partnership.

Since 1952, the newspaper has been in a joint operating agreement with the Salt Lake Tribune, where the jointly owned Newspaper Agency Co. handles ad sales, production and delivery for both properties. MediaNews Group owns the Tribune and the two publishers split the profits from an operation that is more efficient than would be possible if each paper maintained its own sales and production infrastructure.

But times have been tough for even JOAs, as witness the shutdowns last year of the Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Tucson Citizen.

At a time when increasingly scarce local advertising revenues are pinching the once-enviable profits produced by newspapers and broadcasters, the arguments for merging newsrooms are clear:

You cut duplicative coverage, headcount and expenses by sending a single reporter to a press conference or a solo cameraperson to a car wreck. You enrich your web and mobile offerings with better video from the TV operation and deeper content from the print side. With any luck, seamless cross-media promotion will build audience in print, on the air, on the web and on the many proliferating mobile platforms. The combined reach and efficiency should be a major selling point with advertisers, too.

The cost-savings are so appealing to broadcasters that no less than 224 television stations in the country today get their news from another station, according to Bob Papper, the chairman of journalism and media studies at Hofstra University, who conducts an annual newsroom census for the Radio and Television News Directors Association.

Although few newspaper publishers to date actually have acted to pool resources with a local TV station, it happened last year in Hartford and a decade ago in Tampa. If newspaper revenues don’t begin to stabilize soon, a growing number of publishers may begin to take this idea as seriously as hundreds of broadcasters already have.

While hybrid newsrooms undoubtedly save money on everything from reporters to real estate, the journalistic improvements promised by Media General a decade ago are not evident at the combined news operation of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA, an NBC affiliate.

As advertised when the Florida newsrooms merged, print reporters indeed learned to work on camera and TV personalities began to contribute to the newspaper. But those efforts, which are presented today for the world to behold at TBO.Com, are, in a word, underwhelming.

Instead of combining the assets of the newspaper and TV station in a single, dynamic website, TBO.Com is primarily a compendium of cheesy police news and out-of-market AP stories. If you follow the breadcrumbs on the website to the separate pages for the TV station and newspaper, you get nothing more than the sort of shovelware that populates the website of a mediocre broadcaster or publisher in a mid-sized market.

At this writing, the lead story and video on the TV site is a cheapie about a man who killed his cousin in a dispute over a necklace. If stories from today’s paper are on the web, they were impossible to find. Neither the newspaper, the TV station nor the website has an iPhone app, although the competing ABC and Fox affiliates in the market do.

The weak execution is understandable in light of the steep cuts Media General has made in staffing at the Tampa properties since they first were combined. Half of the 1,326 people working at the newspaper, TV station and website were cut in 2008 and subsequent layoffs and reorganizations have claimed more positions since then.

The gruel at this newsroom of the future is way too thin to woo discerning readers and advertisers.

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Why many newspaper pay sites may fail

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Reflections of a Newsosaur by Alan Mutter

Musings (and occasional urgent warnings) of a veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Why many newspaper pay sites may fail
If modern publishers shared the smarts of Benjamin Franklin, one of the shrewdest of their number who ever lived, they might today be selling content successfully on the web.

“Gentlemen,” intoned Franklin, urging fellow patriots to sign the Declaration of Independence in the sweltering summer of 1776. “If we don’t hang together, we most assuredly will all hang separately.”
While Franklin evidently wasn’t the first person to utter the immortal line widely attributed to him, things would have gone better for today’s publishers if they emulated his wisdom when they began trying to sell their valuable content.

Instead, newspapers are embarked on a scattered number of half-baked, one-off pay schemes that for the most part are doomed to fail. It didn’t have to be that way. But the outcome isn’t particularly surprising, given the inability of publishers to successfully collaborate, even though this is the most difficult time in the history of their business.
Newspapers lost their last chance to hang together when it became clear yesterday that the wheels seemingly have come off Journalism Online, the ambitious, global pay-wall initiative launched last year by serial entrepreneur Steven Brill.

After a year of trying to persuade publishers worldwide to join the universal content-vending system that he envisioned, Brill told the New York Times the only committed client he could identify was a Lilliputian daily in Lancaster, PA. Brill said more affiliates are on the way for a service he christened Press+.

While Brill barnstormed unsuccessfully in support of his idea, papers great and small embarked on – or at least started the final boarding process for – a plethora of pay schemes that they each cobbled together for themselves.

The profusion of pay plans has produced a welter of home-grown offerings that will be alien, confusing and generally repugnant to consumers who have been gleefully consuming content for 1½ decades without having to pay for it.

Fortunately for piqued consumers, they can quickly click to any of the thousands of free sites that will be eager to welcome them. Newspapers won’t be so lucky.

