Over on the Facebook, dude of awesomeness Peter Hocking shared Ted Nesi’s blog post about the continuing deterioration in the Projo’s circulation. Surprisingly, their web traffic is also down and down hard. Call it 30%.
You know me; I wrote a snarky comment about how newspapers have nobody but themselves to blame for their predicament. That comment raised the ire of one Linda Borg, a Projo journo. (That link is to Ms. Borg’s LinkedIn page. If you click her name on the Projo website, it opens an email to her instead of a profile page that would have a short bio and a listing of her work. That is nine different kinds of stupid. More on this later.)
Some of her not-particularly nice comments about yours truly inspired this post. And my point here is not to excoriate Ms. Borg, but to win her over to what I would call “a more modern way of thinking about these things”.
My Newspaper Website Bona Fides
As longtime readers might remember, I spent about a decade as an early employee and later as a consultant building up a newspaper services company that is well known at the Projo and its parent, Belo Corporation. Our goal was to help papers get more ads, but as the resident “netizen”, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to the papers what this wacky Internet thing was all about.
My short answer circa 2000: It’s your future.
The papers didn’t care for that answer or any of the follow-on advice I offered. They didn’t care for it one little bit. More than once conversations devolved quite badly.
Eventually, I gave up. Most of the webby types that try to engage newspapers end up in the same place. Clearly, the Internet – and particularly “Web 2.0″ – is a space that challenges virtually every core tenet of what it means to be “the paper of record”.
Newspapers and the Internet: A Brief, Skewed History
Granted, I’m not at all objective about this issue. I wanted to be the guy that taught newspapers how to be successful in the emerging, user-centric space that was known back then as Web 2.0. I was not, but neither was anybody else.
Here’s why: newspapers know everything. Including how to be successful businesses on the Internet. No matter how much data I brought to bear, no matter how many examples of proven, successful approaches I presented, the papers knew better.
They resisted mightily the concept of allowing “reader comments”. (Um, they’re called “users”.) And they positively ruled out the possibility of direct editor/journalist-to-user interaction. At best, they would implement the easily-gamed user voting form of moderation. Oh, and a lame ass and never enforced “be nice” note at the top of the comments.
The netizens predicted that newspapers that allowed unmoderated or lightly moderated commenting would rapidly devolve to a lowest-common-denominator form of discussion. Our experience from building, you know, the Internet told us that it takes tremendous effort to create a space where more-or-less intelligent, more-or-less civil conversation could occur.
NEWS FLASH: We were right.
The Cesspool
I’m virtually positive that my reference to newspaper website commentary as “The Cesspool” is what set off Ms. Borg’s relatively mild indignation. I did not coin the phrase but picked it up from a 2009 post by David Brauer, a Minneapolis alt-weekly reporter and blogger on the media scene out there. (For comparison, click Mr. Brauer’s name in the link. Three guesses what it opens…)
The cold, hard truth is that the term is apt. Newspaper commentary – unmoderated or lightly moderated – is a wretched, wretched space; no self-respecting netizen will wallow in it.
So it should come as no surprise that newspaper websites cannot aggregate any level of “stickiness”, that is time spent, pages per visit, etc. I have parsed a giant number of Audit Bureau of Circulation circulation reports, Newspaper Association of America reports, and pretty much any data source for newspaper performance. While they were able to grow unique visitors and numbers of visits, their engagement metric barely moved. (The image below is a chart from what looks like a late 2009 analysis I did. Overall NAA newspaper website performance for 2009 in a word: flat.)
And now, perhaps, the base metric – unique visitors – might be deteriorating as well.
I’m shocked. /sarcasm
Let’s Talk, Shall We?
Readers know that I’m not a big fan of the views of some of the commenters on RI Future, but I’ll give them all this: they’re here to debate. It ain’t always the most eloquent discussion, but at least it’s more-or-less smart people talking more-or-less on topic. And commentary here stands in marked contrast to that on the Projo site.
In all fairness, Projo’s commentary is better than, say, MarketWatch or the NY Post. But it’s not anything like what we have here or what we used to have on Urban Planet when that discussion forum was HAWT. (UP was the best discussion space I’ve seen in the PVD area. Woneffe, where have all the good times gone?)
The point is, there’s a well-known, easy-to-implement and documented, like, infinity times technique to creating a good conversation space. I can sum it up in one word: ENGAGE.
Odds are pretty much 100% that I will personally respond to comments on this post, and I certainly hope Ms. Borg is amongst the commenters. Other authors and our EiC Mr. Plain might be so good as to weigh in as well. It’s all to the good.
But the “professional” sites simply don’t allow editors, journos or other authors to participate in discussion. And because neither are they present to set the tone nor do they empower others to do so in their stead, they get what they get.
I don’t say this to be mean and I don’t say this in ignorance: the decisions that newspapers make about engaging on the Internet are directly responsible for their inability to thrive in a space where they should.
As Mr. Hocking says, “It’s heart-breaking.” If I seem cavalier and bitter, it’s because my heart was broken more than a decade ago.
