How can legacy publishers supplement falling print revenues?

themediabriefing reporting:

"Most publishers are getting into native advertising because brands believe well written content that carries their message will cut through the cacophony of digital advertising, and publishers can charge a premium prices, as opposed to traditional display advertising, where excess inventory continues to put downward pressure on CPMs and returns. To compete in this hot space, major publishers are creating content studios staffed with crack design and editorial staff to create truly premium native advertising content. The New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journaland broadcaster CNN have all launched content studios."http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/how-can-legacy-publishers-supplement-falling-print-revenues

64 Ways To Think About a News Homepage

Medium reporting:

By news homepage, I mean any way for a user to first encounter content. A push notification could very well be the new news homepage. (Related: Ways to think about push notifications.) An app is a news homepage.An article or a newsletter is a news homepage. If you listen to the news, Overcast or Soundcloud or the iTunes store may be your homepage. YouTube can be your homepage. Homepage, to me, is simply a shorthand version for any of these things. You can substitute any of the words I mentioned for homepage below.
There are lots of ways to think about a news homepage. We’ll start with the basics. 1. You can have a list of stories curated by a person, arranged by topic, the way the New York Times homepage does...64. A news story that explains everything you see on a graph, chart, or other data viz. You click on each portion for a full explanation, in words — in case you prefer words to pictures.

https://medium.com/thelist/64-ways-to-think-about-a-news-homepage-223c01952d26

Pew report looks at collaborations by news organizations

Poynter reporting:
A new report from Pew Research Center, "Journalism Partnerships, A New Era of Interest," provides short case studies of five efforts by local news organizations to collaborate with other news organizations.
As traditional news organizations tighten their belts and emerging news start ups embrace lean operations, pooling resources is becoming more appealing even among former competitors.

The report looks at cases where news organizations joined forces to co-produce or share news coverage, where a small start up gained exposure by sharing stories with a larger traditional news partner, as well as two partnerships that helped local public broadcast outlets develop local news muscle.
http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/news/2014/12/pew-report-looks-collaborations-news-organizations

Membership focus helps Times Newspapers make first operating profit since 2001

The MediaBriefing reporting:
News UK subsidiary Times Newspapers, which runs the Times and Sunday Times newspapers, recorded an operating profit of £1.7 million for the financial year ending June 30 2014, as the newspapers steadily grew their digital subscriber bases and shifted more of their readers into long-term membership relationships.
The operating profit is the first for the two newspapers since 2001, and follows losses of £6 million in 2013 and £70 million in 2009, before the newspapers began charging for all online content.
News UK refused to reveal pre-tax profit for the newspapers and that operating figure doesn't mean the newspapers are yet sustainable on their own. At a press event in London, News UK chief marketing officer Chris Duncan said the swing from loss to profit reflected the impact of significant investment in areas such as unified subscription handling and publishing, as well as journalism.

http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/membership-focus-helps-times-newspapers-make-first-profit-since-2001

Economist Espresso: A new daily shot of news

digiday reporting:
The Economist is the latest to join the crusade against information overload. On Thursday the British news and business publication launched The Economist Espresso, its first daily edition. As its name would suggest, Espresso is designed to complement the core weekly print magazine with a daily shot of news (it’s also a reference to the Economist’s London neighborhood that has a shared history with coffee-house culture). It’s available as an iOS and Android smartphone app or as an email.

Espresso is self-contained, with five original 150-word stories a day that are meant to give readers a sense of accomplishment, which makes it different from other email newsletters that are link collections, said Tom Standage, The Economist’s digital editor.
“One of the reasons the weekly Economist has done well is, you feel you’re completing it.” Similarly, with Espresso, he said, “We’re trying to give you a sense of being out ahead of the news. To tell you what’s going to happen and tell you what to think about it.”
The Espresso launch reflects a few trends percolating among news publishers as they try to grow the digital side of their business. Some media outlets have moved to disaggregate the main news product into smaller slices, as The New York Times has done with its NYT Now, Opinion and Cooking apps, to attract new paying customers. With Espresso, The Economist is taking a freemium approach to pricing. The product is free to existing subscribers and $4 a month to nonsubscribers. Non-paying readers can access one full article per day.

