Sabtu, 10 Desember 2011

Josh Macht: Having two brands isn’t better than having one


Nieman Journalism Lab


Posted: 09 Dec 2011 09:00 AM PST
Editor’s note: We’ve written before about the new split-site web strategy of The Boston Globe. (That includes keeping the established Boston.com a free site, but building a new paid-only site called BostonGlobe.com that includes the print newspaper’s content and a print-like experience.) The Globe’s approach again raises age-old questions about how a news organization’s print and digital selves — the brands — should or should not be one.
Josh Macht, group publisher at the Harvard Business Review Group and a veteran of outlets like Time and Inc., thinks the split is a bad idea. Here’s why.
If you want to see a good example of an online newspaper that’s easy to navigate, neatly organized, and particularly well-suited to the iPad, type bostonglobe.com into your web browser and tour around the Globe’s new address. It’s a site that stands out for its simple elegance; a place where you’ll find limited but useful functionality that lets you save and share articles with one click. What you won’t find, however, are a lot of prominent links to Boston.com, the Globe’s sister brand.
After years of banishing the daily paper behind the Boston.com front door, BostonGlobe.com stepped out alone on September 12, in a move that was meant to create a standalone, paid-for newspaper website. Boston.com is a completely separate place for the free stuff — a haven for Tom Brady and Gisele photos, sports scores, as well as the latest blog postings.

It’s no secret that many newspapers are considering forcing web surfers to cough up cash for content. But the Globe is in a unique position because it had spent so many years pumping up the Boston.com web address. Now they are maintaining two separate brands on the web, each used for different strategic purposes. Call it the “have your cake and pay for it too” web strategy: Boston.com aims for millions of eyeballs and advertisers; BostonGlobe.com sets its sights on paying customers. Never (or perhaps rarely) the two shall meet.
While each new platform might offer different uses and value for the consumer, we want the brand experience to be consistent and integrated across print and digital.
While the game plan may seem logical enough on paper, it’s quite another thing to pull it off online. The move also appears to swim against the tidal wave of editorial integration that’s washing over most newspaper operations. Take, for example, The New York Times (which shares a parent company with the Globe), where you see a paper concentrating on a multi-platform experience. Customers can get access to the tablet, smartphone, website, and print version of the Times for one price. By lashing together all of their publishing platforms, papers like the Times are attempting to habituate enough digital paying customers so that they can eventually deemphasize or drop the print — a fate that now seems inevitable to most papers. The Globe, on the other hand, has fractured its efforts to pursue two vastly different approaches during a time when money is tight and focus would seem to be key to survival.
I know something about the divide and conquer approach, because we tried it here at the Harvard Business Review. The difference was that we were in an opposite situation from the the Globe. For many years, HBR.org was a paid-for website where you could buy reprints, books and subscribe to the magazine. In 2007, we launched HarvardBusiness.org as a stand-alone site for freely available blog content, forums, and conversation. It worked. Right from the start, we saw significant audience growth at the HarvardBusiness.org URL.
We also quickly learned that the type of content that drove eyeballs online was very different from what was at the heart of HBR in print. And even though we tried to market the magazine to Harvardbusiness.org visitors, we struggled mightily to convert this new audience — and when we did convert them, they typically didn’t stay long as subscribers.
What we’ve discovered along the way is that creating and managing multiple web addresses can dilute your ability to reach your overall goals.
When we made the strategic decision to redesign the magazine two years ago, we simultaneously collapsed all our web efforts under the HBR.org URL. We also created one HBR editorial team, which could work on the redesigned magazine and website and keep them in sync. Much of what we were learning online about our audience helped to shape our thinking about the redesigned magazine. Today, we produce all of our content (both free and paid) under the HBR.org flag. And it’s led to some very heartening early results; we’ve seen that because the magazine and website offer a more consistent experience, we’re much more capable of turning surfers into subscribers. We’re also seeing benefits both online and in the real world where, for example, we’ve witnessed 20 percent growth in newsstand, 135 percent increase in unique visitors to the website, and an exploding fan base across our social media channels.
We still have a long way to go with our efforts, and it’s bound to continue to morph over time. But our experience has led us to the conclusion that focus pays off. And it’s particularly crucial now as we begin to take advantage of the tremendous growth in tablet and mobile usage. While each new platform might offer different uses and value for the consumer, we want the brand experience to be consistent and integrated across print and digital. To achieve that priority it takes a collective and concentrated effort across the entire HBR Group.
What we’ve discovered along the way is that creating and managing multiple web addresses can dilute your ability to reach your overall goals. Just type the word “Boston” into Google and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll find Boston.com is the fifth link. You won’t even find BostonGlobe.com on the first page. To gain prominence, the Globe will be forced to spend time and money to blow out their new digital brand, which means splitting resources between two URLs instead of pouring it all into just the one.
But perhaps the larger point is that the Globe is acting as though growing traffic and growing paid-for content are mutually exclusive. That’s simply not true. When I was at Time.com, we tried to create a website that echoed the values of the magazine for online readers. Much of the content, such as photo galleries and blogs, were open to the public. Even the latest magazine was available for free, but if you wanted to read the previous week’s Time or go back deeper into the archive you needed to pay. That approach yielded growing traffic as well as growing circulation from the website to the magazine. We didn’t need two separate brands to pursue two different strategic goals. Rather, we needed to define the value of the content for the reader so that they understood why something was free versus another item behind a wall.
So often, we still create a false dichotomy online between paid versus free. The fact is that the two models can — and in fact must — live together in order to widen the audience and then simultaneously discover what makes your brand special online. For the Globe, separating the brands with different URLs may solve a few problems in the short run, but in the broader scheme, it’s a recipe for limiting growth and opportunity.
Joshua Macht is group publisher for the Harvard Business Review Group.
Posted: 09 Dec 2011 08:00 AM PST

