This might be the equivalent of trying to stop a speeding locomotive, but I think that this whole “digital first” mantra is killing the local news industry. Newsrooms across the country seem to be obsessed with it, thrusting camcorders into reporters hands and urging them to get something on Facebook and Twitter post haste so they can be first to break the news.
If I were one to mix metaphors, I’d say they’re goring the cow that feeds them while simultaneously tilting at windmills. If I were to speak in disruptive technology lingo, I’d say they were engaging in a lot of cramming.
First off, newsrooms shouldn’t be dictating what local TV stations and newspapers do on the Internet. The obsession with shoving news content and commentary onto the web – with advertising as an assumed result – has caused them to miss richer opportunities.
Terry Heaton, senior vice president of Media 2.0 for media consultancy AR&D, has been a big proponent of getting TV stations to deliver “continuous news” via the web. So you’d think he’d be a big proponent of news organizations thinking about the web before anything else. Not so.
“To me, ‘digital first’ can’t work, because digital and legacy are two entirely different services,” Heaton responded when I sent him an advance copy of this blog. “Trying to put digital first when your operating process is ‘finished product’ is not only silly; it’s suicide.”
Heaton says that his Continuous News innovation “is born of the Web for the Web, which is unlike what everybody else is doing. Even with that, though, we have GREAT difficulty gaining acceptance, because their instinct is to bolt digital onto the old.”
What’s happening, I believe, is that the local news industry is unwittingly engaging in the cramming phenomenon. They’re taking the old product and trying to adapt it to the new technology in what appears to be radical strokes, instead of letting the old model run its course and crafting a completely new one. It’s the same “digital first” mentality that had Britannica.com 15 years ago appearing to be radical by electing to sell low-priced CDs and online access over higher-priced encyclopedia books – thereby entirely missing cake-eating opportunities like Wikipedia and Google.
Forcing local news down into the digital space hastens the erosion of their core products unnecessarily. The industry is defining news much the same narrow way Britannica defined research.
Local news isn’t the brass ring on the Web. There are two problems with it: First, it’s not as big of a draw that everyone thinks, and second, the value of its audience is relatively low.
News indeed attracts millions of adults every day, but that’s mainly national news. Local news only appears to be a big draw until you extract weather and traffic. If you factor those out, you’ll see just how small and eclectic the audience is for the traditional definition of “local news.”
To understand this issue, consider the posture of media consumers. With TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, they lean back. They’re receptive to the serendipitous nature of those media. With the Internet, they’re leaning forward. They’re focused seekers, not relaxed readers. They seek, find, leave. The only other medium like that is the yellow pages. The problem is, local news just isn’t that compelling (unless of course there is BIG local news, which is rare.)
Why is posture important? Seventy-nine percent of online news users say they’ve never or rarely clicked on a banner ad, according to Pew Research. In addition, research from Web design expert Jakob Nielsen shows that people looking at information sites rarely even see banner ads. They are leaning forward and hunting, eyes focused on what they’re reading, and not focused on anything else.
I don’t see the economic model for local news online. It’s labor intensive, and advertisers aren’t looking to buy nebulous traffic. But it’s not my opinion that matters. It’s the opinion of those who finance all those journalists: advertisers. And their votes are clear. The digital content that they’d rather be around is content that delivers wallet-ready consumers, not occasional news browsers. Half of the Top 20 sites in terms of local online ad revenue are advertising-only sites. The Top 5 have nothing but advertising content. (See our latest report, “Benchmarking Local Online Media: 2010 Survey,” March 2011.) Looking at the data of 4,800 sites in that survey, I saw one startling example where a news-oriented TV website with 400,000 monthly uniques was making the equivalent of $10 per unique visitor, while another site in the same market with fewer than 20,000 monthly uniques – a niche site with advertising-only content — was making $150.
So here’s my take on what happened in that market: The TV site chose to expend its resources cramming the news model onto the web, thereby missing the niche opportunity altogether. Why would they bother with a site that generated less than one-tenth the traffic and had no intrinsic “news” value?
Those who have adopted the digital first news mantra, I fear, are doing exactly what Clay Christensen described in his “Innovator’s Dilemma” was one of the principal ways that smart managers fail. They adopt the new technology within the framework of the existing business model, making what appear to be radical changes that are actually just modifications to the existing business model.
I’m all for great journalism. My wife and I have been writers and editors for various metro newspapers, and I’m not ashamed to say that we were both moved to tears when we visited the Newseum in Washington last summer. Radio, TV and newspaper journalism has done great things for the world.
But journalism, like Britannica’s encyclopedia business, is a controlled product. The Internet’s role in doing great things revolves around uncontrolled communications.
As for the whole digital first journalism thing, I do believe that the local news franchise will gradually move to tablets and that newsrooms should be experimenting with ways to migrate to that end game. In a few decades you will probably be able to Google “the death of local news on TV and in newspapers” and read how it all just eventually collapsed.
But I guarantee you that nobody’s going to Britannica it.