http://digiday.com/publishers/economists-answer-content-stream-overload/

Let’s get over the whole 'newspapers are dying' thing

the guardian reporting:
...Fourthly, they are tilting their revenue balance away from advertising and towards content. The FT actually makes most of its money from content, essentially flipping the modern newspaper business model on its head. But this has benefits on the advertising side as well. The greater behavioural and demographic insight that comes with membership plans and paywalls helps newspapers move away from empty calories like slideshow page views towards more valuable engagement metrics like time spent.

Advertisement

Finally, along with dozens of other industries, they recognise the increasing importance of live events. The Guardian is a pioneer in this category – or at least it will be when its event space opens in 2016. Membership access to TED-style forums, celebrity speakers, music concerts and Mediterranean cruises is one way to broaden the subscription experience and connect like-minded readers.
So let’s get over the whole “newspapers are dying” thing. They’re certainly moving in lots of creative new directions (and eventually they may ascend out of physical world altogether - holograms, maybe?), but they’re definitely not going gently into that good night...http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2014/nov/07/newspapers-not-dying-buzzfeed-new-york-times?CMP=new_1194

Newspapers are just ...old

baekdal reporting:
...
t's not that newspapers are a particularly bad product. It's not that you don't cover important stories. And it's not that people no longer need or want to get news.
It's just that the way you do it... feels old. It's like you are not in touch with what people expect from a media company in the connected world.
Let me give you a typical example: Here is a link to an article from the Washington Post about the explosion at NASA of the Antares rocket. Like so many other news articles, it illustrates a fundamental disconnect from the kind of reporting you would see from digital native media.
First of all, the article has a print focus, in which the journalist at no point takes into account that online we have both images and videos....
Not to mention this part:

The White House said President Obama was briefed on the explosion. The crew of the space station reportedly witnessed the accident on a video feed.

So did Obama have something interesting to say about it? And what did the crew of ISS have to say about it? Why is Washington Post providing us with information that contains no insight?...
...
You don't have a future if what you write are articles like the one from the Washington Post, articles that have no distinction and is merely delivering information. Not only because you would then have no distinction between your articles and thousands of others, but also because those types of articles will be fully automated in the future.
Computers already have the capabilities, but we still have a problem with the original data being inaccessible. But that too is changing.
Newspapers have a Blackberry moment. It's not that people don't need news, and it's not really that the newspapers posts specifically bad articles. It's just that the way it's done feels out of touch, and people are increasingly seeking other options.
Most newspapers feel like they are not really present. There is a huge disconnect between how you report the news, and how people feel when they read it. It's like the newspapers are living in some kind of 3rd party world. They are never really connected to either the reader or the story.
This is not something you solve by changing the format or creating a new design. This is something you solve by changing the way you communicate. When people today read an article about something, they need to feel that the journalist has an interest in this story. They need to feel that the story is more than just 'a job that had to be done' for the sake of 'a newspaper company focusing on their business metrics'...
https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/newspapers-are-just-old/?utm_source=Baekdal+List&utm_campaign=633730123a-EMAIL-UPDATE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a820ca719e-633730123a-358411673

The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer are investing €3 million in Dutch startup Blendle

NiemanLab reporting:
The New York Times Company and German publisher Axel Springer are collectively investing €3 million ($3.7 million) in Blendle, a Dutch news startup where readers pay by the article, Blendle announced Sunday.
Blendle said it will use the Series A funding to expand to additional European countries beyond the Netherlands over the next two years. In an email, Blendle cofounder Alexander Klöpping wouldn’t elaborate on the company’s expansion plans, saying it “all depends on in which countries publishers are most excited.” Klöpping declined to say how much each company was investing, only that the total was €3 million. Axel Springer, which is making the investment through its venture arm Axel Springer Digital Ventures, also wouldn’t say how much it’s investing. The Times didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Blendle launched publicly in May, and the site has more than 130,000 registered users. Publishers set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the other 30 percent.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/the-new-york-times-co-and-axel-springer-are-investing-e3-million-in-dutch-startup-blendle/

News and Innovation. But what is the Question?

baekdal reporting:

Q: What are the top 3 areas in which newspaper publishers should innovate in the digital space?

