"The state of the industry," Martin Kaiser pondered aloud, searching for the right opening line for his statements on that topic. "How about, ‘Confusing?’ "
While that assessment has merit, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editor joined Washington Post local editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman in a general session Friday morning at the APSE convention that brought clarity to a lot of the issues facing newspapers in general and sports departments in particular.
The buzz word of the discussion, which was moderated by incoming APSE president Garry Howard of the Journal Sentinel, was content – focusing on making it indispensible, sharing it between news outlets to an unprecedented degree, explaining to consumers its value and the expense required to obtain it, and most importantly, monetizing it.
Our deadline for this assignment? Yesterday.
"The future is now," Shribman said. "It’s not going to get any more urgent than it is on Friday, June 26."
At the APSE convention in Minneapolis last year, Shribman sounded a prescient warning about the industry’s financial struggles, making an educated guess that at least one major metro newspaper would no longer print seven days per week.
Not only did that come to fruition – most notably in Detroit – but the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed their doors, layoffs and furloughs have rippled through the country, and the books at even legendary institutions continue to bleed red (Ruiz said the Post lost $53 million last quarter).
But all three panelists were in agreement that sports editors must set aside negativity – "We do a wonderful job wallowing in our own mud," said Garcia-Ruiz, the Post’s former sports editor – and be leaders who inspire their staffs to acquire 21st century reporting skills and take chances with creative approaches to coverage.
"Focus on the work, instead of Romenesko," said Kaiser. "Since we don’t have the solutions, maybe there’s greater freedom than ever before.
"Empower your staff to come in with ideas, and be leaders and don’t get caught up in the ‘can’t’ mentality. Find some joy in this. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, so enjoy what you do – take chances, bring ideas to your bosses."
Here’s a breakdown of some of the key topics:
Bring a focus to your content.
"The key word for all of us is indispensible," Garcia-Ruiz said.
Do a self-evaluation of the content you produce, and identify areas where a concentration of effort would pay dividends. Brand your writers as experts. And consider realigning columnists as specialists in a certain field, or on a certain program or franchise.
"Be the straw that stirs the drink – set the agenda, be the conversation spark," Shribman said.
On the flip side, take a serious look at the space and resources you dedicate to information that is readily available through any number of other news outlets.
"Agate is a great example of some of the general stuff we need to get away from," Garcia-Ruiz said. "People can get general info everywhere."
Shribman compared the sports agate situation to the demise or decline in daily stock market listings in newspapers, which was considered unthinkable at the time but largely has not been missed.
"If I had said that to a bunch of financial editors four years ago, to get rid of financial agate, they would have said, ‘You’re nuts,’ " Shribman said. "Financial agate is a commodity; you can get it anywhere. And so is sports agate.
However, he noted: "I love the sports agate and I’m not ready to get rid of it right now."
Along those same lines, Shribman was critical of the value of Associated Press editorial copy in an era when it is widely available through other news sources such as Yahoo! Sports.
"It’s like a Coach bag, a Brooks Brothers suit – the quality is unquestionable but both are expensive," he said. "While we admire the quality of the Associated Press’ work – it’s unassailingly indispensible – it’s too expensive, it’s imperialistic and it’s forgotten its roots."
News organizations must figure out how to use each other’s content for the betterment of all. "There’s no more urgent task than to figure out a way to share content," said Shribman, whose paper has developed a healthy relationship with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
That task is already being undertaken by Roy Hewitt of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who gave a presentation Thursday evening about the Web site under development by his company that will enable papers to form a cooperative. He has commitments from upwards of 50 newspapers and aims to start up the site this fall, with a modest, one-time fee (to be determined) to set up servers with adequate capacity.
Hewitt has based this model after a cooperative service between eight Ohio papers that has been in existence for two years.
Garcia-Ruiz said that within the last year he proposed internally forming a medium that would package NFL content from local markets, which would make it attractive to national advertisers.
"Traditionally, we haven’t worked that way, across markets," he said. "I floated (the idea) to our ad director and he came up with 15 reasons why it wouldn’t work. We need to address why we can’t make money off the huge audience we have."
