Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Tuesday Q&A: Globe and Mail Publisher Phillip Crawley on the paper’s paywall plans Posted: 16 Oct 2012 12:00 PM PDT
On Monday, the paper unveiled Globe Unlimited, a digital subscription plan that follows what should be a familiar model now in newspapers: A metered allowance for free stories (10), a monthly all-digital subscription, free access for print subscribers, and a doggie-door for people coming in through social media. When I spoke with Phillip Crawley, publisher of The Globe and Mail, he characterized most paywalls as “a fairly desperate act” for newspapers that don’t evaluate what content or utility they offer readers. National and business coverage is the cornerstone of The Globe and Mail’s work, Crawley said, and with Globe Unlimited they can deliver the news in more effective, personalized ways. In our conversation Monday, Crawley also spoke about the need for media companies to gather better data on their users in order to provide better service and improve the quality of advertising. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation. Justin Ellis: Tell me a little about the research The Globe and Mail did before launching this new digital subscription plan. A lot of newspapers are trying to implement their own model, but they all point to the success of The New York Times. What did you find out about your audience in particular? Phillip Crawley: Obviously, we’re very aware there are probably hundreds of newspapers now in the U.S.A. and Canada who are trying to make digital paywalls work, and my view is that many of them will not work — because, quite simply, the content that they’ve locked behind the paywall is not going to be compulsive enough to make people want to pay. I think they’re throwing up the paywall as a fairly desperate act, given the failing nature of their business on other fronts. We have done some research over the last year particularly — this has been under development since summer of last year, — and we conducted quite a lot of reader research. We have a pretty well identified reader group. We know where to go to get some honest opinions from our audience, and we were asking questions in terms of willingness to pay — what it was they might be willing to pay for, what their price sensitivity was, whether they were digital-only users or whether they were people who were print subscribers who might also be interested in a digital delivery system. A number of large players are currently either about to, or just decided to, go down this route. And I think the success that The New York Times is claiming for its paywall has influenced a lot of people, in the sense they keep coming up with results on a quarterly basis, which indicates some sustained growth. And that’s helping their share price, for sure. Ellis: You mentioned companies wanting to increase their digital revenues. What’s the state of your digital revenues right now — where they are coming from, what areas specifically you want to see grow, what you want to experiment with? One thing I noticed is you guys are beefing up your business offerings. Crawley: What we’ve been very conscious of is that the Globe for many people is their go-to source for business news in Canada. We’ve had that reputation for a long time. We’ve had a number of successful websites delivering content — some free, one paid. We’ve had a digital subscription revenue stream for 10 years plus. We have a site called GlobeInvestorGold, which is effectively a high-end investor site. That’s been running for the last decade. People pay a monthly subscription and they get real-time data, they get high-end business content analysis. People who have been our subscribers there are people who are serious investors, both amateur and professional. They use GlobeInvestorGold as a way to track what is happening with their stocks. They put their stock portfolio on the site and it gives them alerts. One of the things we will do once we’ve introduced the paywall next Monday is we’ll strengthen that offering. We’ll provide more insight, more analysis, and bring in material from other sources other than The Globe and Mail.
We feel we’re bringing together some high quality content from a variety of sources so that people who are interested in interpreting what’s going on in the market, getting background, more than just the headlines, will be able to find a lot of this in one place. They will be able to organize this content. We’ve got a very good new tool called Dashboard, which will allow you to personalize your screen whether its a desktop or a laptop, a BlackBerry or a smartphone, or an iPad. So it’s like a newspaper. People pay for the utility of having the newspaper delivered to their doorstep. They’re prepared to pay for that service. And we believe people will also pay if you make the digital content easily accessible on whatever screen they happen to be using at one time, because a lot of our customers have multiple screens, obviously. Ellis: What impact do you think this will have on online readership? Most newspapers who have done this have said they estimate some sort of drop as a result of the change to the paywall. I’m wondering if you guys have a figure or a percentage in mind, or if you think it won’t effect you. Crawley: What we’ve seen is that, again, if you quote the example of The New York Times, they claimed that post-paywall traffic has suffered less than 10 percent. As you know, the Times site is porous from a social media point of view — people can access it in a multiplicity of ways. We are obviously going to monitor this very closely. Digital ad revenue has been an important growth area for us over the last 10 years, but that’s changing very rapidly too. In the last couple of years, the advent of ad networks, of real-time bidding, the way a lot of web inventory is being commoditized — effectively the line rates are being driven down. It has changed the way we look at digital advertising. We had probably 10 years where digital advertising just grew and grew on the back of banner ads and so forth. That’s no longer the case. We need different solutions. The Globe is actually just launching — we were down in New York a week or so ago — in partnership with The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Thomson Reuters, we’re launching an ad network of our own to deal specifically with the issue of how to create quality inventory at a price that isn’t being driven down and down to a dollar. We believe in premium quality, that’s what we believe in terms of our inventory as well. That is also going on at the same time as we want to maintain the kind of traffic levels and growth that we’ve had. Over the last couple of years, the increase in the consumption of our content on smartphones, on tablets, has been enormous. We’ve just seen a really big uplift in that. It’s less clear, in some cases, how that is going to convert into serious dollars. As you know, digital dollars are in many ways smaller than print dollars. But we do see terrific growth in the consumption patterns of people wanting to consume in this particular way. So we feel we have to recognize that in the way we offer our offerings to the reader. Ellis: In the new digital subscription plan, if you’re already a full print subscriber you get unlimited access to the online offerings and apps. But weekend-only subscribers will have to pay over the top to get access to the web. Some papers have done that in the U.S. as well. Why have that additional price to pay versus raising the price and combining access with the print subscription? Why differentiate?