...
Well, I feel the word innovation is misleading in this context. It implies that newspapers can just focus on a specific thing (like mobile), and then everything will be fine. We all know it won't.
Real innovation doesn't work that way. Real innovation is about solving a problem for a specific group of people in a specific situation.
Nike, for instance, innovates by inventing shoes, clothes and apps that allow athletes to run faster, with less injuries, in greater comfort, all of which can be measured and analyzed to further improve and tweak their performance.
This is where the challenge is for most newspapers. The traditional model of a random package of daily news didn't have a target audience. It was just targeted anyone, in any situation.
So, step one is to identify your target for innovation. And once you know that, what to innovate suddenly becomes clear as day because you will know what the problem is....
This is the challenged that newspapers face. To innovate you first need to know what the question is.
Innovation is not about mobile, tablets, apps, aggregation, responsive designs, listicles and many other things. It's about understanding what the question is, and then innovate to find an answer to that problem.
The newspaper industry will find that there are a thousand different questions with an equal amount of answers. It all depends on what you decide to focus on.
https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/news-and-innovation-but-what-is-the-question/?utm_source=Baekdal+List&utm_campaign=b0369ce678-EMAIL-UPDATE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a820ca719e-b0369ce678-358411673

The Washington Post launches a national weekly print edition

The Washington Post will begin offering a weekly print edition featuring the best national and international news from The Post. The 24-page, color tabloid publication will include local advertising and Washington Post content printed and distributed by partner newspapers through a separate subscription as an added benefit to subscribers.
The weekly publication will complement partners’ daily newspapers with a selection of The Washington Post’s best journalism, including coverage of politics, policy, national and world events, lifestyle, and the arts along with a wide range of commentary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2014/10/17/the-washington-post-launches-a-national-weekly-edition/

California Sunday Magazine has a solution for how to find readers: Pay newspapers for them

NiemanLab reporting:
California Sunday Magazine, which launched conceptually in January and physically earlier this month, was beloved before its first issue was even printed. The magazine, a project of Douglas McGray’s, is available both in print and online, on tablet and mobile, and aims to tell beautiful, reported stories about the American West, Latin America, and Asia.
...California Sunday grew out of McGray’s other project, Pop-Up Magazine, a popular performance journalism series that’s meant to feel like a live magazine. What started as a fun project among friends quickly grew, selling out theaters and drawing big-name performers. The experience convinced McGray that there was a market in California for locally-grown media that doesn’t feel East Coast-centric...
...But beyond elegant design and talented writers, what sets California Sunday apart from the digital magazine crowd is its distribution model. In its first weekend, the print magazine reached 400,000 Californians at home as an insert in the Sunday paper. Just like an advertiser would, the magazine paid the newspapers — the Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle — to include the print edition with Sunday’s delivery...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/california-sunday-magazine-has-a-solution-for-how-to-find-readers-pay-newspapers-for-them/

Jeff Bezos and the Post Don't Know the Future of Media, But Are Preparing for It Anyway

Mashable reporting:
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post just more than a year ago, expectations of a digital renaissance for the paper became assumptions. What would one of the most visionary business minds of the Internet age do with something as stodgy and inflexible as a newspaper?
The answer, it turns out, is far less exciting than some had hoped.
There have been no grand redesigns or big-name hires — one of its stars, Ezra Klein, left the paper to start Vox.com. There have been no plans to immediately end the print edition. Instead, during a recent visit to WPNYC in a nondescript office on the west side of Manhattan, the Post gave a look at a relatively unsexy piece of internal software with the distinctly prosaic name PageBuilder.