Editor’s note: Tom Stites had a long career in newspapers, editing Pulitzer-winning projects and working at top newspapers like The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In recent years, he’s shifted his emphasis to trying to figure out a new business model to support journalism through the Banyan Project. This week, Tom outlines his beliefs on where web journalism stands today and one model he thinks might work; here’s part one, and here’s part two.
Maybe we’ve been looking for models in all the wrong places. To find the elusive secret to making web journalism sustainable in community after community, maybe we need to take a peek behind the curtain into the secret sector of the economy.
For years now, people have been trying to devise business models for online community journalism that are both sustainable and replicable, but the usual sectors aren’t delivering: Only a few isolated for-profit sites are generating enough advertising revenue to support themselves while producing the original reporting that’s so crucial to civic health and democracy; on the nonprofit side, there are nowhere near enough philanthropic dollars to support enough sites, at least not for long (see part one of this series). And the idea of public-sector news publishing gets tangled up in the First Amendment.
It’s common to think these three sectors are all there are, but there’s a fourth — the cooperative sector — which future-of-journalism efforts are just starting to explore. U.S. co-ops take myriad forms and represent $3 trillion in assets, $500 billion in revenue, and $25 billion in wages; they include 7,794 credit unions and 864 utility co-ops that distribute electricity over 75 percent of the nation’s land mass. Few people know that co-ops are such a significant and healthy slice of our otherwise ailing economy — the U.S. government doesn’t keep statistics on them and, because co-ops are structured to build community wealth rather than investor wealth, business journalism largely ignores them.
What’s magic about co-ops is that for a long list of industries they offer stable and replicable business models that work in economic settings too arid to support for-profit models — the kind of situation many communities are experiencing with journalism after five grim years of plummeting newspaper advertising revenue that’s led to drastic cutbacks in original reporting (see part two of this series). Now that the news ecology has turned from verdant to desert-like, particularly in less-than-affluent communities where the majority of the U.S. public lives, might co-ops grow the hardy cactuses that journalism needs to thrive again?
Judging by experience in other countries, the answer is yes. Long-established reader-owned co-ops publish newspapers in Italy, Germany, England and Mexico. A worker-owned cooperative is creating an ambitious city-by-city set of news sites across Canada that combine to publish a national weekly newspaper. Also in Canada, listener-owned co-ops operate radio stations.
But to date there are no such co-op journalism efforts in the United States.((Despite their names, the Chicago News Cooperative and KOOP radio in Austin, Texas, are standard nonprofits. The Associated Press is a cooperative, but a producer co-op owned by the news organizations that it provides with state, national, and foreign news.))
Disclosure: The Banyan Project, which I lead, is building a reader-owned co-op model that’s designed to scale massively, the way depositor-owned credit unions and shopper-owned food co-ops have scaled community by community, coast to coast. Banyan has chosen Haverhill, Massachusetts — a middle-income city of 60,879 whose daily newspaper has devolved into an under-resourced weekly and whose radio station has shut down — as its pilot community. As a news desert, Haverhill has very little focused coverage of issues facing the community or of life-issue reporting that its people can use to make their best life and citizenship decisions. Presuming that the pilot thrives, Banyan envisions scaling with each added community site run by its own democratically run co-op with hundreds of local member/owners; a federation would provide the co-ops with turnkey licenses for sophisticated software and other centralized services.
If other co-op approaches are being planned in the U.S., I’ve not discovered them — but there are many other possible approaches, such as the worker-owned co-op being developed in Canada. I’m cheering for lots of social entrepreneurs to jump in and cultivate their own ideas. The Citizen Media Law Project, part of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, wants to help all comers — it is researching the legal issues that journalism cooperatives will face and will post its findings on its online legal guide.
Recent events are making co-ops less of a secret: In 2009 the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives published a comprehensive study of co-ops’ role in the U.S. economy; more than 700,000 people moved their accounts from major banks to credit unions in response to the Move Your Money campaign inspired by the banks’ just-rescinded fees for use of debit cards, and the United Nations has proclaimed 2012 the International Year of the Cooperative. Co-ops are more common in Europe, where the form originated more than a century and a half ago, and in less developed countries where economic deserts are more common; worldwide, more than 1 billion people are co-op members.
Cooperative firms are fundamentally different from other business organizations. They are neither investor-owned businesses nor nonprofit organizations, although the IRS grants tax-exemptions for some forms. Community-Wealth.org, a project of the Democracy Collaborative, based at the University of Maryland, offers this definition: “A cooperative can be any business that is governed on the principle of one member, one vote.”
So the cooperative view of capital differs quite a lot from Wall Street’s. For example, the International Cooperative Alliance has established seven principles that include concern for community; many co-ops pursue the triple bottom line of financial soundness plus positive social and environmental impact. In this era of rampant deceptive business practices, says Tom Decker of the National Cooperative Business Association in Washington, a significant source of co-ops’ strength is the trustworthiness inherent in their democratic and accountable structure.
This is also an era of rampant mistrust of journalism, so co-op news sites’ trustworthiness has the potential to add value to what they publish. Further, the co-op form allows, or rather demands, that news coverage decisions arise from the what a community’s people need rather than from today’s dominant approaches: finding ways to sustain legacy news institutions or designing Web models to conform to various ideas about what technology seems to demand. The web is inherently collaborative — just as co-ops are — and at the local level this creates the potential for civic synergy that could add still more value to co-op community journalism.
Cooperatives arise as a bottom-up response to market failure: It’s a lot of work to start a co-op, so if for-profit businesses were providing needed goods and services at fair prices, why would people go to all the bother? Without economic deserts, there would be no co-ops, but over time there has been no shortage of deserts and there is no shortage now.
The Wisconsin study reports that the great boom in credit unions came, no surprise, in the Depression, after widespread bank failures created a credit desert. That’s also when electric utility co-ops came on the scene, with a boost from the Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal effort. In the 1930s, cities were 90 percent wired but 90 percent of rural homes were not — investor-owned utilities shunned the high cost of wiring rural areas. Co-ops filled the void.
In today’s struggling economy, Decker says, co-ops are on the rise. The scarcity of reliable child care and home health care are arid zones that are inspiring co-ops to form. “Worker-owned home care cooperatives,” the Wisconsin report says, “are emerging as a way to both address high staff turnover and to improve the quality of home care services provided to the elderly and disabled.” Decker reports a rise in worker co-ops in other fields as people come together to invent livelihoods for themselves in a time when jobs are so scarce. He also estimates that as many as 300 food coops will form in 2011, many to meet demand for a coherent supply of local food that supermarkets don’t supply. “Local,” he says, “is the key.”
Now, news deserts are proliferating and the need is great. It may be that co-ops will be the only new journalism business model that can take root in current market conditions. May many species of news cactuses bloom.
Tom Stites, president and founder of the Banyan Project, which is building a model for web journalism as a reader-owned cooperative, was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
Photo by Andrea Marutti used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 09 Dec 2011 06:30 AM PST
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news.

