The Seattle Post-Intelligencer rolled off the presses one final time last Tuesday, leaving behind more than 117,600 weekday readers.

The Seattle paper joins Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition at the end of February. The PI is the latest — and largest — newspaper to fail amid a recession that has been especially brutal for the industry. Four owners of 33 U.S. daily newspapers have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the past three months. A number of other newspapers are up for sale.

The Challenge Facing Daily Newspapers

The writing has been on the wall for some time. In a 2007 Harris/Innovation Newspaper Readership Survey, 8749 respondents in seven countries were asked “What are your sources for news and information today?”. Major Daily Newspapers were cited by just 12% of US respondents (vs 25% for TV Network News and 18% for Online News & Information Websites). The highest users of Major Daily Newspapers were to be found in Spain and Germany (13% each), while Australia equalled the US on 12%, France came in at 7% and Great Britain and Italy scored lowest at just 6%.

When asked “What do you think your sources for news and information will be five years from now?”. 26% of US respondents suggested Online News & Information Websites as their Number 1 source, whilst just 10% thought that Major Daily Newspapers would be the most likely medium of choice. The Italians and British were gloomiest about the future of newspapers, with just 4% expecting Major Daily Newspapers to be a source for news and information in 2012.

The factors behind the decline of newspapers are easy to identify, difficult to counter:

• eBay, Craigslist and their various clones have sucked up much of the ‘Buy & Sell’ classified dollars that traditionally drove the backend of the newspaper. Monster.com and the various online jobsites have done their part vacuuming up Situations Vacant revenues; and specialist real estate and motor vehicle sites have done the rest of the damage. The automated ability to search through thousands or millions of listings at the click of a button makes online classifieds far more usable than newspapers ever could be.
• If consumers want national or international news, it’s available 24/7 online — no need to wait for the thud of the newspaper at your door at some early morning hour. Only local (and micro-local) news is not always easily available online — but it’s expensive to gather and not everyone wants it. Oh — and metropolitan newspapers are competing in this space against their (often fleet of foot) community newspaper counterparts, who have a small beat and often an evangelistic following.
• The tanking global economy has impacted most on sellers of big-ticket items such as real estate, cars, computers and consumer electronics — all categories that tend to be regular advertisers in newspapers. Oh, and banks, financial corporations and insurance giants were also big spenders in print — but for some reason they haven’t been seen around much lately.

So where to now for your daily newsprint fix?

In 2006 analyst Lauren Fine of Merrill Lynch calculated that it could take as long as 30 years for online revenue to represent at least 50% of a newspaper’s bottom line. Said calculation was reached based on projections that assume double-digit growth for online ad revenues through 2012 eventually slowing to 5% with print advertising estimated to decline 1.5% annually.

Whilst we don’t doubt the maths makes sense, the underlying logic doesn’t. We live in a financial bubble that demands quarterly improvements in bottom line results or remedial action is taken. As we’ve seen with Rupert Murdoch absorbing MySpace or Google vacuuming up YouTube (and most any online enterprise with a semi-viable business model), business mega-moguls didn’t get where they are today by settling for mere linear progressions. Can’t grow organically at a fast enough rate? Acquire!

Of course, the humble business of newsgathering has already evolved somewhat over the years. If we discount the creators of cave paintings, hieroglyphics and dead sea scrolls as inappropriate ancestors of journalism, then the earliest proto-journalists in the ancient world were travellers, who observed events in one place and then spread the word at their next port of call. Such methods were at best erratic, at worst embellished and unreliable (a problem that remains with us today).

Under the Imperial Rome of Julius Caesar and his heirs, news of the day (Acta Diurna, Daily Events) from the capital was painstakingly scribed for distribution to the farflung colonies. The reporters, servants of the Empire, were required to provide reportage which complied with their masters’ worldview; the penalty for disobedience was only too literally the editorial spike.

As BC gave way to AD and civilisation relentlessly marched its way towards the perils of our modern world, such handcrafted bulletins were supplemented by other mechanisms such as the wandering minstrel’s ballads (capturing contemporary events in singalong fashion) and the dulcet tones of the town crier. Almost inevitably, the earliest known printed newspaper appeared in Beijing in 748.

