News Blog

A slick site hasn't connected with its local audience.

(Credit: Washington Post)

It isn't exactly breaking new ground to say many newspapers are struggling. Nor is it breaking new ground to argue that newspapers have to cover the heck out of their local communities--so-called hyperlocalism--in order to win back readers and advertisers.

But what do you do when hyperlocalism doesn't work? The Wall Street Journal Wednesday has a (troubling, if you're in the newspaper business) look at The Washington Post's experiment in hyperlocalism, LoudounExtra.com. The site, despite a slick design and plenty of news about the goings on in Loudoun, an affluent Virginia county, has been a disappointment since it was launched last July (though the article stops short of saying by what measurement the site has been a disappointment).

Seems a few things have gone wrong, according to the Journal. To start, the people building the Post's local site didn't get out into the community enough. They were outsiders trying to cater to a local audience, and they haven't made strong connections to community groups. This isn't a new problem for small newspapers, of course. It's rare that the people covering the town council meeting are actually from that town. More likely, it's a young journalist trying to get some decent clips so they can get the heck out of town and move on to a better job.

There have been other issues: The Post hasn't firmly established basic rules like linking policies between the main WashingtonPost.com site and the localized Web site. Loudoun County is a large area with various communities, so it's difficult to buttonhole residents into a particular interest. And The Washington Post parent company has been reluctant to allow community-building efforts such as an application that could have funneled content from sites such as Flickr and YouTube to LoudounExtra.com.

Does that mean hyperlocalism isn't worth the effort? Not at all. The Post still plans at least one other local news site. Beyond the Post, other more intensely localized efforts, such as a University of Kansas sports site spun out of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, have been more successful, according to the Journal.

With some changes and better community outreach, LoudounExtra.com could still be successful. But its struggles so far indicate that bringing outsiders in to do a fancy Web site isn't good enough. You need real community connections, because locals can smell a carpetbagger a mile away.

We're in day five of the tech community's obsession with Psystar, that odd little company in Miami that claims to be selling Apple-like computers. There are still plenty of questions about Psystar. Shoot, we still don't even know for certain if Psystar is legitimate.

But there's one thing we know for sure: Citizen journalism has played a major role in ferreting out the Psystar story. And with that involvement, we're getting a better understanding of how mainstream newspapers can work with folks who aren't trying to make a living off gathering the news but are interested in telling the world what they know.

Do you care about your neighborhood as much as this computer?

(Credit: Psystar)

Can you imagine if newspapers could generate the enthusiasm for their stories that tech sites managed to do for their Psystar coverage? The potential for that enthusiasm is there. Newspapers, not even the online versions of them, just aren't doing a very good job of tapping it.

Think Mac fans are crazy-passionate? Try a San Francisco parent worried about what school his or her kid will get into through the city's baffling school lottery system. Think open-source programmers like to go into the weeds in their technical discussions? Try a Red Sox or Yankees fan in late September.

I bring this up out of love, not hate. I'm a newspaper junkie. My first jobs out of college were in small dailies on the police beat, and part of me still romanticizes that work. (OK, so it's the part of me that probably doesn't remember the lousy pay and waiting for a cop quote at a crime scene in a New England snowstorm.) Point is, newspapers have a lot to learn from tech news sites.

Imagine if most newspaper Web sites had community bloggers--a blogger for every tight-knit neighborhood or small town, hitting all the local school news, the restaurant comings and goings, even the local precinct's police blotter. These blogs could be neighborhood forums, meeting places for the nitty-gritty news that regular newspaper reporters probably don't want to deal with. They could even be platforms for localized classified ads.

A pipe dream? I don't think so. Not even Craigslist, which has done so much to damage newspaper revenues, can offer that kind of hyper-local advertising. No, this isn't going to save print newspapers. But it could help keep them alive in an online form.

Does that mean the role of the traditional reporter goes away? Not at all. But those full-timers are supplemented by people who are going to know an awful lot more about what's going on their neighborhood than a reporter who parachutes in for a story. Newspaper executives, in fact, call it hyper-localism. Unfortunately, few of them are doing it very well.

Of course, the citizen journalism model is far from perfect. Earlier this week, Gizmodo sent its Miami readers after Psystar. They came back with photos showing (aha!) that Psystar wasn't at the address it claimed. There was only one problem: they went to the wrong address.

Now in fairness to the Gizmodo readers, Psystar has changed the address it lists at least four times by my colleague Tom Krazit's count. And if it weren't for those readers at Gizmodo and other sites CNET like News.com (many of whom also dug up interesting business records), along with some good reporting at outlets like The Guardian, the many red flags about Psystar wouldn't have been raised so quickly.

Sure, plenty of old-time journalists go on tantrums about citizen journalism ("How dare they?! This is a profession!! You have to study at the Columbia School of Journalism first!"). On the contrary, I think it's forward-thinking. What Gizmodo did was gave their readers a stake in the news; they became participants, not just followers.

As anyone who's worked the crime beat at a newspaper can tell you, it's not the police who tell you what really happened, it's the nosy neighbors. True, the nosy neighbors (or well-intentioned tech site readers) can be wrong from time to time. That's a risk, and that's why the world still needs editors.

But then again, the way things are going at many newspapers, going out of business is also a risk.

We've all known for a while now that things aren't looking exactly rosy for the newspaper industry (for an excellent account of the state of the newspaper world read this New Yorker article).

Now, Editor & Publisher has figures that are enough to make any newspaper mogul cry.

Total print advertising revenue last year dropped 9.4 percent to $42 billion from the year before, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That's the biggest decrease since the NAA began measuring ad expenditures in 1950.

Total advertising revenue, including online revenue, decreased 7.9 percent in 2007 from the year before.

