Newspaper Death Watch

A Former Publisher’s Take on the Closure of the North Adams Transcript
R.I.P. North Adams Transcript
R.I.P. Print Edition of The Onion – You’ll Forgive Us for Not Crying
Has BuzzFeed Cracked the Code of New-Media Success?

A Former Publisher’s Take on the Closure of the North Adams Transcript

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 09:44 AM PST

Martin Langeveld is a 30-year newspaper publishing veteran who was for 13 years the publisher of several newspapers in Northwestern Massachusetts and southern Vermont. He also was executive vice president and director of interactive media for New England Newspapers, Inc., a four-daily cluster which is part of Denver-based MediaNews Group, Inc. He tipped us off last week to the impending closure of the 170-year-old North Adams Transcript, which he piloted for six years. We asked him for his thoughts, which he shared by e-mail.

I started my newspaper career at The Berkshire Eagle in 1978, served as publisher from 1995 to 2000, then did a stint as publisher at the Transcript 2000-2006 and at the Brattleboro Reformer 2006-2008.

For about 85 years, from 1896 to 1979, the Transcript was owned by the Hardman family, which then sold the paper to the owners of the Boston Globe. The Berkshire Eagle at the time was owned by the Miller family, who had bought the paper in 1892. The two families had a friendly rivalry, but when the Hardmans decided to sell, they let it be known that they would not sell to the Millers — because they were afraid the Millers would simply merge the two papers.

The Millers unsuccessfully attempted an end run using a straw man, and then they tried again, without success, when the Globe put the paper up for sale 10 years later and sold it to American Publishing. The Millers sold to MediaNews Group in 1995, and MediaNews bought the Transcript from American Publishing a year later. A couple of years after that, Michael Miller, a third-generation member of the former publishing family, asked me why we hadn’t merged the papers yet — thus confirming the suspicions of the Hardmans. (In the early 1980s, the Millers had merged two other papers, The Torrington Register and the Winsted Citizen in Connecticut, into the Register-Citizen.)

It’s a fact that we ran the numbers in 1996 and concluded that the bottom line was marginally better keeping the papers separate versus merging them, but the deciding factor was really Dean Singleton’s passion for newspapering and his conviction that North Adams was a separate place from Pittsfield and should continue to have its own paper. He brought in a designer, we improved the looks and content, and restored the original, handsome Gothic name plate. Over the years, of course, a long series of small consolidation steps merged the business and production functions of the two papers, and the Transcript’s building was sold, to the point where a final consolidation became the simple step it now appears to be.

Since there was not a huge bottom-line advantage to separate operations back in 1996, I doubt if there’s much financial advantage to merger today. The North Adams office is being retained, as is the journalism staff. The sales staffs were merged long ago and the business office functions were consolidated in Pittsfield. There might be a few circulation positions eliminated. But on the other hand, more copies of the larger Eagle will have to be printed; deliveries will have to be made to all the same places; and circulation revenue will be lost to the extent there was duplication. Back in the day, you could raise advertising rates based on the circulation increase, but that pricing power is gone. There was some duplicated preprint advertising which will be lost.

So my guess is that the justifications for the merger consist of (a) less management distraction managing two different brands in the same market, and (b) the perceived opportunities in focusing on a single region-wide brand. Readers really will gain something since the two papers duplicated coverage on a lot of events, so the expanded Eagle staff can now cover more. (Hopefully there will be enough newshole available to print what they write.)

The region — the Berkshires — is a brand in itself, which has always been a strength exploited by the Eagle. So the move announced at the same time (making the Berkshires Week supplement, published since 1952, a year-round standalone publication) is a smart one, especially if it’s accompanied by a good online strategy.

It’s understandable the names of the papers will not be merged into Eagle-Transcript. But I’ve suggested that the Transcript logo be retained in a small way as part of the Eagle’s editorial page masthead. The Transcript’s 170 years of publishing history should not vanish without a trace.

Read more of Langeveld’s wisdom at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
North Adams Transcript website.

