Yesterday I interviewed journalism professor George Sylvie, to get his thoughts on the future of newspapers and newspaper websites for a magazine article I’m writing. Professor Sylvie first came to my attention a couple of weeks ago, when I posted a commentary on a newspaper article written about him, and then he commented on my post. Because the interview was long and involved, and I don’t quite know what to make of it all yet, and because it’s full of interesting tidbits, I’m posting the full transcript here.
How long have you been in the news business?
I graduated from college in ‘76, so off and on for 30 years, I guess – mostly off. If you put in schooling, doctoral degrees and that sort of thing. Actually my full-time experience is about a dozen years. The rest of it has been either as an academic or consultant. All my practical experience has been at one paper, which doesn’t exist anymore. I used to be an editor at the Shreveport, LA Journal. That was an afternoon paper, and as you know afternoon papers are sort of dinosaurs in themselves now. The last time I actually worked in the newsroom was 1990.
Have you been a professor since then?
Pretty much. Through my research I keep in touch with a lot of folks, of course, visiting and talking with people and doing studies on this that and the other. My research keeps me attuned to things, because that’s what I’m interested in. But I haven’t been a practicing journalist for close to 20 years.
How did you develop your interest in news websites?
Through some students of mine, who were interested way back in the beginning – well, not the beginning – when newspapers started to develop their own websites. I’d say since the mid-1990s, as an extension of newspaper and media markets – marketing and distribution, particularly of newspapers. I had a couple of students who were interested in the web, and how it appealed to people, what was its impact on other media. I got hooked, and I’ve been looking at that sort of thing ever since. So I have to put it at my students, really, because I was primarily a management person – we call it organizational behaviour. My experience as an editor influenced my initial line of research into media management.
I had a particular really bright student from Taiwan who was interested in the global aspect of the web and what that did to markets for newspapers, particularly local newspapers, and how it influenced newspapers to make themselves over and appeal to those markets. Back then it was mostly just newspapers shoveling things online. And our thesis back then, and still to this day remains, that online papers are not – or were not, they’re just now being recognized – places to start unique content, because they were sort of looked at as an afterthought.
Anyway, interest blossomed from there, looking at online audiences, business models, and things of that nature.
Tell me about your thesis regarding the Long Tail, and how that relates to local website advertising.
What that boils down to is this stream of research that this student I was telling you about – who is now, by the way, one of my colleagues here at the University of Texas, his name is Chyi – we had discovered back in the ’90s that the markets for online newspapers were, because of the global nature of the technology, divided into local and long-distance. The long-distance market was something that people weren’t paying attention to because they didn’t know much about it, plus newspapers were, and still are, local media, oriented toward emphasizing, marketing, and selling that aspect.
But we realized newspapers have two markets – the advertising market and the intellectual or informational market. And what online technology did was sort of strip newspapers involuntarily of that dual market and make it into four markets. You have the local informational and advertising markets, that’s two, and then you get the long-distance. The long-distance markets were being neglected, to the detriment of the newspapers, who really didn’t know what they had, and weren’t putting any kind of monies into researching how to maximize or take advantage of those markets. Lo and behold, that idea has become conventional wisdom. Now you see newspapers, especially in this economy, trying to do all they can to move away from their traditional print-based technology into the online world and create hybrid models.
Since you’ve got that long-distance market, and since not much is known about it, you’re now seeing some of the smarter newspapers, usually the ones with deeper pockets, looking into that market – which is not necessarily global, but may be regional in nature – to see exactly why those people, those users, are coming to the local newspaper. Why are they looking at that newspaper as it pertains to information or advertising as opposed to other media? And what we’re seeing is that the technology introduces a whole new public that newspapers hadn’t realized were potentially psychologically connected. Because the newspapers never gave them much thought, the opportunities are unknown. Newspapers have been by and large local media, news being primarily a local phenomenon. And because newspapers are not set up to understand a regional market, there’s a whole lot of ignorance out there about what these people are looking for and why they’re coming to these local online sites.
These people in this long-distance market are actually part of the Long Tail that Chris Anderson and others have already brought to the forefront in terms of the discussion on media audiences or online audiences. There are lots of potential opportunities for niche publications or search engine optimization efforts by newspapers, because newspapers really represent not just sources of news, but sources of all kinds of local information because of the way they’re structured and the nature of news organizations. They develop beats – experts, if you will, in the guise of reporters, photographers, and editors. Newpapers need to take advantage of that potential market. It would be silly and folly not to, especially in this day and age when markets are disappearing right and left, particularly local news markets, because of the tradition of journalism to cover issues that don’t necessarily make things as interesting to most people as they should be.