The New York Times has finally given up on the Web-subscription model, announcing Monday that the newspaper's online site will no longer charge for any content.

The decision comes two years after The Times began charging $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for Internet access to premium content, such as pieces by columnists and archived stories, according to a story that appeared in the paper.

The Times said that the subscription service met targets, acquiring 227,000 paying subscribers and generating $10 million a year.

Executives at the newspaper seemed to suggest in The Times' story that the reason for scratching the paid service is that the company's projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.

With the Times opting out of paid subscriptions, it is believed that there are no other large general news providers offering a subscription Web service. The Wall Street Journal is the only major newspaper in the country still charging for content, and parent company Dow Jones is studying whether to drop its subscription service as well.

In what might be a boon to researchers, historians and librarians, The Times also announced that the newspaper is making available online the paper's archived stories from 1987 to the present. In addition, the company is also planning to make available stories from the years 1851 to 1922.

I was just reading through my daily news feeds when I came across this interesting little nugget of information from Techdirt.

According to the site, the Vancouver Sun gave away free compilations of songs from artists on the Nettwerk record label in an attempt to appeal to readers and make the newspaper a bit more popular. So, after reading this, I can't help but wonder--can free music downloads save newspapers? I think they can.

The Internet, as we all know, has taken a toll on the venerable newspaper industry--so we'd understand that print media folks would be a little bit sensitive when their writers crack jokes about it. But, as it turns out, they might be more thin-skinned than we thought. Humor writer Elliot Kalan, who writes a column for the free daily newspaper New York Metro, might've just gotten fired over it.

Kalan, who is also a segment producer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show, wrote a column in the publication's August 3 edition entitled "Newspapers: Information's Horse & Buggy, in which he asserted that "Nobody reads newspapers anymore...As this very copy of Metro shows, the only way to get most people to read a newspaper is to literally force it into their hands." Ouch. A potshot not only to the print media as a whole, but also to the phenomenon of free dailies that are ungracefully waved in your face like giant newsprint mosquitoes as soon as you emerge from the dank underworld of New York City's subways.

New York magazine's Web site reported that the powers that be over at Metro, which also runs Boston and Philadelphia editions, weren't too happy, and sacked Kalan immediately.

Betting pool time: Which blog will hire him now?

(Via Jossip)

Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.

A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com." The representative did point out, however, that the Post had made an error: Sanders' article said that the number of TimesSelect subscribers had fallen from 224,000 in April to slightly over 221,000 in June. According to the Times, TimesSelect subscriber numbers have actually risen from 220,090 in April to 224,580 in June.

The demise of TimesSelect, which has been in operation since 2005 and puts archived content as well as popular opinion pieces behind a subscription wall, has been rumored for some time among New York media circles. Adding fuel to the fire is News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. When speaking about his decision to purchase Wall Street Journal company Dow Jones, he suggested that the Journal might free up its own premium content.

New-media pundits have typically been very critical of TimesSelect, considering it a disadvantage for the legendary publication to be locking up so much content, particularly opinion pieces by well-known writers. "By cutting stars like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich off from the rest of the Internet," Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider commented in July, "the Times has diminished its (and their) influence--and helped create room for upstarts like The Huffington Post to step in."

Currently, TimesSelect subscribers pay $7.95 per month, or $49.95 per year, for access to op-ed columnists, archives dating back to 1851, extra multimedia features, and occasional access to the Sunday paper's articles before they are made available for free or in print.

No. 2 overall & online

No. 3 overall

More advertising dollars are flowing to the Internet, in a trend that started years ago. Advertising Age has come out with its annual look at the United States top-100 advertising spenders. There are few surprises, but it's confirmation of what you've probably been seeing and expecting. Internet ads now account for 5.5 percent of total spending by the top 100 advertisers in the U.S. That adds up to nearly $10 billion, and the Internet's about even with radio and ahead of outdoor.

What are the biggest losers? TV's share of ad spending has been dropping annually for 16 years, after it peaked at nearly 70 percent. TV now accounts for less than 59 percent of American ad revenue. Newspapers had a serious drop of revenue in the 1960s, then slowly began to recover, only to fall off a cliff following 2000. That year papers collected 16 percent of all ad revenue; in 2006 it was less than 12 percent. Since 1970, magazine ad revenue has been fairly flat, but that means not keeping ahead of inflation. Glossy print still is No. 2 in total ad dollars garnered. That leaves the Internet as the only clear winner among major ad media.

The big advertising spender is Proctor & Gamble, which leads at $4.9 billion. Second and third are AT&T with slightly more than $3.3 billion and General Motors with just less than $3.3 billion. These are followed by Time Warner, Verizon Communications and Ford Motor.

Other carmakers on the list are Toyota Motor at No. 12, DaimlerChrysler at No. 14, Honda Motor at No. 21 and Nissan Motor at No. 23--all spending well more than $1 billion annually. Other big spenders are No. 12 Sony at nearly $2 billion and No. 15 Sprint Nextel at more than $1.7 billion.

Tech brands? Microsoft is No. 45, Dell is No. 47 and Hewlett-Packard is No. 51. Each company spends less than $1 billion. Apple ranks No. 89, while Philips Electronics barely makes the list at No. 98.

Of the big 100 spenders, Vonage spent the most online in 2006 with $185 million, more than a third of its total amount spent. The No. 2 online spender was AT&T at nearly $170 million. They were followed by Dell, Walt Disney and Verizon.

TV is still leading the Internet by more than $50 billion. Anybody predicting the Internet and TV ad dollar curves will ever intersect? That'll depend on whether TV retains control of the most prized copyrighted material or whether Internet sites begin to compete with live sports and original programming with big-name stars.