Crawley: We obviously feel if you are a five- or six-day subscriber, you’re already paying a decent price for your subscription to get your paper delivered. So we’re giving those people — and that’s the hardcore of our subscriber base is that five to six days, that’s the majority of them — we’re giving them a free ride effectively into Globe Unlimited. We’re not doing the same for the person who only buys one or two days a week. We’re asking them to pay $4.99 a month, and we believe that’s a pretty modest extra for getting this. But we’re also mindful of the fact we can bundle print and online together. I’m sure you know The New York Times story: the claim that they have seen an uptake in New York Times Sunday paper subscriptions since they bundled it with their digital offering. People who were previously just digital only have now signed up to take the Sunday paper. So they are seeing a lift in their traditional print sales at the same time they are seeing growth on the digital side. Our feeling from taking the surveys we’ve done of our readers, there’s a strong loyalty — a lot of our subscribers have been with us for a long time. The majority have a predilection towards having a print version as well as a digital delivery option. So this is not an either/or choice — this is “as well as.” What we see is a willingness to pay when it is made convenient and easy to do, and that you don’t have to have three or four different screens with three or four different setups. Everything works the same if you’ve got the kind of delivery that we are offering. Ellis: One thing publishers talk about a lot when they create paywalls is authenticating the existing print subscribers — pushing them to connect their print and digital identities for online access. Why is that so important? Is it simply a matter of getting more information on your customers? Crawley: Every media company with ambitions for the future, rather than just managing downwards, is looking to improve its ability to both collect, interpret, and use data to help them in the market. We will be spending many millions of dollars over the next couple of years on creating the capability, both with people and systems, that will enable us to not only gather the data in a better way, connect the dots together, and then take it back to the clients, the advertisers, the agencies and say, “Here’s the kind of behavioral data that you’re looking for.” The agencies are increasingly bored with looking at simple readership or circulation numbers. They want the kind of behavioral tracking data that they can get from people like Google. As an industry the newspaper business, the media business, whether you are in TV or newspapers, you need to be able to assemble more intelligent data. That is a big push for us and we will certainly be expecting to have a richer set of data as a result of this. Ellis: One of the things that differentiates papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, in terms of their paywalls, is the makeup of their audience. They have broader audiences outside of a city or town — it’s a national audience, and with the Journal a business audience. What’s the makeup of the Globe’s audience? Crawley: One of our principal advantages is our audience, because we have a position where we reach a lot of the high-income, high-education people in Canada. We’re a national newspaper, we have a national audience, and as a result of that we are attractive to advertisers, because we can deliver an audience of people who have a high household income. We have more people with a household income above $150,000 who have at least one degree. In other words, an affluent, educated audience who are prepared to spend. That’s what’s been appealing to our advertisers. We believe with the kind of audience we’ve and can reach on a national basis, that if we collect more data on that audience from a digital point of view, a digital behavior point of view, consumption patterns and how people respond to ads — that strengthens our story. We believe this is an important advantage to us by being able to paint a better picture of that audience. We already have lots of data, but we increasingly recognize that what we’ve got to do is bring it all together, synthesize it, interpret it, take it back out to the market. Ellis: Here in the U.S., papers with paywalls are seeing different levels of success. Gannett is rolling out their paywalls here, and up there the Postmedia group launched digital subscriptions for their papers. With The Globe and Mail joining in now too, what effect do you think it has on readers to look around the media environment and see there are more of these paywalls going up? Crawley: I think they’re going to come to terms with the fact that if you want quality content, quality content comes because you keep spending money on quality journalism. We’re opening up a bureau in South America, ready for the events that are going to unfold there in the next few years — the World Cup, the Olympics, but also because there is a lot of Canadian business investment in South America, particularly on resources and mining. We think it’s a place we should have a bureau. We’ve expanded our network of bureaus around the world at a time when lots of other newspapers have been cutting back on their basic newsroom coverage. They’ve cut back on local councils, they’ve cut back on coverage of the arts — they’ve cut back on lots of things, and the readers have noticed. To my point at the beginning, if you go behind a paywall and find really nothing that you can’t find anywhere else, clearly I don’t think you’re going to keep paying for it. You have to be convinced there is something really worth having. |