R.I.P. North Adams Transcript

Posted: 03 Jan 2014 12:51 PM PST

The North Adams Transcript, a daily fixture in northwestern Massachusetts since 1843, will be merged into the larger Berkshire Eagle later this month. The Transcript name will be discontinued and its five-person full-time editorial staff will join the Eagle. A sister weekly newspaper, the Advocate, will also be folded.

While putting the usual happy face on the announcement, management did provide a rationale for the move: “Publishing two daily newspapers that cover the same market – literally, they overlap – no longer makes sound business sense when one accounts for the duplicate efforts and redundancy in the processes involved in producing, delivering and servicing two newspapers that share the same mission,” wrote Publisher Kevin Corrado and News VP Kevin Moran in a joint message to readers.

The Transcript is one of four Massachusetts newspapers owned by MediaNews Group of Colorado, which is one of the largest newspaper publishers in the U.S. The company is known for its practice of buying multiple newspapers in the same region and centralizing production, ad sales, business operations and even editorial operations to cut costs. Some former staffers have complained that MediaNews sacrifices journalistic quality for the sake of profits.

In this case, however, the merger probably make sense. The Berkshires are the most rural area of Massachusetts, and with readership declining across the industry the wisdom of maintaining overlapping titles would be questionable. Fortunately, no reporting jobs were lost.

R.I.P. Print Edition of The Onion – You’ll Forgive Us for Not Crying

Posted: 16 Dec 2013 12:56 PM PST

Final print edition of The Onion

It is neither major, metro nor daily, but we would be remiss in not marking the passage from the world of the printed page of The Onion, which has long borne the self-effacing tagline of “America’s Finest News Source.”

Founded by two juniors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988, the satirical journal has thrived online with its diet of satirical news stories written with such deadpan earnestness that The Onion's entry on Wikipedia lists more than 15 prominent cases of third-party sources citing it as a legitimate news outlet, usually to their embarrassment

Unlike many newspapers that have left the print world, The Onion is merely following its overwhelmingly young and Web-savvy audience. The paper became international phenomenon when it hit the web in 1996 and traffic to theonion.com reportedly now averages 7.5 million unique visitors per month. Its YouTube channel has 670,000 subscribers and The Onion has been liked on Facebook 3.2 million times.

The Onion has been gradually withdrawing from the print market for years. Its last remaining print editions – which were in Chicago, Providence, and Milwaukee – published their final copies last week. Not surprisingly, they were a tribute to the durability of print. Headlines included: “‘ONION’ PRINT REVENUES UP 5,000%,” “Nation Just Prefers Feel Of Newsprint In Hands” and “Experts: Digital Media Revolution Still Another 70 Or 80 Years Away.”

We were subscribers to the print edition of The Onion for several years and keep its RSS feed in our carefully curated list of media sources. We still have trouble reading it without the milk coming out our nose.

Has BuzzFeed Cracked the Code of New-Media Success?

Posted: 09 Dec 2013 11:04 AM PST

We did a double-take when we saw this headline on Bloomberg last week: “BuzzFeed Said to Expect 2014 Sales of Up to $120 Million.” If you haven’t paid much attention to BuzzFeed, now is a good time to start, because this seven-year-old dark horse may have figured out the secret to making money in an environment of brutal competition and plummeting advertising prices.

The story relates some impressive statistics:

BuzzFeed expects to book $60 million in revenue this year, up from an initial budget of $40 million.
Year-over-year traffic is up fourfold.
The site attracted more than 130 million unique visitors in November.
BuzzFeed expects to field more than 600 ad campaigns this year.
It has raised $46 million.
It’s profitable.

Image representing Jonah Peretti as depicted i...

Image via CrunchBase

Casual visitors to BuzzFeed might be tempted to dismiss the site as just another collection of top-10 lists. That’s understandable, given that top stories bear names like, “The 28 Funniest Notes Written By Kids In 2013,” but there’s more to BuzzFeed than mouse candy.