PageBuilder does what its name implies, allowing journalists to build pages to feature content. Like Storify on steroids, it is built to pull in a wide variety of content and craft it into whatever format is desired — a content management system for the open-source era.
...
Digitally, the Post is competitive. Its August monthly unique visitors are up more than 50% compared to the same time last year to just under 40 million, according to comScore. That beats out rivals like The Los Angeles Times (27.3 million) and the paywalled Wall Street Journal (22.9 million), while gaining on The New York Times (49.9 million).
The growth is encouraging, but the Post is still suffering from the same fate as every other newspaper. Prakash claimed that the company brought in record digital revenue last year, but that has not been able to keep up with print declines. The paper's most recent public earnings report since Bezos bought it, in August 2013, showed an overall dip in revenue and continued losses.
...Innovation has mostly come in the way of new blogs and a breaking news team. Software developers are now embedded within the newsroom to connect the tech and editorial sides. That system has yielded a custom storytelling tool, a new blog focused on photography and The Most, which organizes the top stories online by media outlet.
...Dan Gillmor, a professor at the Arizona State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said that the newspaper model is not fixable. Media companies that survive will need to change into something almost entirely different....
http://mashable.com/2014/10/05/wapo/

Are newspapers doomed? It depends

Newsosaur reporting:
...
So, yes, some newspapers will fail, as they run out of relevance, readers and revenues. Since the Great Recession, we have lost such titles as the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Tucson Citizen and the Manassas (VA) News & Messenger. But newspaper failures, as demonstrated by the demise in 1978 of the estimable Chicago Daily News, are not new news. 

So, where does that leave us? Hopeful but worried. Here’s why: 

The future of newspapers – or, more precisely, local news ventures that may or may not involve putting ink to paper – will depend on whether the people running them are up to the considerable challenge of creatively disrupting their businesses before an ever-growing phalanx of digital competitors destroy what’s left of the still-enviable commercial might and journalistic value of their enterprises. 

Unfortunately, the industry’s track record is not good. In the two decades since the Internet burst into common consciousness, the leaders of the newspaper industry have failed to recognize the need for profound change, much less manifested the grit to go for it. Rearranging the deck chairs by shuffling newspapers into free-standing entities won’t, in and of itself, change the troubling trajectory of the newly liberated publishing units of News Corp., Tribune, Scripps, Journal Communications or Gannett.  
....
As painstakingly (and painfully) detailed here, the weekday circulation of newspapers fell by 47% in the last 10 years to the point that only a quarter of the nation’s households take a daily newspaper. Print and digital advertising sales fell by 55% in a decade. In spite of aggressive efforts by most publishers to increase the fees they collect from print and digital readers to offset the ad decline, the industry’s total revenues slid 35% in the last 10 years, dropping the average pre-tax profits of publicly held publishers by 37%. 
...http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/08/are-newspapers-doomed-it-depends.html

Gannett exec: Goal of reshuffled newsrooms is to invest ‘fewest resources necessary in production

Poynter reporting:
As five Gannett newspapers institute sweeping changes across their newsrooms, the goal is to better attract an audience of 25- to 45-year-olds, a Gannett executive told Poynter via phone.
That means reaching readers beyond print.
Freeing up resources for quality reporting that’s responsive to online audiences will allow the newspapers to be “each community’s top source of investigative journalism, of public-service journalism,” said Kate Marymont, Gannett’s vice president for news. How are these newsrooms able to double down on reporting? “We’re going to invest the fewest resources necessary in production,” she said....
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/261916/gannett-exec-goal-of-reshuffled-newsrooms-is-to-invest-fewest-resources-necessary-in-production/

The newsonomics of how the news industry will be tested in 2014

Ken Doctor reporting:
Our 2014 stage is set, and oh what a marvelous assortment of characters will be walking across it. Many of these characters — the Bezoses, Henrys, Kushners, Omidyars, and Buffetts — are new non-newsies thrusting themselves into the news world, unexpectedly and in short order. The competition they face is unprecedented, as many media — news and entertainment — converge on the same models of digital advertising and revenue from readers, viewers, and listeners. There’s only so much money to go around, and the losers here are likely to outnumber the winners.
...