| Robert Steiner: In Toronto, we’re dumping the j-school model to produce a new kind of reporter Posted: 16 Oct 2012 07:03 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: Students are back at journalism programs around the country. As the media industry continues to evolve, how well is new talent being trained, and how well are schools preparing them for the real world? We asked an array of people — hiring editors, recent graduates, professors, technologists, deans — to evaluate the job j-schools are doing and to offer ideas for how they might improve. Here Robert Steiner, director of the Fellowships in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, talks about the different model that he’s trying — turning experts into journalists rather than journalists into experts. In its series of pieces on journalism education, the Nieman Journalism Lab raised two of three ideas that could really change the field. The first, from Len Downie: Journalism schools should work more like teaching hospitals. The second, from CNN Digital's Meredith Artley, is that specialists in certain beats are getting hard to find. But the breakthrough comes in melding those two ideas to a third: The world now belongs to freelancers. With that, you have a new kind of journalism education now in its first month at the University of Toronto. Our Fellowship in Global Journalism deliberately recruits subject-matter experts — academics and professionals — and teaches them to break news in their own disciplines for media around the world. Like medical students, our Fellows spend only a couple of hours a day in class. They spend most of their time working their own beats as stringers for major media; those are our so-called teaching hospitals. Our fellows don’t get homework; they pitch, report and file to newspapers like The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Dallas Morning News, and The National Post; to broadcasters like CBC News and to specialty news agencies like the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust.org. They don’t have professors; they have journalism coaches in the University and editors on the desk. They don’t get marks; their stories either run, or get spiked. They don’t get a degree; they don’t need another degree. This year’s fellows include two young professors, three PhDs, a lawyer, a former advertising executive, a former development aid professional, an architectural designer, and a Middle East specialist. Instead of producing a degree, the eight-month program helps them generate reporting networks, clips, sources and a running start to a freelance career for media around the world. Most importantly, this doesn’t happen at a j-school. The University of Toronto ranks high among the world's research universities but we have no traditional journalism school to reform. The fellows in Global Journalism sit in the Munk School of Global Affairs, just down the hall from other students preparing for international careers in public service, development, law, science, and business. Like so much else in journalism now, this is an experiment. So far, it's working. Big papers and broadcasters jumped on board to help us get it off the ground. After two weeks of boot camp, our Fellows are beginning to think like journalists. Their story ideas make me sit up, and they have an early flair for interviewing. They're also feeling all the anxieties about accuracy and deadlines that plague the rest of us. The idea began three years ago, when some colleagues asked me about the future of journalism education. I was assistant vice president of the university at the time, but had spent my early career as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. I'd never gone to j-school, and was so removed from the discussions about reform that I had no idea the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation were on their way to investing almost $20 million in the same question at that very moment. For a month, I scanned the curricula of major j-schools around the world and compared them to changes in the way reporters worked since I'd left the Journal for business school at Wharton in 1997. The gaps between curriculum and practice floored me. J-schools were teaching generalists, but the healthiest media companies were going after niche audiences. (And a one-term j-school course in, say, “science for journalists” was not enough to turn produce a knowledgeable specialist.) J-schools were preparing students to work in newsrooms, but newsrooms were shedding reporters and hiring freelancers. Freelancers, in turn, were saturating their local markets; but one specialized freelancer could become a go-to stringer for media in a dozen markets around the world. Students in traditional j-schools still expected to “learn by doing” journalism in their summer internships, the way I had as a political science student in the 1980s and 1990s. But few editors have time to teach interns anymore. So we set out to create something completely different. We'd recruit real specialists, instead of trying to teach a specialty to generalists. After one month of boot camp, we'd put them right into real media, rather than lock them in class for eight months before an internship. We'd coach them while they worked, rather than dump the teaching job on busy editors. And we wouldn't prep them for staff jobs. We'd teach them to juggle one lead string with six or seven secondary strings in other markets around the world. Those differences forced us away from the old path in other ways. Newspapers, broadcasters and web services are our teaching partners — they help us design and even deliver a curriculum that supports their journalism. We teach core writing, broadcast, web and mobile journalism skills. But our curriculum emphasizes global news judgment. Traditional journalism students get assignments; ours must hunt for stories that will play well in markets around the world, defend them to me and another former foreign correspondent at a weekly story meeting, and then pitch them to their lead string. To help our fellows stay on top of their beats, we've embedded them in the broader university. We've introduced each student to a dozen top researchers in their own field elsewhere on campus. Political scientists at the Munk School, including Michael Ignatieff, deliver a seminar series on current developments in global affairs. And a clinician in our faculty of social work will teach the lost art of deep interviewing; the way she teaches therapists to spend an hour probing complex issues with patients. At some point along the way, I realized we were bridging the values of a Wall Street Journal bureau, circa 1997, to the working world of 2012. Boot camp ended on September 28. By October 6, two of our Fellows had already been published in major media. Santiago Ortega wrote about the U.S. presidential candidates' positions on climate change for Alertnet.org (a site of the Thomson Reuters Foundation), and Stephen Starr wrote about the Syrian National Council for Canada's National Post (paywall protected; here’s a more recent piece). Others are now digging out unreported news on major changes in urban development, police oversight, and environmental regulations, among other topics. They're nervous. Restless. Pumped when a pitch goes great. Anxious when the next one doesn't. "Riding a roller coaster," as one Fellow told me recently. So far, so good. Munk School photo courtesy the University of Toronto. |
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