Andrew Sullivan on Watching Old Media Die December 8, 2008

Last night while checking my RSS feeds, I saw this TimesOnline column by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, about the looming death of print newspapers. Pretty timely given the latest torrent of bad news coming from the world of legacy media companies: Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, filing for possible bankruptcy this week; The New York Times borrowing up to $225 million against the value of its mid-Manhattan headquarters building; McClatchy looking for a buyer for The Miami Herald; and E.W. Scripps Co. selling the Rocky Mountain News.

UPDATE: (Within a few minutes of going live with this post, I received word that the Tribune Co. is filing for bankruptcy. Another one bites the dust. UPDATE 2: Given the company’s almost $13 billion of debt along with declining local tv and newspaper ad revenues, it’s a tough road ahead for the Tribune Co. )

Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, gives the history of his blog as to why bloggers hold such an economic advantage over these legacy media companies, despite the best efforts of these companies to beef up their websites:

“To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.”

Will large newspapers, even if offered online-only, survive? Only time will tell. But I also agree with Sullivan that blogs are not a complete substitute because most blogs don’t have the budgets and staff to do in depth reporting (Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post are notable exceptions), and often rely on traditional media sources to back up an opinion or issue. Add this to the tremendous loss to the public discourse and it will be a sad day indeed, should only a few media companies manage to survive.

Web Analytics: Time to Get on Board October 27, 2008

Last week I was at the DC eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the premier marketing conference attracting the best and brightest in web analytic and marketing people in corporations, government agencies, media and everywhere else.

This year’s theme was “Tough Times Call for Tough Measures: Increase the Effectiveness of Every Marketing Dollar” or how to create the most ROI for tight marketing budgets squeezed by the downward economy. While traditional market spend is down, online spend is up as reported in a recent MarketingProfs survey showing 60% of all marketers surveyed said they would be increasing their online budgets while 85% would be reducing their use of traditional marketing vehicles.

Even in light of increased online budgets, your boss wants to know that a dollar spent online will result in three dollars earned. How are they going to know? Web analytics. (WAA definition: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for understanding and optimizing Web usage.)

Even in revenue-challenged businesses such as the newspaper industry, CEOs are realizing the value of informed business decisions based on web analytic metrics. James Robinson, Director of Web Analytics, The York Times, talked about starting just over a year ago with one person doing web analytics; now they have five staffers and are looking to add two more. They use web analytics to decide on print run numbers, boost subscription revenue, product development, and identification of most-read stories and sections. In a geeky cool move, after big news events such as Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance address to the GOP convention, Robinson’s staff sends out a one page Web Analytics Bulletin to key personnel, charting online change.

Web analytics is experiencing exponential growth, both in new and improved analytic tools (Goggle Analytics just launched seven new features) along with increased buy-in from company and organizational stakeholders. In a dimmed economy, the future for web analytics and the powerhouse revenue value it can bring to companies and organizations is dazzling. Time to get on board!

Blogging Goes Mainstream… again October 19, 2008

I’ve been a blogger since 2003 and so have used blogs for years as an information bridge between old and new media for searches. What seemed to make perfect sense to me back in 2003, apparently has finally become fully embraced by mainstream media, according to eMarketer senior analyst, Paul Verna.

In his story, Blogging Becomes Mainstream, Paul Verna writes that “blogging has become so pervasive and influential that the lines between blogging and the mainstream media have disappeared,” noting a Technorati-sponsored State of the Blogosphere 2008 survey conducted in July and August 2008 by Decipher. The survey’s comScore Media Metrix blog numbers come in at 77 million unique visitors in the US in August 2008, compared with 75.1 million unique visitors to MySpace and 41 million to Facebook. In July 2008, comScore ranked two blogs — OMG and TMZ — as numbers 1 and 2 in their list of the top 10 entertainment sites.

In an interview with eMarketer, Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati said, ‘Blogs are now mainstream media. We’ve certainly seen that with the number of professional, semiprofessional and passion/enthusiast bloggers who are creating real media experiences. At the same time, you’re also seeing mainstream media come the other direction to add blog content.’

These days, looking at the sites of mainstream media heavyweights such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, you readily see the truth of Jalichandra’s words. Both sites have digitally exploded with in-house blogs [NYT: 63; WaPo: 85] that cover huge readership segments in news, lifestyle and opinion with brand extension to outside blog content via blog rolls and featured blog posts. Mainstream media’s first tentative steps into blogging just a few short years ago have become a stampede — paying dividends in more content variety for readers and higher traffic stats for the company bottom line.