So, in practical terms, what’s the single most important thing that newspapers should be doing on their websites?
Right now I would say looking at who’s coming to their websites and find out why they are coming, what they are looking for, and what they can do to make people stay longer. We’ve been helped in this by the folks at [research company] Belden Associates out of Dallas, looking at actual data from certain newspapers. We first theorized that this long-distance audience was technically or theoretically global, but it’s really not, unless you’re talking about the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the London Guardian. It’s really people within a radius of maybe 100 to 150 miles.
A lot of this boils down to how newspapers are measuring these folks. Belden’s contention, and I think this may be borne out by some of the analysis we’re working on now, is that newspapers don’t use particularly good ways to measure the usage. They rely on server logs, ComScore and Neilson when some of these methods are not really conducive to understanding why people are there. There’s a fine line between a user of a site and an actual consumer of the site. How much are they consuming? Exactly what are the psychological and economic reasons they come to that site and what do they glean it? They may hit your sports section, but you really don’t know what the heck they’re looking for without doing some in-depth questioning. Our contention is that newspapers really don’t do that very well, because they’re not set up to do it. Most of them are run locally and autonomously, and corporate budgets – and most newspapers are now links in a corporate chain – don’t extend to empowering or enabling newspapers to know what those people are there for.
My contention, in that paper you read [PDF], is that there are ways you can understand and exploit that audience. Newspapers should be really trying to grasp how people are consuming the newspaper as opposed to just buying, or logging in, or registering, or whatever.
It’s my contention that people use newspapers in a lot of various contexts. I allude in the paper to how, if you go into a bookstore, and there’s a Starbucks in the bookstore, people sit in that Starbucks for a couple of hours reading. They could be reading your paper, but there’s no paper there for them to read, unless they want to buy the paper. Or there are times when I go into a grocery store, and I’m sure you do the same, and think, “Is this thing I’m buying the best that I can buy? I sure would like to know if there is someplace locally where I can get this cheaper.” Or I may want to know something about that product. Most people, if they have the time, are going to turn to a magazine. If they don’t have the time, they might turn to a newspaper to get some kind of additional media data on shopping, or reading, or browsing. Or if they’re in a doctor’s office they’re going to read the paper.
When you combine all these opportunities for a newspaper to approach people with partnerships at local brick-and-mortar retailers and local mobile cellular companies, you can make the newspaper available when the person wants it, on the person’s own terms, usually when they’re searching. The search function is something that newspapers are not really adept at exploiting, because they don’t understand search. Newspapers have forever worked on a “if you build it, they will come” platform, and they’re not used to understanding search mentality, like say a librarian is, or somebody in the informational sciences.
Newspapers not only have to take advantage of these long-distance audiences, but also take advantage of the other day-to-day potential uses that a newspaper can have for most people. The problem now is that newspapers look at themselves only as news. They don’t look at themselves as sources of information about lifestyle- or consumer-related issues. Newspapers have to change the way they think about content if they’re going to survive online, but also if they’re going to survive in terms of competing with all the sources of information out there nowadays. And that’s the problem: when you enter the online arena you’re competing with millions and millions of other sites, theoretically.
Practically, if you can establish a brand that’s built on trust, you can also establish a brand that’s built on usability. I think you’re going to see the smarter newspapers try more and more to do that. You see some of that with the creation of little niche sites, soccer-mom sites, things of that nature. But that’s more a cable or magazine model. And if you look at cable and magazines, there are too many of them, they’re popping up every day, and their life cycle is not long enough, because people change and their interests advance or they get into different cycles of their lives. So the reason you see the number one sites being those of search engines is that people now are directing or calling the shots. If you’re going to adapt to people being in control, you have to adapt to how people search and under what conditions they look for information. Especially local information.
Long answer to your question, but newspapers really need to try to understand more so what people are looking for, as opposed to building it and then expecting people to come to it. Newspapers are doing a lot of crappy research. They’re doing a lot of focus groups, they’re doing a lot of surveys, but they’re not really spending the money it takes to understand why people use their products, and especially why young people don’t use their products.
This is a particularly bad time for newspapers. Do you agree?
In America, yeah. In the rest of the world, probably not. Circulation is growing in a lot of places. And newspapers are still making money, let’s not forget that. But the world’s in a recession, the West is really deep in it, and newspapers and other media are usually the first ones to get hurt and the last ones to get out of the impact of the recession. But yeah, I agree, it’s a bad time.
What’s your prognosis? Will there be a lot of papers moving strictly to the web? What’s going to happen?
