For years, editors and press critics have lamented the
decline of editors’ influence in newsrooms. Several of us, including Geneva
Overholser, Jim Naughton and me in my 2002 ASNE presidential address, have
said we need national leadership to address the business incursions into the editorial
process.
September presented editors with two stories that I contend
should serve as a new rallying point for editors intent on playing something
more than a subordinate role in crafting a future for newsrooms and
journalists: One argues for a common platform for newspaper Web sites as a means to fight obsolescence; the other is a reminder that newspaper sites might not always want to depend on outside organizations like Google to aggregate their work.
In my view, both stories have been underplayed, including on
Poynter.org. I fear editors do not appreciate the impact and opportunity
presented by both. If you are already debating, planning and gaming these
issues in your newsroom and boardroom, then the only advice I have for you is
that you take the debate to the national stage. If you have not tuned in yet, you need
to engage.
The first story was an Editor & Publisher piece boldly labeled “Winning Online — A Manifesto,” written by my longtime friend and current
Arizona State University colleague, Tom Mohr.With brutal candor, Mohr argues that newspapers are going to lose
the online battle and the communications war unless we find a way to put
together a national, industry-wide consortium and migrate onto common platforms
for our newspaper-dot-com Web sites.
I will not reiterate all of Mohr’s
arguments, but essentially he claims that “local-only” is an indefensible
position online. Mohr says that’s because a local-only position doesn’t give
newspapers the scale they need to compete. The bands almost strike up in a
cavalry march when he writes that only by joining forces and moving into common
platforms can newspapers gain the scale necessary to wield bargaining power against
the search portals and major online competitors.
The worst thing editors can do is
ignore Mohr’s article. The newspaper industry and newsrooms need a healthy
debate about whether we can feasibly construct a common platform for all our newspapers,
and we need editors at the forefront of that debate. There will be some crucial
and complex questions surrounding local and national control. The first
tendency will be to run from them. That’s the wrong tendency. Editors need to
be the authors of the solutions.
My former boss at McClatchy, the
charismatic Gary Pruitt, made a wonderful argument earlier this year when he was
quoted by CJR Daily as saying:
When the
Steelers faced off against the Seahawks in Super Bowl XL last month, 90.7
million people [tuned] in, television’s best day of the year. But on that Sunday — indeed, on an average Sunday in 2004-2005 — about 124 million people read
the Sunday newspaper. Look at it this way: We won Super Sunday, 12-9.
I agree
with Pruitt’s basic point that newspapers are still the most crucial and
effective delivery vehicle to our society, but the online world is beating us
up. The Super Bowl illustration clearly
says “scale matters,” but we have to take advantage of that scale. Pruitt’s contention
about our audiences could become operational and powerful for advertisers and
consumers if we could figure out a way to aggregate those readers and deliver
localized and national content to them on a coordinated, common online
platform.
I guarantee
you this concept is being discussed in the hallowed halls of CEO-land. But this
idea is too big, too important and too news-based for newsroom leaders to hide
in the shadows. All the alphabet organizations — from ASNE to APME to NAA — to all
the UNITY organizations and the important individual industry leaders must
weigh in on this one. It could well be the path to the future, and news folk
have to play.
I am sure
a lot of editors and publishers quiver at cooperation because they remember
past struggles like the battle over Standard Advertising Units, the failed New
Century Network, and countless other stops and starts at industry problem
solving. A new consortium would have to emphasize a unity that other editors have
not, but I think now three things are different:
1) Urgency. Readership is
declining, advertising is declining and obvious options are declining. We need
to do something fast.
2) The industry often fretted about anti-trust concerns
and even worried about being seen as a bully. The predictions of our death are
such that those concerns seem quaint.
3) Those past efforts were primarily based
on advertising; this effort needs to leverage our content in order to protect
our business model. That’s why it is so important editors become a part of this
unified effort.
The
second important article that has not seemed to get enough attention from editors
was a Sept. 18 Associated Press article out of Belgium. Here’s the lead: “A Belgian court has ordered Internet
search company Google Inc. to stop publishing content from Belgian newspapers
without permission or without fees, a Belgian press association said Monday.”
From conversations with editors I
know, many are discussing whether or not being a part of search engines, blogs
and other news sites is the optimal decision from an economic and journalistic
standpoint. There are two issues here:
1.)The first is that editors seem to accept as an article of
faith that the search engines’ initial link to his or her news organization’s story is
beneficial to the news organization. We have historically been so thrilled our
newspaper’s name is mentioned and so delighted that traffic is coming to us, we
have overlooked the possibility that there might be far more money in selling the
rights to our content or in banding together with other newspapers to increase
the value of our content. Sophisticated analysis is
required to see if we make more money from selling the traffic sent to us by
those external sites or if we could successfully monetize exclusivity. And yes, editors have to be willing to use
nasty terms like monetize because the ugly truth is that, increasingly, consumer
research shows audiences consider Google, Yahoo! and MSN their primary sources
of news.
2.)The second and perhaps even more troublesome issue is that
the caching of news costs the news organizations money by enabling users to
bypass paid archives — and to reduce page views that would otherwise be
generated for advertisers on the news organization’s site as opposed to the
cached site. We need to constantly assert our ownership of content, and a consortium could give us the
leverage to exert our power and our rights. Our bargaining power must increase.
These important
discussions should be front and center in your newsroom, of course, but I am
convinced we also have to take that discussion national.Editors and publishers have to share data
discoveries, traffic numbers and hypotheses. And it is crucial that editors have
a strong voice at that table to get the most impact and the most
economic value from the information our excellent storytellers gather.
Editors
must be on top of these dramatic changes, and editors must be integral to the
debates about the directions the industry chooses.
Tim J. McGuire is the Frank Russell Chair for the
business of journalism at the WalterCronkiteSchool of Journalism and Mass Communication at ArizonaStateUniversity.He
is the former editor and senior vice president of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and a former president of the
American Society of Newspaper Editors.