Do institutions have a place in news innovation?: About three weeks after Dean Starkman’s indictment of future-of-news thinkers was posted online by the Columbia Journalism Review, NYU professor Clay Shirky — one of the primary targets of the piece — delivered a response late last week in the form of a thoughtful essay on the nature of institutions and the news industry. Shirky explained the process by which institutions can lapse into rigidity and blindness to their threats, and he argued that there’s no way to preserve newspapers’ most important institutional qualities in the digital age, so the only option left is radical innovation.
Several observers — of a future-of-news orientation themselves — jumped in to echo Shirky’s point. The Journal Register Co.’s Steve Buttry praised Shirky for waiting and reflecting rather than responding immediately, and media consultant Steve Yelvington seconded Shirky’s point that all this talk about traditional journalistic models being overwhelmed by a decentralized, audience-focused digital tidal wave is descriptive, not prescriptive — not necessarily the way things should be, but simply the way they are.
Howard Owens of the Batavian took the middle ground, declaring that evolution, not revolution, is the standard vehicle for change in journalism and laying a model for sustainable local journalism that focuses on local ownership, startups, and innovation. In the end, Owens wrote, online journalism will evolve and survive. “It will find ways to make more and more money to pay for more and more journalism.  The audience is there for it, local businesses will always want to connect with that audience, and entrepreneurial minded people will find ways to put the pieces together.”
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal raised a good point in the discussion about how to preserve serious journalism: He argued that the primary obstacle won’t be so much about paying for journalists to cover important public-affairs issues, but about finding a way for that news to reach a substantial percentage of the population in a given area. That “amplification” problem may be tough to solve, but could be relatively easy to scale once that initial solution is found.