Kaiser pointed out that even small steps would be a big improvement – such as providing prominent links to online coverage from the visiting market on a Major League Baseball game story, to keep up with the competition. "It’s so much easier on mlb.com," he said.
Monetize online content. "There’s nothing to lose by trying to get people to pay for content," Kaiser said.
The Journal Sentinel’s Packers Insider pay site (www.jsonline.com/packerinsider/login) is an exception in the industry among daily newspaper websites, with a healthy customer base that pays $6.95 per month or $44.95 per year for "insider" content from its staff of knowledgeable writers.
The panelists agreed that the time is right for others to follow their lead, and to think big.
"The future is paid, niche content, terrific niche content, for a lot of money," said Garcia-Ruiz, who hinted at several initiatives in the works at the Post. "We’re going to have a lot fewer readers, but they’re going to pay a lot more to read us.
"We need to identify projects that will get us those numbers, and to monetize in the millions, not the thousands."
In the past, these attempts have failed. But Garcia-Ruiz said newspapers erred in their approach, in essence banishing table scraps to the web that wouldn’t fit in print.
"We’re a lot smarter about what we would put behind a pay wall now," he said.
Open new revenue streams. "I’m a big believer in the old clich� about being leaders, not managers," Garcia-Ruiz said. "Stop trying to catch up – come up with the next thing."
The classified market has collapsed and isn’t coming back, Garcia-Ruiz said, and newspapers missed the boat on taking ownership of online aggregating services.
Instead of lamenting the shortcomings of the past, though, look for opportunities that capitalize on existing resources but present them in a non-traditional way.
"As an industry, newspapers got lazy in the ’90s," Kaiser said. "Back in the ’70s, when there was competition, we were trying things, we were innovative, life or death, and it really drove newsrooms. … Take chances, be risky, stir things up."
For instance, the Post held a conference at its auditorium with its NFL writers, drawing 400 people for a free, one-hour discussion that helped develop a lucrative advertising relationship with Bank of America.
Another area that newspapers should exploit sooner rather than later: the mobile market, which is taking fire with the new iPhone but still lags behind Europe and Asia developmentally.
"The Internet is not the last thing," Shribman said. "It was the next thing for your predecessors. It’s like if we said radio was the last thing. The web is so yesterday. We just don’t know what tomorrow is."
Emphasize to your readers the expense of running a quality newsgathering operation. "We have to be evangelistic about our costs and needs," said Shribman, who lives by example. He wouldn’t undergo heart surgery a few years back until his surgeon showed him a paid receipt for a subscription, and wouldn’t run a neighbor’s letter to the editor until she signed up for delivery.
"Once you explain to people how this model works – or isn’t working – they understand," he said.
This can be done in more subtle ways as well. The Journal Sentinel recently held a five-part series off its Web site until it was completed in the print edition, so as to encourage single-copy sales and ward off "freeloaders." The paper explained to readers that it did so to emphasize the high cost of investigate journalism.
Newspapers also must underscore their credibility in a world where Wikipedia has become a trusted source for some. Shribman noted that during a recent Google search on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the third entry he turned up was a slick-looking biography commissioned by a white supremacist group.
"We have to start to educate not only sports consumers but all consumers to be much more critical, give value to certain sources over others," he said. "All information is not created equal."
Twitter and Facebook have also presented challenges because athletes can communicate their message directly to the public. But Garcia-Ruiz believes the market will differentiate the quality of information.
"I think young people understand "best" – our coverage instead of Twitter or NFL.com," Garcia-Ruiz said. "We’re in much more danger due to aggregators than new media."
As Kaiser noted in his opening comments, there haven’t proven to be any easy solutions to the problems facing newspapers these days. But there are a lot of promising possibilities, and the panelists believe it’ll be a trial and error process to see what sticks.
"Too many people are looking for the magic bullet," Garcia-Ruiz said. "I think it’s going to be a lot of different things … that will slowly get us out of this and turn it around."
