its interesting to me that the organizations that should be combining as quickly as they can aren't.
What are the strongest news brands in this country ? Rupert Murdoch would tell you that the Wall Street Journal is at or near the top. You can put the New York Times,Washington Post and others up there as well.. You could probably put Time and Newsweek on the list as well. All are print.
For years the TV networks have spent billions on promotion, people and production to try to create a definable and sustainable brand that drives viewership. In the internet era, it hasn't worked as choice has significantly diluted their audiences.
Cable News Networks have tried to expand the market for news consumption, but really haven't grown beyond niche audiences, with 2mm viewers for any given program being a huge hit.
What I find interesting is how duplicative all their efforts are. Each of the above has a signifcant news departments with reporters out in the field looking to break stories or do a better job of reporting than their competitors, regardless of medium.
Riddle me this Batman: Rupert Murdoch has figured out that Print and TV can be combined to be a vertical news organization and is willing to pay 5 billion dollars to do it. Why has no one else realized the value of combining big news brands and organizations ?
Why isn't a CBS News merging their news department with a NY Times and rebranding itself as the 6pm NY Times News ? Or with Time Magazine News ? Or NBC News and ???
I recognize the arrogance factor. That each wants to be the defacto source of news in this country and lever what little editorial power they still have left (Does anyone other than the people who write editorials or are written about really read the editorials in newspapers these days ?). But its time to realize that drastic change is necessary and that ego needs to be put aside.
Put simply, a NY Times reporter with a camera crew can reach every medium available today. Right now any video that reporter captures is relegated to the net. Instead, that resource could be available to a network news department , the net, heck, even as part of a DVD series or to theaters as part of a weekly series. We would show it at Landmark Theaters.
News should be available to its customers in the medium that its customers demand, and in those customers don't even know they want yet. I know there has been many a time when i have read a Times story thinking that it would be interesting to see video to support the story. Why not ?
This post is a long way of saying that I think news is a unique opportunity still. But what is happening is that everyone is cutting back individual news operations rather than partnering to ramp up. Consumers dont need more brands, they need more indepth reporting of more stories.
Its time for convergence of mediums. The NY TImes 6pm News on CBS makes a lot more sense to me that teleprompter reading by talking heads with nice legs. As Dan Rather often says, its time for news "with Guts"
While on the topic of news, 2 quick thoughts:
1. One of the biggest all time product branding blunders in any business is newspaper columnists and reporters calling what they write on the web a blog. When you have a reporter in the field offering online updates and you call it a blog, you define them as peers of the many unwashed masses who post on a blog, myself included. Suzy and Don on myspace have a blog, and so does your intrepid reporter. Its not too late to come up with a name to brand what professionals call their timely infield updates. Its the only way you are going to differentiate your news organization from user generated content.
2. I was trying to remember the last time I heard a question from a sports reporter before or after a game or event when i thought to myself "What a great question". Why ?
Newspapers, TV and the Net - Its Convergence Time
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. For your questions 2, about the questions lobbed to coaches, players, etc, post game (and even pre-game) my assumption was that no tough or though-provoking questions are asked is because they are often the edgy comments, the ones that no one wants to answer for fear of saying something stupid.
In sports, writers and reporters need access in order to provide information to its readers......so, if they ask questions that are tough to answer or could require a player or coach to break league rules or team "rules" (how reffing affects the game, why they weren't ready to play, if they agreed with play-calling, etc.) they won't get answered.
And for the other spectrum of great questions, intricate strategy details, those don't fly with bosses because most of the readers/listeners have no idea what is being said, therefore it doesn't drum up any additional interest.
Quite simply, great questions either won't get answered or aren't sellable. Therefore, sports reporting is dumbed down.
Posted at 11:52AM on May 20th 2007 by David S
3. I think the model in academia for this is the Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and whatever their tv station is. It's been a few years since i was studying this in grad school, and I'm not in the field anymore, so I don't know if it's "working" or not.
Being a big sports fan, I go back to sports on this subject. Whenever I think of convergence, it reminds me of ESPN's Cold Pizza. I dunno if you ever watched it, but they spent a lot of time bringing in people from print media and putting them on camera to talk news. I spent a few years in television, and this tactic would make me sick. These newspaper people aren't trained to be on camera, and you can see their discomfort. They aren't good on camera, and you can see them react when the PAs tell them to smile; you can see them get flustered when they stumble over the prompter or their stories. I saw that they got rid of Cold Pizza, and renamed it FirstTake, but i dunno if it's the same show or not.
I think news departments can be combined, but you've still got to have those specialized people who are eye-appealing and trained to talk on camera.
This is another deal where you have to wait for the 'old-guard' to get out of the game before things really start to change. It's bound to happen eventually.
Posted at 12:25PM on May 20th 2007 by Scott Allen
4. Mark, Thought provoking ideas as usual. Interesting that today the San Francisco Chronicle says they are laying off 25% of thir newsroom staff. The San Jose Mercury News staff is less than half what it was 5 years ago. The newspapers are getting killed because they have failed to adapt.
The AOL/Time Warner merger was supposed to take advantage of the synergies you are suggesting. Time Warner had it all...raido, TV, Newspapers, magazines, books,, movies, music...everything. Combining all of this with AOL, the king of the online world at the time, was supposed to create amazing synergies. It didn't happen.