Well, you see what happened in Detroit, and with the Gatehouse papers, and now what’s happening with a lot of other individual papers. They are cutting back. One reason they’re cutting back, Tim, is they realize that some of these people either are trained to do one thing that’s not necessary – and I’m talking about journalists, my own profession – and they haven’t been able to retrain themselves and make themselves more valuable to the company. Newspapers also understand that they have a lot of people, and could outsource a lot of this stuff. The only people that really add value to the product are the journalists and even some of those are not of great value because people don’t want just news anymore. That’s why you’re seeing newspapers, particularly in the West and more developed parts of the world, having this crisis of confidence. Their audience has taken things over and the newspapers find themselves trying to catch up.
You’re going to see a lot of papers continue to experiment. What’s human nature when people have to change, Tim, is that they’re not going to change overnight. They’re going to go in bits and pieces and fits and starts. There will be times when things look drastic. If I was in Detroit I would say, yeah, I agree with what Detroit has done, because they are in a very bad economic market. It’s a microcosm of the microcosm. It’s probably one of the worst areas to be in recession-wise.
And you’re going to see other papers follow the lead of the more innovative papers, and cut back on Monday circulation, go to three or four days in print, try to become more visual, more original, more interactive in their online presentation. Maybe start hiring more young people – although I don’t think that’s the solution, trying to hire young people after they fire the older, more veteran, more knowledgeable people. I think that’s a mistake. But who said newspapers were smart.
But you’re going to see people continue to tinker. I suspect short-term your going to see a lot of papers emulate some of these little tinkering moves. And if the economy really gets worse in, say, from March to July, you’ll see even more layoffs. People are afraid to change until they see a point where if they don’t do something they’re going to get lost. So right now everybody’s holding their breath and tinkering. If things get much worse by July you’re going to see a lot more papers go to shorter staffs, shorter publication cycles, more niche publications. Nobody’s going to go totally online until the big papers of the world do. Let’s say Detroit was one tree, and when another tree falls in Dallas, and another in, say, Miami or Chicago, then you’ll see a lot of little trees start to fall and go all-digital.
But if things improve – and that’s the problem, we don’t know. It’s all tied to these papers being part of corporations which have gone into mountains and mountains of debt to make profit. And the debt situation has caught up with the general economic state of lending these days. So when their debts come calling and they can’t get any more loans to refinance the debt – well, that’s why you’re seeing a lot of this. If that situation improves you won’t see that much change. But if that situation gets worse, then you’re going to see a lot more drastic cuts. I think it’s that simple. People look to see if the economy is getting worse, and tighten more if it is. Same thing in my own family: if the economy starts to get bad we start to save a lot more.
And these papers, because they refuse to put the money into how to make money – how to understand what people want – are going to continue to cut back on capital expenditures and staffing. Until they get right down to the bone, and then what are they going to do? And I don’t know when they’re going to get to the bone.
Do you agree that papers should start investing heavily in the web, and sort of leave the print side alone? Reverse what they’re doing now?
No. Sure, invest more heavily than they’ve been investing, but not to the total exclusion of the print product, no. Because right now, the print product is still making money. If your revenues were 60 to 70 per cent and trending toward all-online, then yeah. But the revenues aren’t doing that. Not yet. When things gather momentum, then you want to do something like that. But it would be stupid to do that now, because you don’t know if things are going to get that bad yet. You know they’re going to get bad, but the question is how bad.
If people start getting most of their local news online, then yes. They’re already getting most of their national and international news online rather than in newspapers. We just heard that from the Pew Center. That is one trend that I would worry about if I were at USA Today or the New York Times. But I’m talking local papers – and smaller papers really aren’t doing that badly. It’s the big ones and the regional ones. They’re the ones that have a very heterogeneous audience, which is harder to gauge.
What do you think needs to happn before online revenues start to match print revenues?
Ha…I don’t know, Tim!
Is it just a matter of time?
I think it’s a matter of time, but I also think people are going to be waiting to see what Murdoch does, what the Washington Post does. They’re really going to be looking to see what the Tribune does, because the Tribune is right in the thick of it right now, with everything happening to them, especially with the situation in Los Angeles and Chicago and all the debt and all that, yada yada.
My basic philosophy of life is that people aren’t brave, and they’re certainly not brave when it comes to using their money. They tend to look toward others for clues. If McClatchy starts pulling the plug on papers – because McClatchy is the new Knight Ridder, right? – or if the New York Times starts to cut back significantly, or if the Washington Post, which is sort of like the darling in the multimedia world now, starts cutting back…some of these papers, like the Post, have already gone to converged newsrooms, and that, in a sense, is probably where a lot of newspapers need to start going. I think what you’ll see is a lot of people merging the newsrooms and telling people they have to take video or learn HTML or Flash or something.