The first significant journalism breakthrough came with the arrival of Johannes Gütenberg and his 1447 invention of movable type. From there to the tabloids was just a matter of time.

After Gütenberg, innovation started to break out all over Europe, and attribution gets a little messy – too many “Number 1 with an asterisk” claimants. Zeitung, a German news report, made its debut in 1502. Trewe Encountre became the earliest known English-language news sheet in 1513. Mercurius Gallobelgicus was the world’s first periodical, emerging from Cologne in 1592 and published in Latin twice a year for distribution at book fairs. Germany’s Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, in 1609, became the first regularly published newspaper in Europe.

This collection of worthy European publications must have satisfied the demand of the times for “all the news that’s fit to print”, because it wasn’t until 1665 that the first regularly published English-language newspaper, The Oxford Gazette, started pumping out news twice a week. The Gazette owed its existence to the Black Plague, which saw Charles II and his court relocate from London to Oxford as a precaution. The King and his courtiers wanted newspapers to read, but were afraid that any newspapers coming from London might be infected. Because he could, Charles II promptly ordered the Oxford University printer to bring out a local paper.

The earliest forms of news gathering and dissemination were typically performed at the urging of the establishment (Julius Caesar, Charles II et al.) and the notion of independent, objective reporting was not an option. Investigative journalism is an even more modern construct.

For that we owe a debt of gratitude, not to Woodward and Bernstein, not even to Lois Lane and Clark Kent but to nineteenth century pioneers such as Henry Demarest Lloyd who in the 1880s published a series of articles exposing corruption in business and politics. Nellie Bly, another courageous journalist in those perilous times, was a young woman who put herself at great personal risk going undercover to investigate social issues such as child labour, low wages and unsafe working conditions.

Neither Nellie nor Henry could have effectively practised their trade, of course, without the willingness and support of their editors and publishers. There was no blogging software in nineteenth century New York, no talkback radio, no Xerox®. Without an outlet, there was no story. Now-legendary publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had to stand their ground in the face of considerable opposition from the entrenched interests of the day, permitting their reporters to publish and be damned. Only then could freedom of the press become a reality, not just a quaint constitutional aside.

Over the last century or so the honourable craft known as journalism has flourished, as newspapers and magazines have been joined by their electronic cousins, bringing news to the world on a minute by minute basis and demanding an increasing supply of journalistic talent to feed the insatiable media machine. The old six-monthly cycle of the Mercurius Gallobelgicus just might be a little too occasional for today’s 24-7 world.

But the times they are a’changing. As we lurch into the third millennium, the future of journalism is very much under debate – not because the profession is any less valued than before but rather because the traditional media on whose behalf journalists practise their trade are themselves under threat in this internet-changes-everything world.

Today’s audiences, with fingertip access to the news of the world from a million sources throughout the day, increasingly find evening television news bulletins irrelevant and out of date. Radio struggles to compete with the cult of the white earbuds. Newspapers, forced to migrate their content online, have yet to discover how to monetise their electronic outlets so as to earn the same revenues as their print editions. The writing is on the wall instead of in the paper.

At the same time, behold the rise and rise of citizen journalists. Unpaid, uncredentialled but on the spot, camera phones at the ready. When the bombs went off in London in July 2005, the BBC received 50 pictures from the public within the hour. Around 22,000 texts and e-mail messages poured in with personal testimonies on the first day. By the weekend the BBC had received 1,000 images and dozens of video clips sent by e-mail and direct from mobile phones.

When anyone can be a citizen journalist – thanks to blogs, podcasts, vcasts, YouTube and camera-phones – what future lies in store for journalism in general, and newspapers in particular?

Well, as we noted at the beginning of this piece, evolution is the order of the day. No doubt the grand and illustrious order of monks feared for their future when the damnable printing press made its debut, threatening to render intricate manuscripts redundant. And yet monks are still with us, their efforts turned to other enterprises.

If they can do it, so can our newspaper barons.

Tweet This Post

According to AdAge.com, Google is turning to Behavioral Targeting to beef up its display advertising business.

Here’s the scoop:

[On March 11 Google] announced it will launch a beta test of “interest-based targeting,” which lets advertisers target web users based on where they’ve been surfing across the internet. If a user is reading sports articles on NYTimes.com and also visiting CBSSports.com, for example, it could get lumped into a sports audience bucket, which advertisers can target.