The value of Journalism Online – and the similar but different ViewPass project I abandoned last fall when it became clear the industry could not rally around a common pay platform – is that either would have been a widely available, highly visible system that surfers would recognize all over the web.

These trusted, ubiquitous brands would have made it easy for consumers to buy content at any participating site by simply clicking a button to activate a previously authorized credit card.

Instead of coalescing around one or two universal payment systems, the publishers elected to fire off in all directions:

:: The New York Times will wait until next year to introduce a metered system that requires visitors to pay after taking advantage of a still-to-be-determined number of free peeks at the site. The solution may work great for NYTimes.Com, but there appears to be no plan to extend it to other publishers.

:: Newsday already has implemented a protocol that requires visitors to subscribe in order to read anything more than the few paragraphs running in the clear on its site. The scheme, which has resulted in a 41.5% drop in site traffic since it debuted in the fall, has gained a whole 35 subscribers willing to pay $5 a week. This system might work for Newsday, which is giving free online access to anyone who subscribes to its print product or the cable services owned by it parent, CableVision. But the plan doesn’t seem the least bit extensible to other papers.

:: At least three dozen small- and medium-dailies around the country have deployed individual systems to sell some or all of their content for prices ranging from $1 a year to $400 a year. The response? On average, an amount equal to only 2.4% of the print subscriber base of the papers is paying for online content. Inasmuch as there is no common thread among the various solutions, there’s scant chance an industry standard will emerge.

While publishers in certain isolated markets may employ successfully Newsday-like plans to stanch the erosion of their print circulation, none of the schemes to date is helping turn interactive content into the potent new revenue stream it ought to be.

Had publishers agreed to build a unified pay system, they could have created a marketplace to syndicate articles among themselves and to target articles to readers according to their interests. Newspapers could have collected premium prices for ads served alongside the targeted content and might have been able to curb a bit of copyright poaching, too.

But the publishers never got it together. Now, they’ll be hanging separately.

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Don't Drink the Bong Water

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Published on Friday, October 23, 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle

A Tale of Two Supermen

by David Sirota

For better or worse, our American Idiocracy has come to rely on athletes as national pedagogues. Michael Jordan educated the country about commitment and just doing it. A.C. Green lectured us about sexual caution. Serena Williams and John McEnroe taught us what sportsmanship is - and is not. So when a single week like this one sees both the Justice Department back states' medical marijuana laws, and a Gallup poll show record-level support for pot legalization, we can look to two superjocks - Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps - for the key lesson about our absurd drug policy.

This Tale of Two Supermen began in February when Phelps, the gold-medal swimmer, was plastered all over national newspapers in a photo that showed him hitting a marijuana bong. USA Swimming suspended Phelps, Kellogg pulled its endorsement deal and the Associated Press sensationalized the incident as a national decision about whether heroes should "be perfect or flawed."

The alleged imperfection was Phelps' decision to quietly consume a substance that "poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol," as a redacted World Health Organization report states. That's a finding confirmed by almost every objective science-based analysis, including a landmark University of California study in 2006 showing "no association at all" between marijuana use and cancer.

Alcohol, by contrast, causes roughly 1 in 30 of the world's cancer cases, according to the International Journal of Cancer. And a new report by Cancer Epidemiology journal shows that even beer, seemingly the least potent drink, may increase the odds of developing tumors.

Which brings us to Armstrong. This month, the Tour de France champion who beat cancer inked a contract to hawk Anheuser-Busch's alcohol. That's right, less than a year after Phelps was crucified for merely smoking weed in private, few noticed or protested the planet's most famous cancer survivor becoming the public face of a possible carcinogen.

The data prove the answer to "why the double standard" isn't about health, and our culture proves it isn't about widespread allegiance to "Just Say No" abstinence. After all, whether through liquor commercials, wine magazines, beer-named stadiums or cocktail-drenched office parties, our society is constantly encouraging us to get our liquid high.

No, the double standard is about know-nothing statutes and attitudes promoting the recreational use of alcohol and banning the similar use of marijuana - all thanks to retrograde mythologies of post-'60s Americana. In our now-dominant backlash folklore, the patriots are the straight-laced Joe and Jane Sixpacks - and the Armstrongs who encourage their drinking. Meanwhile, the supposed evildoers are the pot-smoking Cheeches, Chongs and Phelpses, whose marijuana use allegedly underscores a dangerous hippieness.

Ergo, the moral of this Tale of Two Supermen: To end contradictions in narcotics policy and permit safer recreational drug choices, we have to first reject the outdated Silent-Majority-versus-counterculture iconography that defines so much of our politics. We must, in other words, replace caricatures with scientific facts and mature into something more than an Idiocracy.

We should all be able to imbibe - or inhale - to that.

Copyright 2009 Creators.com

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.