The pebble has started rolling with Detroit and these other papers. If the economy gets worse, then the pebble will pick up more weight and mass. But if the economy stabilizes, or doesn’t look as dire, or, depending on the size of this Obama bailout, if people start spending money again, then things will level. A lot of it just depends on what people are in the mood to do with any kind of money that’s going to come their way. And it’s anybody’s ball game right now. That’s the scary thing. I don’t think newspapers are in control of their own destinies. They sort of missed the chance to do that. But at the same time, it never hurts to start.
But you wouldn’t do it in a radical way?
No. This economy is on a watershed that could get worse, or get better. You have to give that some time to ascertain where it’s going to go. And I think in this first quarter of the year, we’ll find out. If things are worse in March, then the impetus will be toward the back-up plans, what’s the Plan B if this next quarter is even worse. People are very short-term oriented in our society anyway. You could talk to John Morton or somebody like that and they may say, oh no, history shows this that and the other. But we haven’t had a recession like this in 70 years. And the perception is let’s see what Obama can do before we push the panic button. So call me in three months.
This is what got newspapers in trouble from the start: we don’t have long-term mentatlities any more. Being publicly traded as many of these companies are, they can’t afford…although, if their stocks go down low enough, you might see a lot of restructuring and a lot of merging. One strategy out of this mess is that certain companies probably need to merge. Do you want to see Lee newspapers go under? Do you want to see [ Dean Singleton's company] MediaNews go under, or all those large to medium companies? Probably not, so you may see some mergers there. Hopefully you’ll see something maybe a little bit smarter than what McClatchy did because of the situation with the lending. But you never know.
Earlier you mentioned that the one thing that newspapers could do better would be to measure more precisely what their consumers are doing. How, precisely, do you do that?
Newspapers have always known more about their audience than any other medium. That’s why newspapers were basically a license to print money for so many years – and still are, to a certain extent. But at the same time, newspapers – because they were monopolies or developed into monopolies in the 60s and 70s – have played fast and loose, gotten complacent, with undertanding the habit of reading and how people have become disenchanted with government, disenchanted with institutions of all kinds. And for too many years, they just assumed that this gravy train was just going to keep chugging along.
And here comes the Internet to change the game on them, and change the control, giving consumers more of a choice, giving consumers this giant library that allows them to choose what they want, even in the sense of news. Which is why I think most people, online at least, get more of their news from Yahoo and MSN than from the newspapers. What that has done is make newspapers lose touch with their communities. And communities have changed too. Newspapers don’t distribute much in their suburban areas, like they used to, because they’re trying to shed readers. They don’t get in touch with these bedroom communities that are dependent on a smaller paper, say, or a weekly paper, for a lot of the things going on in their communities. They’ve become regionalized, even in a small locale.
I’m here in Austin, TX, for example. I live 15 miles from the University, right on the edge of Austin, in a little town called Flugerville. But I can’t get any Flugerville news in the Austin American Statesman, so I have to find other ways. I think that dispersal of audiences, that suburbanization, has prompted a lot of newspapers to lose touch with who those people are. Yes, they do know a lot about these audiences, demographically speaking, but they don’t know these audiences in terms of lifestyle, or interests. Most newspaper people do not live in the suburbs. They live in the tony, upscale, gentrified areas of the city, or they live in apartment complexes.
All of that looks to the disadvantage of the people that help market the paper. Most newspaper marketing departments consist of people who are producing fliers or may outsource a couple of studies once or twice a year, where they’re just asking people what they read, and how often, but they don’t necessarily get a handle on why these people read and what their psychographics are. Marketing has never been a strength of newspapers. And now they’re playing catch up.
Newspapers are finally learning what other businesses learned 30 years ago, that in order to keep the business you have to keep marketing. You can’t just say, “We do the news” any more. If Coca-Cola took that attitude they’d lose to Pepsi. They’ve got to do something else. You’ve got to keep your name out there. And because newspapers are primarily more of a public utility, or considered themselves that way, they didn’t necessarily look at themselves as businesses. Even though they’re run like businesses, they don’t think in a business sense when it comes to understanding the continuing, evolving needs of their audiences. People have changed. There’s been a sea change in the West from what people want from newspapers and what people want in general. People are much more me-oriented now than they used to be. And we’ve lost that sense of community, and that sense of civic duty, if you will.
Newspapers have gotten away from what they used to do best, which is know their community. And until newspapers learn that they need to reacquaint themselves, in a one-on-one, very local way – because that’s what they are – they’re going to be playing catch up with some of these other businesses. Because the web, especially, and the Internet, allow you to customize a lot of things, and that’s what people want.
Steve has already pointed out something that comes out of the A-B overlap zone, the blending of the town crier function with the town expert function: topic pages.