The world as it should be

My experiment with Twitter will continue, despite my initial
reservations. I have found it to be useful in gaining all sorts of
information that has been helpful and interesting. I can see how
journalists could use it to better their work and attract/keep more
readers.

I can also see how it would be useful in gaining new sources for
stories, especially in the middle of a breaking story. You could
have, for instance, searched for people who were Tweeting during
Katrina and gathered all sorts of useful information and quotes.

Here are some things I have gathered from the web:

1. Good way to spot and follow trends
2. Again, it is searchable for interesting keywords
3. Good way to build a good list of sources to follow
4. It is way to make journalists seem more human to their readers,
sort of different from years ago, but very suitable in our social
media world. Journos don’t need to get TOO personal, but a few
personal tidbits here and there will help keep readers connected.
Not a bad idea in today’s media world.
5. You can even use Twitter to send out breaking information: a
wreck on I-95, something unusual at a city council meeting, etc.
6. Not only can individual journalists use Twitter, but the paper
can create a persona or just use the newspaper’s name, and send
update information to followers — who are likely the younger group
you are trying to reach — about pop culture news you get on web
feeds or breaking news.

So there you have it. I think it is worth looking into. You can follow me at

http://twitter.com/newsdesign

Some people seem to think that worrying about newspaper redesign is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I am not so sure. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if the rush to the web — and I have been among the rushers — isn’t a bit premature.

No one has a good business model for making profits off web advertising, which is not growing at the rate we all hoped for, even expected. The pay site model doesn’t seem to work very well either: people are too accustomed to getting access to newspaper web sites for free. Much information can be gotten elsewhere at no cost.

Cutting staff as a way to cut costs doesn’t seem to have helped. Paper and people are the major expenses of a newspaper, so what’s the problem?

I think the problem is way more complex than we have presumed. Newspapers are not widgets, and simply cutting newsroom costs by cutting news staff, as one might lay off workers on the widget production line, is at first blush logical, but it doesn’t address the issues completely.

I am studying this and will post more soon. I believe that people have a different sort of relationship with their newspaper than with a widget, and that relationship is more intimate and interwoven with our personal and social lives than we think. I think the secret lies in understanding the close relationship readers feel with their newspapers (at least for now) and exploiting that approach to keep circulation from this free fall. Newspaper design, in its broadest sense, plays a major role in all this, too.

I would be very interested in getting a conversation going on this. I’ll have more to say next post. Meanwhile, what do you think?

As reported in the 12/21 NYT, a Canadian ad agency may have come up with a money-saver for newspapers: use the newspapers you are no longer selling to readers as insulation in jackets. The ad agency is doing just that and, to their credit, they gave away 3,000 to homeless people in the area.

When I was a tyro reporter for the now moribund Long Beach Independent (now Press-Telegram [the Indy was the morning paper and the P-T the afternoon]), I often had to ride my motorcycle along Pacific Coast Highway to Huntington Beach and trust me, it was cold at 1 a.m. in the winter, even in Southern California.

I would start each trip by stuffing six inches of day-old papers up my jacket to help fight the cold. I can attest to the fact that newspapers make good insulation.

Personally, I believe that better designed newspapers make for better insulation….

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Can we help make your paper better looking, whether it becomes insulation or not?!?  

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Detroit Free Press will cease home delivery of the paper, except for Thursday, Friday and Sunday — the best days for advertising. According to the WSJ, an “abbreviated” version will be available on newstands on the other days. The digital versions will expand, the article said.

I feel certain this will happen faster and faster as more papers face the reality of declining advertising in the midst of a flailing economy.

Despite the spectre of job cuts, this is not necessarily bad for newspaper designers. Whatever the information product, you will always need people to put the product together, whether it’s in pixels or ink on dead trees. And good design, which is not simply cosmetic, can play a critical role in keeping and gaining readers.

These are bad times overall for the industry, but not necessarily for good designers. That is, if publishers are smart enough to realize the importance of good design to their business.

In a recent story in the Wall Street Journal (12/6-7, 2008), Martin Peers said that in two years the newspaper industry is going to look very different.

Not uniquely prescient, that’s surely true. But on a page filled with other tales of corporate woe (reading the WSJ nowadays is like reading a horror story), it really stuck out with its numbers. Peers reported that more than 20 percent of the newspaper industry (by circulation) is in “financial distress.”

The number that really jumped out at me was that in these parlous times, publicly traded newspaper companies reported an average profit margin of 11 percent. Now, numbers are only helpful if you compare them to other numbers, so let’s look at a few. In 2002, the average profit margin was more than 22 percent. In the first half of 2007, it was still nearly 16 percent.