Paywalls picking up steam among smaller papers: Now that The New York Times has bravely served as a paywall guinea pig for the rest of America’s general-interest newspapers (apparently successfully, judging from the indicators we have so far), we’re starting to see more of the nation’s mid-sized papers announce online pay plans of their own. This week, Gannett, the United States’ largest newspaper chain, revealed that it would be expanding its paywalls to more of its papers sometime next year. According to the Gannett Blog, the company began experimenting with paywalls at three newspapers last year, and while we don’t know much of anything about those projects, it appears Gannett is pleased enough with them to build out on that model.
The Chicago Sun-Times also announced a paywall to begin this week: It’ll follow the increasingly popular metered model employed by the Financial Times and New York Times, allowing 20 page views per 30-day period before asking for $6.99 a month ($1.99 for print subscribers). PaidContent noted that the plan is being run by Press+ (the system created by Steve Brill’s former Journalism Online) and that Roger Ebert’s work has been exempted from the paywall.
We also got a couple of updates from existing newspaper paywalls: MinnPost reported that the Minneapolis Star Tribune has come out ahead so far in its new paywall, generating an estimated $800,000 in subscriptions while losing a five-figure total of advertising dollars. And PaidContent reported that three paywalled MediaNews Group papers (now run by John Paton of the Journal Register Co.) have killed their Monday print editions, with a corresponding drop of their online paywall on those days.