Braveheart meets newsies

The future is staring down the news industry, and the business doesn’t have an eternity of blinks left. Best practice strategies and their execution — the core of what I cover — are the only way forward, but this year has surfaced the intangible of what I’ve called “outrageous confidence.” Jeff Bezos’ buying of the Post (and the Grahams’ selling) startled people in the press worldwide and crystallized the sense that a new generation of owners may seem a real future in the news business. In 2013, all the new owners — Buffett and his growing BH Media, John Henry and his Globe, Bezos and his Post — have been consumed with getting-to-know-events and rearranging the furniture.
The test for 2014: Will these owners beat their chests, open their wallets, and most importantly fund and support new products, new kinds of customer engagement and new thinking not invented here in Newspaperland? Will they not settle for incremental small experiments but, while staying within journalistic values, make some big new bets?

The Last Man Standing theory of local media

Here’s our most Darwinian theme. The theory: As first newspaper print and then local broadcast advertising continue to winnow down, there just won’t be enough left to support the number of local media news outlets we have today. Digital advertising and even TV paywalls could help with funding. If you want to be running a local newsroom of significant size in 2020, be prepared to be one of only two or three that may then exist. It’s a only-the-paranoid way of looking at the Blade Runner news future, but it’s also, unfortunately, a logical extrapolation of the last half-decade.
....The test for 2014: As we witness newspapers trying to do video, TV stations trying to write stories, and public radio aspiring to be text/audio/video producers, who will get it right first? Don’t expect the definitive “right” within a year, but 2014 is a pivotal year to get legs up on the competition.

The back pages

Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in.

Mobility, mobility, mobility

There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money.
The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/the-newsonomics-of-how-the-news-industry-will-be-tested-in-2014/

Day-old news won’t cut it in print anymore

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:

If you asked me what are the three main challenges of any newspaper
company today, my answer would be:
first, to evolve from mono-media companies to multimedia information engines;
second, to integrate all your editorial and business resources into an open multimedia newsroom;
and third, to rethink and reinvent the editorial models of your print products in this new multimedia landscape.
All of them are unavoidable. The first one must be led by owners, CEOs, and publishers. The second one needs the understanding and full support of top editors and general managers. And the third one, the most crucial one, the participation and involvement of all journalists.
Bosses can rule on vision, strategy, integration, and media architecture — but only with all your journalists aboard your company will be able to develop new editorial models.
Why? Because most of your editors, writers, reporters, and visual journalists came to your company when the print newspaper had an editorial model that for centuries nobody challenged. Newspaper newsrooms were, and always will be, the “core” of our news business. They were the best to find, select, write, edit, and design news and stories that your readers couldn’t find anywhere else.
For this reason, we presented ourselves as “newspapers of record.” Something that, today, we aren’t anymore. As The New York Times says: “We
don’t record the news. We find the news.” A training manual for new Financial Times journalists is very clear on this point: “News reporters do two things. They find the news and they write news. The first is hugely more important.”
In the past, every 24 hours, our newsrooms were able to produce a print newspaper with exclusive content, and readers needed to pay for our daily selection of the most relevant and interesting news and stories of the day before.
But that model has crashed. It’s dead and doesn’t work anymore. “Yesterday’s newspapers” are worthless. 
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/day-old-news-wont-cut-it-in-print-anymore/ 

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/ 

Ken Doctor reporting:
Face it, print advertising is becoming a niche, even if it’s a big one. Through the end of last year, newspapers’ print ad revenues were down 60 percent since the height of 2005, to $18.9 billion from $47.4 billion in the U.S. That’s almost a $30 billion difference in seven years. This year’s decline should roughly match last year’s of 9 percent, and many publishers project about the same loss for 2014. If those numbers hold, that means by the end of 2015, print ad revenues will total $15.6 billion — only around $4 billion more than where reader revenues may then come in.

The continued decline of print advertising is the very dark cloud hanging over the news industry and the darkening ones looming over the magazine industry. While digital advertising overtook print advertising in 2012 in the U.S. and globally, the accelerated pace of the print to digital movement is clear and fairly unwavering.