Bad news, for sure. But, as I have written about before, the average profit  margin of ALL companies is more like 7-8 percent. So newspapers ought to be doing well, it seems to me. Now I know nothing about making money (hey, I am a professor), but doesn’t it seem like newspapers ought to be in better shape? All those years of huge profit margins, and still above average, yet more than 20 percent of the industry is in financial distress?

I am reminded of a quote from newspaper industry analyst John Morton in an American Journalism Review last year: “…no industry can cut its way to future success. At some point, the business must improve.”

Design can be an important improvement if it is done to make the news easier to access and understand. Design won’t help if it is used as a cosmetic afterthought or as a way to plug empty space in the news pages because you have cut reporters and editors. I think most recent design changes in newspapers I am familiar with have not really been improvements. They have been fun and pretty bandages on a broken bone.

Most newspapers associations and think tanks have been useless in helping newspapers stanch the flow of red ink as well. I think that is a subject that has not been discussed enough. What are these groups really doing — besides collecting dues — to help newspapers, especially the smaller ones?

That’s what I am trying to do with News Design School.

I worry about all sorts of things all the time, so it should come as no surprise that I am ever more worried about the future of newspapers.

My local anorexic newsprint product — gads, it’s gotten thin — has just unveiled some content changes that are predominantly visual. The Florida Times-Union now has a cartoon character, Jack, who will guide readers through the entertainment news.

The paper had already decreased its actual story count and has lots of summaries, celebrity news, teases to blogs and such on their web site, and so on. It’s beginning to look like a comic book or graphic newspaper.

I am torn because I want newspapers to survive, but I hate how much of their souls they appear to be selling to be so. I am not yet convinced that we have to go quite so far to get and keep readers.

Thinking more about my last post, I think I was wrong. Good times will come again to the stock market and to newspapers and to the businesses that buy advertising. Sure, we may be in the basement, but the basement is the foundation of a solid business.

“Buy low, sell high” has always been good advice. Advertising during a down economy is also good advice, in part because many of your company’s competitors will pull back. You will become more visible in the marketplace as the cacophony of advertising messages lessens.

It will cost money, and the short term might be tight, but over the course of several years, as the economy inevitably cycles back, your company will be in the top position because you stuck around in the consumer’s mind.

For newspapers, it may mean a temporary lowering of ad rates. It will certainly call for aggressive and creative cross selling across print, web and mobile products, but it can be done. Not all companies will refuse to cut advertising, but the smart ones will.

And smart newspapers will put together appealing packages for them while they continuously improve their product. Information is a necessary commodity in any economic setting. I hope most newspapers are smarter than they have been acting so far in the downturn. Drastically cutting the producers is not the answer.

It will be interesting in a few years to see who survived and how they did it.
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Check out my newspaper design training and redesign consulting site.

Among those of us toiling in the groves of academe, there are a lot of wailings and lamentations about the lack of basic knowledge among our students.

To a certain extent this is true. I give my journalism students current events and general knowledge quizzes, and you would be surprised (well, maybe you wouldn’t be) at some of the answers. Many thought our Civil War was in the 1700s, about a third had never heard of Watergate, and most couldn’t name the state directly south of Wisconsin. They all knew the host of American Idol, however.

I have concluded that there is a larger problem, and it is articulated well in a famous quote by Will Rogers: “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so. ”

In my journalism labs, I always ask about their knowledge of computers and a few software packages. They all claim well more than adequate knowledge, but when faced with lab tasks, they are often clueless not only about how to do the task, but how to use the Help function to get the answer. Turns out that they can check their e-mail, MySpace and Facebook pages, but beyond that. . . .

Whether it’s computers or content from textbook readings, they seem to think that a cursory reading and a loose grasp of the material is all they need. When I ask them questions that require some in-depth, critical thinking, they can’t do it. They don’t know how. The problem is that they think they know something if they have memorized facts, so they don’t stretch their minds to make connections between Fact1 and Fact2. Why should they? They know at the highest level already.

I really think this is why I get the blank stares I get when I ask a tough question. It’s not that students are dumber today, it’s that they came to premature closure in their thinking because they came to class sure they knew it all.

The push for assessment, migrating up from the K-12 ranks, plays right into this. Assessment needs simplicity in measurement, so instruction becomes what’s measureable, not what’s right. If I were a wee bit more pessimistic, I would say that higher ed is near the start of a long decline, close on the heels of the decline we have seen in K-12. Sad.