The site was founded by Jonah Peretti (right), an MIT Media Lab alumnus who also co-founded Huffington Post. Peretti has made a career of figuring out how to make stuff that people want to share, and his latest venture appears to have cracked the code (For more on the new journalism discipline of writing for maximum share appeal, read this article).

Everything on BuzzFeed is optimized for sharing because that’s the secret to building traffic. BuzzFeed eschews traditional search engine optimization. “We don’t spend that much time thinking about search,” Peretti told Fortune in this interview. It focuses instead on the psychology of sharing: What content do people instinctively want to tell others about? In the long run, Peretti thanks sharing by humans will be a more important factor in online success than search results.

Unlike some other content farms, BuzzFeed has designs on serious journalism. Peretti has said he plans to hire 200 professional journalists, and the site’s news section is beginning to look more and more like what CNN used to. In essence, the cat videos and wet T-shirt slide shows bring in visitors s

o serious reporting can happen.

BuzzFeed is perhaps best known for its novel approach to native advertising. Sponsored content appears in line with staff material (it's lightly labeled) and uses the same format as everything else on the site: lots of lists, photos and captions. Sponsors are encouraged to come up with creative ideas that will fit the look and feel of the site. Intel has 10 Pieces Of Vintage Technology We Couldn't Wait To Have and Ruffles came up with 12 Reasons Dogs Really Are Man's Best Friend. Peretti told Fortune:

We told brands, “You have to tell a story.” This is actually something the magazine industry has been great at over decades — making advertising that actually adds to the product. It’s something that websites have completely failed to do…If you take all of the ads out of a fashion magazine, you lose half the photography, you know? So we really took the approach of, “Well, why can’t the web be like that? Why can’t we make great branded content, advertising, that has its own page that people want to click on and engage in and share and interact with?”

This may sound like heresy to journalism traditionalists, but BuzzFeed is breaking a lot of molds in an attempt to find a model that works.

In fact, the site’s basic content model isn't all that different from traditional newspapers'. The reason most newspapers carry horoscopes, crossword puzzles, comics and gossip columns is because large numbers of people read newspapers solely for those features. If BuzzFeed’s 21st-century version of Dear Abby can provide some serious journalists with gainful employment, then we all owe Jonah Peretti a debt of gratitude.

Media Boomlet

BuzzFeed isn’t the only new media entity that’s benefiting from the aggregation craze, but there are questions about how far this business can scale and whether there’s much money to be made.

USA Today‘s Michael Wolff writes that Henry Blodget (left) is shopping Business Insider, reportedly asking a cool $100 million. Not bad for a site that’s less than five years old with just 62 editorial staff members listed on its masthead. Wolff runs the numbers, makes a couple of educated guesses and figures that Business Insider is probably getting a CPM (cost per thousand) of between $1.50 and $3. That compares to $30-$40 CPMs that were common in the business magazine world just a few years ago.

Wolff sees the mass-market digital media landscape as being a race to the bottom, with publishers frantically searching for viewer eyeballs, regardless of their appeal to advertisers. “The digital traffic world, with techniques and sources and results that are ever-more dubious, is, as I’d guess the astute Henry Blodget has ascertained, not a sound long-term play,” he writes. Hence, it’s time to get out.

But the venture capital community, which is flush with stock market cash, apparently doesn’t agree – yet. CNN Money’s Dan Primack and Jessi Hempel say Flipboard is set to raise another $50 million, bringing to $160 million its total venture funding since 2010. Flipboard doesn’t even produce any original content. It’s a mobile platform that aggregates content produced by other media companies, and its licensing policies have raised some hackles.

The new high-volume aggregation model that’s attracting so much attention was outlined in The New York Times last year. It’s a caffeinated rush to get it first, and very little content comes from traditional journalistic shoe leather. Reporters are skilled at finding, assimilating and repackaging information in eye-catching packages. The assumption is that citizens are already doing a lot of the reporting on their Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, and the media company that can be filter the noise adds significant value.

YULI AKHMADA

Rabu, 05 Februari 2014