Printed Matters

I love it when the scholarly professorial types say stuff that I’ve been saying for a while. It makes me feel all educated and stuff.

Take this article, which was sent to me by a former j-school classmate.

“George Sylvie, associate professor in the School of Journalism, has some ideas – and they are not all pleasant to hear,” it starts. And they’re not all new, either.

Look at this bit:

That short-term, quarterly profit-oriented decision-making comes at a cost, Sylvie believes. Inevitably, those cuts show up in quality, circulation and newsroom morale. It sends a message to journalists that what they do, or what they consider essential, isn’t important.

Well, that’s true. I wrote about it four months ago, saying this:

This, I think, is the crux of the problem. It’s not that reporters hate the Web, or producing material for the web. It’s that news companies are cutting staff, expecting more work from those that are left, and throwing new skills into the mix, while at the same time cutting pay and benefits. I’d be a curmudgeon too!

Or how about this:

One of his recent studies, “One Product, Two Markets: How Geography Differentiates Online Newspaper Audiences,” co-authored with Iris Chyi, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism, suggests managers clearly understand the geographic market definitions for their online editions.

I mentioned these two types of visitors in an essay I wrote for my managers over four years ago. I called them “traffic” and “high-quality readership”, but the concepts are the same. I suggested that you should advertise differently to the two groups.

Traffic, though it is low-quality readership, is readership none the less. Traffic can be sold to non-local advertisers who want access to high volumes of non-local site visitors. You can identify these advertisers easily because they are the same ones who have high-quality websites and are actively promoting them….Your newspaper site can have a high-quality readership as well. The areas of the site that are used interactively by this readership should carry a high premium to advertisers, and can be sold in exactly the same way that experienced newspaper salespeople can sell their print readership.

I included a means for telling the two types of traffic apart. They are the ones (regularly) commenting on a website and participating in its forums or other avenues for user-generated content:

…only the people who wish to actually participate on your site are worth counting as readership, because they are the only ones who care about your site and the only ones you have a chance of getting reliable demographics from. You’ve not restricted them from accessing content, you’ve merely restricted them from adding their own content to the site. They have no reason to do this unless they want to participate in the site and, my friends, that is a reader, someone who will click around, see various things (including ads), get involved, and is not the one-hit wonder we characterized as traffic earlier on.

Then there’s Sylvie’s invocation of the Long Tail to explain concepts in newspaper archives:

In his latest study, “Developing an Online Newspaper Business Model,” [Sylvie] ties Chyi’s extensive work on online markets, as well as his and Chyi’s notion of long-distance online newspaper audiences, with Chris Anderson’s “Long Tailed Statistical Internet Model” to suggest a new, consumer-driven product unique to local online newspaper’s niche markets.

But I already made that link in an article I wrote for my Journalism Law and Ethics class a year ago. And I think I say it a little more clearly:

The new visitors came from search engines such as Google and Yahoo. News stories are chock full of keywords, the things search engine spiders like to eat up and digest and spit back at people who are searching for things online. So the old stories got hits from people located all over the world. In October 2004, Wired magazine managing editor Chris Anderson explained the business model at play in an article called The Long Tail…

OK, I’m tooting my own horn here a bit. But that’s not a bad record.

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