Is this blogger a journalist?: Just when you thought the “Are bloggers journalists?” discussion was completely played out, it got some new life this week when an Oregon judge ruled that a blogger being sued for $2.5 million in a defamation case wasn’t protected by the state’s media shield law because she wasn’t a journalist. As Seattle Weekly initially reported, the judge reasoned that she wasn’t a journalist because she wasn’t affiliated with any “newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”
This type of ruling typically gets bloggers (and a lot of journalists) riled up, and rightly so. Mathew Ingram of GigaOM gave some great context regarding state-by-state shield laws, noting that several other recent rulings have defined who’s a journalist much more broadly than this judge did. These types of distinctions based on institutional affiliation are attempts to hold back a steadily rising tide, he argued.
On the other hand, Forbes’ Kashmir Hill described some of the case’s background that seemed to indicate that this particular blogger was much more intent on defamation than performing journalism, creating dozens of sites to dominate the search results for the company she was attacking, then emailing the company to offer $2,500/mo. online reputation management. Hill concluded, “Yes, bloggers are journalists. But just because you have a blog doesn't mean that what you do is journalism.” Libertarian writer Julian Sanchez agreed, saying that while the judge’s ruling wasn’t well worded, this blogger was not a journalist.

Facebook’s new tools: A few Facebook-related notes: The social network began rolling out Timeline, the graphical life-illustration feature it announced back in September this week, starting in New Zealand. It also briefly, vaguely announced plans to extend its Twitter-like Subscribe button into a plugin for websites, a move that TechCrunch said signifies that “the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on.” Cory Bergman of Lost Remote urged news orgs to get on the Subscribe bandwagon as soon as they can, as a way to extend their journalists’ brands.
Meanwhile, news business consultant Alan Mutter laid out a basic plan for publishers to not just gain audience on Facebook, but make money there, too. The key element of that plan may be a surprising one: “The most intriguing and perhaps most productive approach for making money off Facebook, however, is for newspapers to take over the social media marketing and advertising campaigns for businesses in their markets.”
Reading roundup: Pretty slow week this week, but there were a few smaller stories worth keeping an eye on:
— As a sort of sequel to the Huffington Post’s OffTheBus effort in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Jay Rosen and NYU’s Studio 20 are partnering with the Guardian to determine and cover “the citizens’ agenda” in the 2012 election. Rosen and NYU will also be working with MediaNews and the Journal Register Co. on the local and regional level. At the Lab, Megan Garber explained what’s behind the initiative.
— The American Journalism Review published a piece on the journalistic ethics of retweeting that included news that the Oregonian is telling its reporters to consider all retweets as endorsements. The Journal Register Co.’s Steve Buttry rounded up (appalled) reaction and argued that editors should consider each case individually.
— Ten NBC-owned TV stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles will work with nonprofit news orgs (public radio in LA and Philly, and the Chicago Reporter and ProPublica) in a new initiative first reported by the LA Times.
— The popular iPad news aggregation app Flipboard launched for iPhone this week, and Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman drew lessons on mobile design for news orgs from it.
— The New York Times reported that most of the pack of would-be iPad competitors in the tablet market have fizzled out, though the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have gotten off to promising starts.
— Here at the Lab, longtime newspaper editor Tom Stites is in the midst of an interesting three-part series on the state of web journalism. Part one is a good overview of where we are and where we want to go, and part two looks at the wide-ranging effects of layoffs and cuts into local journalism.
Clay Shirky photo by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license.
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