The test for 2014: How can publishers mitigate their print losses, pulling from an expanding toolbox of sponsored sections, events packages, custom publishing, and more to minimize as much as possible a near-universal negative number?
Digital advertising separates the pack
Last year, U.S. newspapers were up 4 percent in digital advertising, to a total of 11 percent of revenue. This year’s reports indicate that growth could well be less, closer to flattish, with many publishers struggling near the zero point. Yet some, which we’ll investigate in early 2014, are in double-digits. That’s a combination of executing on some of the ad buzzwords of the time — content marketing, native ads — but also on much less glamorous and written-about work like audience extension and yield optimization.

The test for 2014: With print ads spiraling downward, will the failure to execute on a strong and diversified digital ad strategy doom news organizations to even deeper cuts in staff and product?
...Mobility, mobility, mobility
There’s simply no way to over-emphasize the centrality of getting smartphone and tablet experiences right for news customers. This year, we’ve seen newspaper access move from around 25 to 35 percent mobile access, with TV stations in a similar range. Startup news sites, significantly, report 50 percent or more of their views coming from mobile. As importantly, mobile advertising in the U.S. will double to $9.6 billion from $4.4 billion. Google will take about half of that, Facebook 15 percent, with only a couple of dozen publishers are taking in serious money.

The test for 2014: If news publishers don’t make 2014 the year of mobile-first content and sales development, they have slim hopes of growing digital ad revenue over the next several years.
http://newsonomics.com/the-newsonomics-of-how-the-news-industry-will-be-tested-in-2014/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newsonomics+%28Newsonomics%29

Struggling industry throttles newspaper metrics

Ken Doctor reporting:
Unable to arrest years of declining ad sales and sliding print circulation, two key trade groups representing the newspaper industry have done the next best thing: 

They effectively have stopped reporting on the metrics that make it possible to measure – and, therefore, understand and manage – the industry’s ongoing challenges. 
Earlier this year, the Newspaper Association of America, an industry-supported trade organization, decided to stop producing the quarterly revenue reports that have charted the advertising slump that has carved aggregate industry revenues from a record $49.4 billion to $22.3 billion in 2012.
As reported here, my analysis shows that ad sales slipped about 5.5% in the first six months of the year. Assuming the industry does no better or worse in the last half of the year, it is on track to deliver approximately $21 billion in ad sales for all of 2013. 
The NAA, which publishes sales records dating to 1950 here, promises to release a once-a-year revenue report scheduled to debut in March, 2014. 
http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2013/10/struggling-industry-throttles-newspaper.html 

The newsonomics of outrageous confidence (of newspapers)

Ken Doctor reporting:
...
Jeff Bezos toured his new Post before closing the sale and wowed a group of very professional skeptics. Orange County Register president Eric Spitz, part of Aaron Kushner’s ownership group, gave a long interview extolling growth and investment. Then John Henry penned an open letter to the good citizens of Boston and beyond, laying out in fine detail why he bought The Boston Globe. (It’s been a good week for Henry.)
Each of these new owners said a number of intriguing things — sentiments and strategies that we can pick over, puncture, and praise. They all surface elements essential to success. Money? Check. A longer-term view? Check. A respect for the long-time community roles of newspapers? Check. A call for new ideas? Check.
But there’s one other commodity that stands out amid them all — the commodity of confidence. In light of financial downturn of the industry, we could even call it outrageous confidence.
...Confidence in the very basis of their businesses — what news media uniquely do for their communities, local or national — has been shaken so much by revenue loss. Publishers — and their workforces who have sensed the fear, uncertainty, and doubt disabling the spirit of the industry — mistook revenue loss (largely in advertising and largely caused by hurricane forces beyond their control) for brand and community value loss.

The huge audience is growing again. 

Paywalls have proven that readers will pay for digital access.

...

We’re at the beginning of a new age of storytelling...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/10/the-newsonomics-of-outrageous-confidence/