Google will also let advertisers “re-market” web users across its content network, so if a person visits an advertiser’s site or abandons some products in an online shopping cart, that advertiser can find that consumer again on the web and serve him or her ads. In its beta version the targeting measures will be sold through Google’s direct-sales team, with a select group of advertisers taking part; later it will be available in the self-serve AdSense auction marketplace. The targeted ads, which can be either text or display, will run on AdSense partner sites and YouTube.com.

AdAge goes on to note that this is ”the first big sign Google is integrating into its large AdSense network some of the technologies it picked up with its acquisition of [advertising network provider] DoubleClick.”

Unfortunately, it’s also the time that, as reported by MediaPost, consumers remain concerned about online privacy issues. According to MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider newsletter:

Publishers and advertisers by now have internally devoted enormous investments in money, time and intellectual capital to behavioral targeting platforms. Yet when it comes to consumers themselves, most brands still like to pretend that behavioral targeting doesn’t exist, treating it like a secret vice to be locked away, hidden from the public that simply “can’t handle the truth.”

A recent study by Trust(e), an independent nonprofit online privacy advocacy organization, documents why that is precisely the wrong message for brands to be communicating.

The Trust(e) Behavioral Advertising Survey, conducted by TNS, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,008 individuals aged 18 and over on their attitudes about behavioral targeting. The survey found that, although consumers remain suspicious of and conflicted toward behavioral targeting, an increasing percentage of the online public are growing somewhat less uncomfortable about behavioral targeting, if (and it clearly remains a BIG if) brands radically step up their efforts to be more open, honest and transparent about where, when and how behavioral targeting is used.

Contrary to the assumption of some in the industry, behavioral targeting as a term is no longer esoteric. In fact, according to the survey, 43.2% of respondents said they’re familiar with the term, and 68.6% knew that their browsing information may be collected by a third party for advertising purposes. Over a third, 34.9%, felt their privacy has been invaded or violated in the last year due to information they provided on the Internet.

The survey found that consumers were not only very sensitive to any perceived intrusions into privacy, but also acted on that feeling by managing their privacy through activities like deleting cookies. Over 36% of respondents said they do at least one of the following in order to surf the Internet anonymously: use proxy surfing software; give fake names and contact info when requested by certain Web sites; and use a Web browser with privacy settings that delete cookies and don’t record a history of visited sites.

Here’s a sneak peek at a little of what our own Marketing Rag has to say about behavioral targeting:

“It creeps consumers out to think they’re being watched. George Orwell did such a great job of introducing the concept of Big Brother in ‘1984′ so now people worry about the misuse of their personal, private data for nefarious purposes. Thankfully, most marketers really only want to know what consumers are up to so that they can sell stuff. Behavioral targeting enables marketers like us to promote products that we’ve learned are likely to be of interest to specific segments, rather than try to flog everything to everyone. We’re so over one-size-fits-all. For those consumers who (for example) don’t have pets, they would find it a great pleasure and a very useful side-effect of behavioral targeting NOT to be shown petfood ads.

“To send consumers the right messages, we marketers need to:

• acknowledge that, thanks to modern technologies, we’re better able to understand consumers’ needs and wants without having to constantly ask about them;
• propose that, as a result, we can offer products and services that are more likely to be relevant and of interest to individual consumers;
• enter into dialog with consumers to refine and personalize those offerings even further.

“The other main challenge for marketers, when considering Behavioral or Interest-Based Targeting, is to ensure we have a really good understanding of the processes by which consumers have been sliced and diced by the publishers — in other words, how they have been evaluated and clustered into segments deemed suitably alike (and presumed to be potential targets).  If we use Google’s ’sports audience bucket’ as an example, are those within the bucket any more or less likely to be potential purchasers of our products? How will we know? Holy segmentation Batman, this sounds like a job for split-run testing!!

“There’s another issue to consider as well. If all the hottest prospects have been identified behaviorally and sold off in segments to interested marketers, at what point do we rule out advertising to the rest, because they are (by exclusion) NOT hot prospects?”

Tweet This Post