The New York City media tends to get a little excited when
covering one of their own. We’ve seen
that recently in the coverage of the dismissal of Executive Editor Jill
Abramson, the first female editor of the New York Times. I think Lewis DVorkin at Forbes online had
the right response: download the leaked Times Innovation Report and re-read
“The Kingdom and the Power” by Gay Talese, in which he quotes a NYT executive
from a generation ago: most of our staff are “cathedral-builders, not
stonecutters.” The coverage of Ms.
Abramson’s departure suggests that sentiment is still in the air at the
newspaper.
Much more important than the termination, whatever the
editor’s legitimate grievances, the Innovation document suggests that the paper
has much deeper problems than egos in the newsroom. The NYT deserves credit for the clarity and
honesty of this report. Having read and
written my share of these white papers, I was astonished that the paper did not
whitewash issues and shone a rare light on the interaction between the business
and newsroom sides. The report is
brutally honest about the dangers posed by fast-rising competitors, including
Vox Media, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others. The report also acknowledges that website and
news app traffic are declining. The authors of this paper understand the need
for audience development, unlocking the power of data, and the importance of
management agility.
The Times’ digital solutions appear to be focused, specific
and probably late to the game. I was a
little surprised to read about a renewed effort to make better use of “evergreen”
content through tagging, metadata and structured data. By their count, the paper has 14,723,933
articles in its archives, dating back to 1851.
The need for more structured data has been in the publishing air for
decades, spearheaded by IDEAlliance and others and embraced by companies
including Time Inc. Media companies have
known that this is money in the bank as well as a way to deepen and personalize
content. It makes good sense for the
report to recommend organizing the content by relevance rather than data. For example, articles about art and culture
have a long shelf life. What an amazing
perspective this company is sitting on.
The authors come out in favor of the “stonecutters,” suggesting
that the paper’s staff needs to push back against perfectionists and focus on
“minimal viable products;” not everything has to be perfect. The report notes
that The Verge has redesigned its home page 53 times in the last year. It also points out that Gawker “plundered” a
NYT story about “12 Years a Slave” and milked it endlessly. The Times tends to publish an article and
forget it. Their digital rivals carve
out content in chunks and spoon feed an audience.
The management advice is familiar: reward entrepreneurs;
kill off mediocre efforts; and focus on projects than are “replicable” rather
than one-offs. The gutsiest and most
challenging part of the report is about Unbolting the Newsroom, which is an
effort to build an audience-based collaboration between the business side and
the newsroom, focused on reader experience.
There is still too much talk of tradition and turf and the church and
state separation. The report suggests appointing evangelists who can help push
the newsroom to embrace their digital futures.
This seems to be like a Super Committee. The report says this with a straight face.
I think this well-charted effort might be a fantasy, and not
for a lack of trying. Lewis DVorkin,
quoting from the report, puts his finger on the contradictions the NYT faces.
“We still have a large and vital advertising arm that should be walled
off.” No company can win in the digital
arena with this kind of restraint. It
seems a little surprising, given the recommendations of the leaked Innovation
report, that the Times would appoint a new Executive Editor with little digital
experience.
I’ve been thinking about the impending Time Inc. spin-off
from Time Warner and how this company is trying to get out from under its
legacy media shadow. The New York Times
might find some lessons here. Even
though Time Inc. might have been, by some measures, overstaffed with recent
C-level staff lacking in digital acumen, its fundamentals are solid. Time Inc. embraced early on the idea of
structured data and generating income from its archives. I know first-hand that this wasn’t always considered
a high priority in-house (or in the publishing community for that matter) but
the technical staff waged this battle and won. Deep tagging of content significantly
increases its value, especially as screens proliferate and advertisers seek
more specific and personalized solutions.
I’ve noted before that I think Time Inc. has had a somewhat
muscular definition of “church and state” separation that was not always
consistent with the fast-changing demands of the digital business. That issue has been rendered moot by the new
reporting structures at the company.
That Time magazine and Sports Illustrated ran a small Verizon ad on the
cover of a recent issue suggests that this is a new beginning. As a long-time editor, I’m not appalled at
this development.
One gets the sense that a more streamlined Time Inc. will be
able to move faster. The recent purchase
of Cozi, a free home-management app and website for meal-planning, calendars, and
shopping, will likely be the first of many.
It has 10 million users and gives Time Inc. a leg up in the productivity
category.
When I read the Times Innovation report, I thought that the
company had a lot of digital catching up to do. When I read a report by
Internet guru Mary Meeker about Internet Trends, delivered at the Code
Conference recently, I realized that the newspaper and the rest of us better
hurry up. Not surprisingly, print is
almost absent from this report but Meeker notes that “print remains
over-indexed,” which means that there is a disproportionate relationship
between the amount of advertising spent on print and the actual time consumers
spend with print (19% of total advertising vs. 5% of consumer time spent). The metrics for radio, TV, and the Internet
are much closer and more consistent, except for mobile. Consumers spend 20% of
their media time on mobile and this platform gets only 4% of the
advertising. Meeker says this gap
represents a $30 billion opportunity for mobile in the USA.
I’ve heard the word “disruption” in media circles so often
that these days it seems quite tame. One
could infer from Meeker’s numbers that advertisers are spending too much on
print, though the print guy in me would say that the “over-index” exists
because of the intrinsic value of print (engagement etc.). I’m not sure how long I can hold out on this. As display advertising gives way to more
emphasis on programmatic sales, this print “over-index” will surely get more
scrutiny.
If Meeker is correct, the Brave New World that we’ve been
ploughing through for the last two decades will become even more interesting or
frightening, depending on what chair one is sitting in. Please don’t believe the hockey stick
predictions for mobile growth, but do think about the fact that now there are
almost as many mobile phone in the world as televisions. And in 2013, 25% of
web usage was via mobile.
Just as I’m getting used to multi-purpose apps, Meeker tells
me to pay attention to apps as a service layer that only opens when they have
something to say to me that is informed by context, location sensors, history
of use and predictive consumption. Perhaps
someone will remind me to buy “Mother Jones” magazine.
Meeker indicates that industry verticals are likely to
change given the marriage of content, community, and commerce. She cites Houzz, a site that brings together
photos, professional consumers, and products in an ecosystem devoted to home
renovation and design. This sounds like
a magazine to me.
The NYT Innovation report and the Meeker perspective, though
different in intent, reside at distinct ends of a digital and existential
divide. But she has a lot to say to and
about content companies. According to
her research, two-thirds of Digital Universal Content is created by consumers
in the form of videos, social media, and image sharing. That’s staggering.
As the authors note in their report, the NYT is perfectly
positioned to experiment with collections comprised of videos and articles,
such in the heavily-reported sex-trafficking, building at the same time a new
frame around old content. The newspaper might learn from medium.com, founded by
Evan Williams, ex-chairman of Twitter, which is built around specific content
verticals written by people knowledgeable in specific fields (I
contribute). This could be a good way to
extend the brand in a managed, professional way. Their fine professional
journalists can’t do everything.
Or buy the company.
Lots of them.
The path to a digital future is probably not through the
committee room door.
(The Mary Meeker presentation can be found at recode.net).
No comments:
Post a Comment