Saturday, December 21, 2013

Loosen the newsroom’s chokehold on the brand

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:

Any American editor will proudly tell you that the newsroom — and especially The Editor — is the sole custodian of the news(paper) brand, the true keeper of what the masthead is really meant to represent.
And if you ask anyone on the business side at most American publishing houses — especially in the advertising/sales department — you will likely hear a grudging acknowledgment of this odd reality, an admission that the newsroom does have the final, veto-proof say on the vast majority of issues involving the use of the brand.
There is a good reason for this unchallenged, even if incongruous, reality. For
decades, when newspaper ad departments were essentially order-takers, simply “booking” ads and incoming revenue, all that a news brand — such as The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or The Washington Post — stood for, was entirely the journalism, which until very recently was merely the physical newspaper. There was little need to “extend” the brand, to find new ways to use the masthead’s name — and more critically, the news brand’s relationship to customers — to generate other revenue. Over time, the editor and the newsroom’s grip on what the brand is, what it should be and also what it couldn’t be, became embedded in the very foundation of the Church and State demarcation. A
fait accompli, if you will.

Just how has this “newsroom owning the brand” manifested itself in most mainstream American newsrooms? In 2013 alone, we saw:
High profile, creative journalism experiences mostly run ad-free, with highly engaging acts of digital storytelling actually generating negative revenue for publishers (because even normal ads on the website were deliberately “designed out,” essentially turned off on these pages, instead of accommodating new kinds of sponsorships/ads).
Conversations about how a publisher’s advertising team and their non-news content-creators can engage and work with deep-pocketed brands wanting to become storytellers have stalled over some genuine and largely unproven newsroom fears that sponsored content/native advertising will be the ruin of their news brand.
Media critics, usually former editors/reporters who don’t have the burden of funding a newsroom — continue to feel rather well qualified, as de facto guardians of the news brand, to use their bully pulpits to publicly challenge any and all brand extensions, be it events, a themed cruise or any branded, paid-for service, including even the mere existence of shopping on news web sites.
Newsrooms and editors blithely citing “reader perception” issues, often without any actual and measurable evidence, to stonewall transparent and user-friendly ecommerce hyperlinks or, heaven forbid, serving contextual product ads.
Paywalls are owned by circulation when it comes to generating paying customers for journalism, yet newsrooms continue to insist on owning critical content levers that can be used by circulation to help drive conversion of “drive-by” audiences into paying audiences.
Now, wishfully, let us fast forward into 2014.
If publishers are to build sustainable business models through a combination of advertising dollars, reader revenue, and smart adjacent businesses, then one of the biggest stumbling blocks will be this prevailing, meek public acceptance of the newsroom’s primary ownership of the brand by those in product, advertising, circulation, marketing, public relations, and indeed by many publishers.
Just because a news “brand” was almost never leveraged for anything other than journalism for decades doesn’t entitle a newsroom to its veto-proof card, especially when such power currently comes without real accountability to help sustain the brand, not just the brand’s perceived reputation but also its financial health.
Don’t get me wrong. The complaints that editors — and many journalists — express, often mostly in private, about their “business” side — they don’t read or understand the product; they can’t seem to sell what news does well but always want something new; they only care about closing an ad buy and not about readers — aren’t entirely made up, even if they are way overdone.
But for the news brand to succeed and a publishing house to find sustainable business models for journalism (usually the single largest expense for a publisher), the brand has to be co-owned: by those who create journalism, those who can turn that journalism into a product, those who try and monetize that product, and those who support and promote that entire package. Editors, by virtue of their critical role as maestros of journalism, will always be first among equals in any publishing house that values honest, independent journalism. Still, the privileged status a newsroom enjoys ought to come with accountability and a responsibility to help sustain both journalism and the business of journalism.
For 2014, here are six specific suggestions for publishers to help loosen the newsroom’s default chokehold on the news brand, and try to more formally connect daily acts of journalism to the long-term business of funding that journalism: 
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/loosen-the-newsrooms-chokehold-on-the-brand/ 


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