The revolution in news online and off
Topic: Media
Sure we hear a lot about the decline of old style media, but still it’s a pretty rare occasion that a daily newspaper shuts down. Yesterday’s closing of the Halifax Daily News by owners Transcontinental wasn’t necessarily a complete shock. Nor was the word that Transcon will team with Metro International SA and Torstar to roll out Canada’s seventh free morning tab, Metro Halifax, beginning on Thursday.
But the move does suggest a newspaper industry at least that will be willing to take increasingly radical moves to adapt to changing demographics and tougher competition, offline and on, for readers.
The 27-year-old Daily News had always been a very distant number two to the Chronicle Herald, and was losing serious money –reputedly in the millions- for some time. As Marc-Noel Ouellette, a senior vice-president of Transcontinental's newspaper group, told the Globe and Mail : “Our efforts within the traditional model of newspaper, which is to invest in the newsroom, cut costs and so on, were not enough to offset the losses.”
Transcontinental believes the Metro newspaper model, with its focus younger demographics and very short articles, has a good shot at working well in Halifax. It’s a regional hub and provincial capital with 375,000 people in its metropolitan area. It also is home to eight universities or collages and an estimated 38,000 students. Metro Halifax will have an initial distribution of about 25,000 copies daily, up from the 20,000 circ. of the Daily News.
The staffing numbers also tell the story. There are 92 jobs being eliminated at the Daily News, while the new Metro will be hiring about 20.
And while Transcon is taking a minority stake in the new venture, it is maintaining its other properties in the Halifax region, including four locally published weekly newspapers, a real estate guide, Transaction and its flyer distribution network, all of which apparently make money.
Together, these moves highlight several of the big trends not just in newspapers but the entire media business:
•Ever increasing segmentation and niche market focuses;
•The rise of a free-to-readers content;
•And seriously squeezed resources all round.
I’ve been thinking about these questions lately, in part because I’ve been asked to take part in a panel discussion on “how traditional media outlets are adapting to the electronic age.” This will be at The Canadian Institute’s Toronto Media Relations conference. It's on February 19-20, with this panel slated for early afternoon on the 20th.
The key questions the organizers sent out as thought starters:
• What are the emerging trends for online news?
• How do the online editions of newspapers differ?
• What is their readership?
• How do they develop their stories?
• Is there room for more content?
I’ll do some of my thinking about this out loud here over the next couple of posts.
Some of the trends, such as the complete shuttering of major market dailies, are a bit unnerving to journalists. And so is this one: Outsourcing reporting and editing to India.
AP reported in January that the Miami Herald was contracting out the copy editing and design in a weekly section of Broward County community news and other special advertising sections to a company called Mindworks, based in New Delhi. The report noted that Mindworks would, among other things, be responsible for monitoring reader comments posted to online stories. It was touted as a test, with the Herald unclear on how many if any jobs would be affected.
The AP report also noted that: “Earlier in December, The Sacramento Bee, also owned by the McClatchy Co., said it would outsource some of its advertising production work to India. And in May, news website pasadenanow.com was widely criticized after editors hired two reporters in India to cover the Los Angeles suburb.”
Another trend is the paperless newspaper. There's been a couple pop-up in smaller U.S. markets in recent months.
Exhibit A is likely the Cincinnati Post and its sister paper The Kentucky Post, which were shut down Dec. 31 by owners E. W. Scripps after 126 years of publication. But rather than abandon the Northern Kentucky market, in what may be a first for the U.S. newspaper industry, Scripps replaced the paper with a website: the Kypost.com. (Notably, Scripps hired just one of the 52 Post staff who were let go to be part of the new property).
Cincinnati may not be an important market, but it’s not a barren crossroads either. With a population of 330,000 it is considered the 56th largest U.S. city. The "Greater Cincinnati" coverage area boasts a population of over 2 million.
Now, there is still a daily in Cincinnati, the Enquirer, owned by Gannett, which owing to a 20 year old co-printing arrangement with Scripps had the more lucrative morning and Sunday markets locked up. That lack of maneuverability on when it could publish was a big part of the Post’s problem. It was part of the declining breed of afternoon dailies. A New York Times piece about the closures quotes Scripps as saying there were 614 afternoon dailies in 2006, compared with more than 1,450 in 1950. The combined circulations of the Cincinnati and Kentucky Posts had shrunk to 27,000 in 2006 from a peak of 275,000 in 1961.
Indeed, the Times says fewer than 10 U.S. cities still have two or more daily newspapers.
According a report in the MediaPost's online MediaDailyNews, the new KYPost.com site “will be hosted by WCPO-TV, a Scripps television property in Cincinnati, drawing heavily on the station's video news for online content. The ad-supported site will focus on breaking local news, traffic advisories, sports scores and schedules, and weather in northern Kentucky communities, including user-generated content.”
When you think about it, Canwest made a similar move when it shut down the print version of it’s alt daily targeted at young readers Dose, and kept it alive as dose.ca. Although, Dose never pretended to be an old-line newspaper, and at less than 2 years old hardly had a legacy like the Cincinnati papers.
We can expect to see more online-only properties serving audiences that in the past would have had multiple print options.
The most high profile example is the MinnPost.com, an online only newspaper covering happenings in the St. Paul-Minneapolis twin cities, which launched in November.
It’s not part of an established newspaper company, however. Indeed, it’s been created by the former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who is dissatisfied with how his former employer, McClatchy, is serving that market, the U.S.’s 14th largest.
In both cases, these sites are focusing mostly although not exclusively on local news and leaving the “comodified” national, international, business and national sports and entertainment to others, which is seen a s a fairly big departure for media outlets with major market, and even region hub markets, pretensions.
MinnPost.com has most of the sections and departments you’d see in a newspaper -Home, Region, World/Nation, Politics, Health/Science, Business, Arts, and Sports, as well as more online media staples like “Posts, Multimedia, Community Voice”. And it pays for content from both professional journalists (many of them laid off in recent years from the Minneapolis Star Tribune) and to a lesser extent the general public. Noted MediaPost’s online MediaDailyNews last fall: “MinnPost.com takes an unusually democratic approach to content creation; whereas other newspapers have tentatively embraced features like reader comments and other kinds of user-generated content, MinnPost.com actively seeks to recruit civilians as paid contributors -including competitors and open skeptics.”
In a sense though, while it is an online creature, MinnPost is also a real newspapers. Readers can download and print a PDF if they like.
The founder of MinnPost.com, Joel Kramer told MediaDailyNews he expects his site, which so far carries only display ads, to break even in about four years. And he predicts that this kind of local niche approach to online media “will only get bigger as regional newspapers contract financially and in terms of editorial content.”
It’s hard to argue with him.
Posted by sutter or mckenzie
at 10:12 AM EST