The State of the Media report, released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, has good news and bad news for newspapers.
Newspaper websites are popular. But ad revenue is tiny compared to print. Worse, subscriptions for on-line editions are a tough sell when “free” news abounds.
According to the report, newspaper ad revenue fell 26 percent last year. US newspapers are spending 1.6 billion dollars less annually on reporting and editing than they did a decade ago.
Newspaper staffs continued to shrink in 2009. We estimate with colleague Rick Edmonds that by year’s end 5,900 more full-time newsroom jobs were lost, disproportionately at larger papers, on top of a similar number in 2008. Roughly a third of the newsroom jobs in American newspapers in 2001 are now gone, and those cuts come particularly in specialty beats like science and the arts, suburban government and statehouse coverage.
Ex-newspaper editor Steve Woodward (right) is optimistic about the future. He’s the CEO of Nozzl Media, formed in Portland in 2008, by journalists and programmers who worked at the Oregonian newspaper. Nozzl’s real-time streaming widget combines news stories, social media, public records and blogs into a constantly updated news flow. It can be embedded on a Web page (and soon) on a smart phone or tablet.
Keyword filtering manages the firehose. You narrow the stream by topic, city or zip code. Just the news you want. When you want it. Live.
Nozzl Media’s proprietary software scours local staff stories, as well as blog posts, Twitter posts, photos, videos, podcasts and other user-generated content. The software also analyzes electronically available public records, such as property sales and licensing databases. It detects new records and adds those to the reservoir.
The content — news and advertising alike — flow out in a real-time river. Bite-sized headlines, images, links and other short-content forms. The video demo (below) was a little sluggish, likely due to a slow cellular connection.
Woodward chatted with Dailywireless editor Sam Churchill last week and provided additional email correspondence (below):
Dailywireless: How was Nozzl conceived?Steve Woodward: In 2008, Steve Suo, a reporter at The Oregonian, began to work in his spare time with developer Brian Hendrickson to design software robots that could examine online government databases, analyze their structures and suggest strategies for extracting their contents. At the same time, Hendrickson, who had worked in the IT department at The Oregonian, was working on his own side project: OpenMicroBlogger.com, which is the Internet’s second leading open-microblog network software after Identi.ca. In March 2009, Suo and Hendrickson, plus Greg Griffiths and I, decided to form a company that would combine the two concepts — public records gathered by robots and pushed out to end users in a real-time stream via microblogging technology.
Dailywireless: Did the vision, the technology and the market change over time?
Steve Woodward: Yes, yes and yes. The vision evolved from being strictly a technology company to becoming a media company. Rather than just selling software, we would also deliver content, including news feeds, blogs, social media and other content not originally envisioned with the database robots.
Also, we decided to develop the delivery system specifically for smartphones to take advantage of their geo-locational capability. As a result, we began to develop a mobile-web version of the real-time stream that would work on any browser-based platform. But after a couple of months of work, we put the mobile version on the back burner while we created a web widget. That sounds crazy at first. But it was the result of changing markets.
Dailywireless: Who’s the target market?
Steve Woodward: Our primary market is print news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and trade publications. Second is broadcast news. Third is commercial customers with a need for real-time, targeted information, such as political campaigns, lobbyists and professional sports organizations.
Dailywireless: What’s the business model?
Steve Woodward: Our revenue model consists of an upfront commitment fee from the news organization, plus a perpetual 20 percent share of all advertising revenue sold by the news organization’s advertising staff in connection with our product.
So, for instance, a newspaper might pay us a $10,000 commitment fee, after which we acquire content and use it to create a stream of information that the paper displays on its website or on a mobile-phone browser. The paper’s advertising staff then has three distinct opportunities to sell ads: in the stream itself (stream ads), anchored to the web widget or mobile page (sponsorship ads), or appear on the landing page that is generated by clicking on any individual item (landing-page ads).
For customers that do not sell advertising, such as nonprofits and political campaigns, we charge an upfront commitment fee, plus a monthly subscription fee.
Dailywireless: How will newspapers be different in 5 years?
Steve Woodward: Five years is a long time, but we can make some educated guesses. The print newspaper as we now know it will largely be gone, replaced by stories and multimedia news on portable tablets such as the iPad. Once the price of the iPad and its inevitable competitors comes down low enough to spark widespread consumer adoption, online and paper versions will begin to merge onto this single digital platform. Tablets also will eliminate the conventions of the 24-hour news cycle, which was based on the need to run a press once a day so that news could be delivered to customers at a given time.
Much harder to envision is what reporting will look like in five years. I don’t think the demise of print newspapers necessarily leads to the demise of good journalism. It just means that non-mainstream journalists — community bloggers, nonprofits, advocacy groups, freelance political journalists, etc. — will probably supplement and even improve on much of the work now done by major metro daily papers.
I’m an optimist. I still believe the best that journalism has to offer lies in our future, not our past.
Nozzl Media has a live demo and Twitter feed. ReadWriteWeb has an early review. Digital Journalism Portland and Oregon Media Central cover the local news beat.
The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news site, was launched last November to cover statewide politics. Editor in Chief Evan Smith was interviewed by Paid Content about the transition from magazine to web journalism, how Facebook and Twitter can—and should—be used for news.
Related Dailywireless stories about newspapers in the 21st century include; Tablet News, Mobile News via Paid Apps, Producing Olympic Multi-Media, HyperLocal: There’s an App for That, Neighborhood News: Big Time in Seattle, Coming Soon: Tablet Wars, Ocean Observatories: The Ultimate Splash Page, Rental Bikes: Free with Location-based Apps?, Comix As Life, Tablets and Three Bears, Apple Launching Pad, Kindle Announces 70% Royalty Option, NY Times Announces Pay Model, Apple Tablet: Change Agent?, Free Television: R.I.P.?, Handmark: Mobile News R Us, Google’s Real Time News, Hulu for Publishers Announced, Driveway Moment, Smartphone News Formats Enhanced, iPhone App Goes Live, AP & Verve Go Moble, iPhone App Builders for Dummies, Chrome OS: The Net Computer, Kindle for PC, Mobilizing WordPress Blogs, Zoo Apps, Apple Tablet Confronts Publishers, E-Books from Sony, Asustek & MSI, Marvell Chip for $100 eBooks, Book War, The Ides of Newspapers , Rocky Mountain News: Final Edition, RCR Wireless News: R.I.P., News Innovation BarCamp, Andreessen on Charlie Rose, Kindle 2: Slimmer, Smarter, Android Market: Open for Business, Google: Free E-books for Mobiles, The Magic Bus, E-Ink Makes News, Bloomberg News: Local Contractor?, Columbian Newsmap, Web-based News Operations, Jeff Jarvis: It’s Journalists’ Fault, Verve: Newspaper Salvation? and CNN’s News Bureau in a Bus.