I enjoyed this post because it confirms all of my biases. I view the traditional newspaper model the same way I view milk delivery of the 1800′s. Printing words on expensive rolls of paper every day and creating large, fuel and labor-intensive distribution networks to people’s doorsteps is pure madness to those of my generation who grew up with the internet and portable devices. Papers left on my doorstep by companies are a annoyance directed swiftly into the trash. The management of my building is then notified and usually holds the offender accountable for the trespass and collecting the remaining pamphlets before residents arrive home. Why anyone under 80 would actually pay a company to do something like this is unfathomable to me – almost as unfathomable as why anyone would pay $20 for a piece of plastic with a majority of songs they don’t want on it. To me, the decline of these models is an indication that decentralized consumer price mechanisms can do a remarkable job of weeding out the old, inefficient models and replacing them with the new and improved. The Projo was faced with the decision of evolving to the Internet Age or dying a slow, painful death. They chose the latter, and, as you point out, they are now fully getting what they deserve (the online pay model they now use is the industry equivalent of hospice care).
I understand that you probably have no real intention of persuading Ms. Borg and those of her industry, and your expressed hope to do so was likely a rhetorical device in the assistance of writing this piece, but if the contrary is true, then I would strongly recommend Dale Carnegie’s immortal classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, of which this piece and the practices described within it violate pretty much every tenet without exception. In full disclosure, I also regularly violate a number of Carnegie’s principles here but with the full understanding that doing so will neither win me friends nor influence other commenters (although readers could well be another story). In my professional life, however, I use it daily as my social Bible, and I attribute most of the successes I have had to following Carnegie’s advice to the letter.
You’re not the first to suggest this to me.
For the record, people still get milk delivered. Until they create a transporter, milk delivery will still have a potential market, however niche it may be.
I think the view of unmoderated user commenting really is accurately described as a “cesspool” and the Journal’s comments are the largest, rankest cesspool on Rhode Island’s web. There is some moderation there, otherwise they wouldn’t display like half of the comments they number (shows just how many are too terrible to let stay up).
What seems to happen is that we often get presented with a false dichotomy of allowing anonymous comments (and thus uninhibited filth) or making everyone use their “real” name via Facebook or something (thus using shame to prevent people from saying the most outrageous things). And it’s false because as you point out, it’s just a crappy workaround of actually doing moderation.
I come from a forum background, where all comments are anonymous and a team of moderators exist. Yes, a ton of comments are crap, but the quality comments shine through. And the really bad ones are not only openly mocked and derided, they’re moderated. Repeat offenders are banned. The appearance of lawlessness helps breed lawlessness, while on well-run forums, moderators are not only doing their jobs, they do it visibly.
Comment sections have drawbacks (such as long chains become cumbersome to look at), and one interesting alternative is to create a linked forum thread for each article.
Agreed. There’s really two halves to getting it right.
The first half is active moderation by moderators with tools to deal with the worst offenders.
But the more important half is setting the right tone by the majority of users. When there’s a high bar set, trolls tend not to want to play. You’ll get some, but not nearly as many. And, as you point out, particularly when EVERYBODY from “both sides” piles on down-modding them via tools or via text.
The point, though, is that the papers could be giant, active, thriving loci of conversation with record statistics for engagement and, thus, revenues.
“it’s because my heart was broken more than a decade ago.”
Try twenty years ago. Newspapers had already cut their own throats before the internet even came around.
David Simon’s pretty good on this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Llnbzq7b4Ww
Newspapers have always had huge profit margins, but in the early and mid-nineties they started to financialize. They took their profits to Wall Street and developed the business models that led them to gut themselves before the internet was a gleam in their eye.
It’s fine–and fun–to point out a failing of the newspapers special to the internet, like nasty comments, but, by the time comments became an issue, it was really all over but the cryin’.
Nonetheless, I have to say that I mightily enjoy reading the various cesspools around the nation. You get a sense of your countrymen available in few other places.
John, I’m sure you saw the front page story by your FACEBOOK sparring partner on May 2, 2012. That is the perfect example of hard hitting journalism, getting all sides of an issue in front of readers, especially on controversial subjects, that the Journal is known for. I am shocked after reading such a great example of in depth journalism that the readership of the Projo is plummeting; really, I can’t explain it, it baffles me.
Yeah, I read the Projo…
Good one, man!
Sorry John, you’re so close to the center of the problem, you don’t even realize you were a major part of it. Maybe if you had done a better job of explaining things to the “powers that be,” in the newspaper industry, instead of being your admittedly, “snarky” self, things would have been hunky-dory and we’d all be singing Kumbaya while chasing butterflies over rainbows.
If everything you were trying to convince the newspapers to do was perfect, why didn’t you go out and do it yourself? You could have been the new media Rupert Murdoch instead of a guy who loves to hear his voice, whether it be out loud or online.
Far be it from me to defend ProJo management, I worked for years trying to counteract the damage they did. However, I’ve worked with Linda and plenty of good people at the ProJo and I’m not going to let a long-winded, gas bag like you disparage them.
When I hosted a RIFuture meeting in my home, I sized you up pretty quickly. You’re the guy who has to be right, won’t ever admit he’s wrong and will argue your point ad infinitum; even if you can be proved most positively wrong. That’s why you advocate so hard for your unlimited comment model.
Answer me this though, how many advertisers are going to want to buy space on pages where open warfare could break out over an issue in the comments section?
Readership at the ProJo has declined because the paper has become little more than a spin machine for groups like EngageRI. Reporters who write balanced stories see them appear in print with whole parts edited out and key quotes removed.
You, on the other hand, are the guy spinning in the opposite direction. The irresistible force met the immovable object when you tried to advise the newspaper industry. I only wish I could have been there to witness the hilarity of those conversations; a roomful of know-it-alls with no one able to admit they were wrong. Now neither of you will accept responsibility for contributing to the death of an industry.