The San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper) has SFgate.com to cross promote and utilize content. KRON TV and Radio has also tied together content and promotion.
I think you are absolutley right. There is synergy...but the existing management teams have looked for it in all the wrong places. They have failed. It would take out of the box thinking to really make it work. Something you are very good at.
Even conventional thinking management could at least take advantage of cost savings available through mergers. It seems like there is a lot of duplication and overhead that could be sqeezed out in a roll up of news organizations.
Rupert Murdoch is the best in the business. It would be wise to watch very closely what he does. He has built Fox News and Fox Interactive into powerhouses, and bought MySpace before anyone else figured it out. Pretty smart guy.
5. In response to your:
"#2. I was trying to remember the last time I heard a question from a sports reporter before or after a game or event when i thought to myself "What a great question". Why ?"
One could also ask when was the last time a sports figure being interviewed actually gave an answer which one could say was "A great answer". I know, it is the chicken and egg scenerio, ask a great question and ye shall get a great answer. But then again, would it kill some to expand on an answer, to take a simple question and give it a terrific and honest answer? There are not that many Q and A sessions which are out of left field, less so during the play-offs as the coach or player will be all over the reporter asking the question. The reporter than is unable to get the inches of content needed to fill the space between the adverts in the next days newspaper.
I saw you on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch a while back, up until then I knew nothing of you as I was living in Japan for the last decade or so. All I did know was that you freaked out often enough and seemed to enjoy donating to the NBA BadBoy Fund. ESPN makes you known everywhere, sports really does glue of our world together. The answers and questions on The Big Idea were show-stopping, in the sense you were being honest, more than honest, to a point I felt there was no way Donald Trump would ever let us the viewer inside for a real look at the person. Not that I give a toss about DT, never have, never will. DT does not let us care, we only care about the less protected person, a human if you will. DT has a wall so thick and so high, we feel the journey is way too much aggro for too little pay-off. I said to my wife "Look at this guy (Cuban), he is being so honest and has no fear of being wrong. I like him. There is no way Trump would ever be this way". Thanks for the interview, thanks for being yourself and thanks for caring.
Cheers, Steve
6. will never happen. compnies that size, and deals of that significance, there are too many people to get in the way. everyone looking out for themselves, and their jobs. everyone will want credit AND control of the entire deal. they'd rather die on their own than live together.
Posted at 1:28PM on May 20th 2007 by Clark G
7. The NYTimes may be sold nationally, but it's still no better than the 4rd place newspaper in most markets, behind the local daily, behind USA Today, and behind another New York newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.
In the great flyover - which IS most of this country - viewers would automatically choose "World News Tonight" over the "New York Times News". There's already more coverage on national news when a fly burps in New York, Washington, Atlanta or Los Angeles than when 42 people flap their arms and fly over a barn in Billings, Montana.
We even have Rudy Guliani running for President, although nobody in the heartland can figure out why. His appeal seems to derive from 9/11, but he didn't do anything before 9/11 to prevent it, nor anything after 9/11 to fix it. Ron Paul gets it, but Rudy can't even be bothered to read a report to find out what happened.
It would be reasonable to use the "USA Today" brand on television news, I suppose, were USA Today to acquire a reputation for breaking news. I don't mean to insult USA Today. It does a nice job at what it does, which happens to be highly readable feature stories. It's simply not attempting to provide the same content as the evening news telecasts.
8. Here's a question for you. With TV, radio and Newspaper ad rates dropping like a rock....whats the future of invenue advertising rates...there was a time when big corps paid millions to be instadiums but now that it can be measured the rates can longer be justifed....where will the money come from in the future?
9. personally, I have not watched the evening news in at least 5 years. I get about 90% of my news from the net occasionally I read the wall street journal. I agree the journal is the better paper but it doesn't feature the range of stories that the NYTimes does.
Posted at 2:30PM on May 20th 2007 by superdave
10. Call real journalism blogs "Progs" - for Professional Blogs. It has the added advantage of being short for "programs" :)
Posted at 2:44PM on May 20th 2007 by Rob La Gesse
11. Why don't you encourage your NBA players to blog?
A "blog" isn't some special category of writing!
You don't have to BE someone or PORTRAY somesort of style with you writing!
Anyone can blog: Executives do time sheets, Teachers deliver class assignments, anchors do segments, journalists write articles, pro atheletes answer questions after the game.
A blog is merely simply an individual expression/documentation of content.
A feed is a string of blog entries.
A channel is a niche menu of searchable feeds to choose from and feature on your personal page.
A personal page is a representation of who a person is and a viewing point for all of their preferred feeds of interest.
A portal is a collection of peoples personal pages who connect because of a particular niche
Caller id, SSN, Email Adress, Myspace ID ## is a reference point colleagues use to connect with each other within a portal.
A front door is a menu of portals and/or channels of all niche interests.
Its much more than just owning the consumption points or "hardware" (print distribution business, movie theatre chains, flat panel television sales, tablet pc manufacturer, cell phone, highway billboards, etc..) you have to own the contribution/authoring/assembly mechinism as well!
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0407.turner.html
If you encourage your players to blog (video or text) freely without lesser regard to corporate concequence, then you have access to an additional set of valuable DRAMATIC content.
I could understand a "NO" in a private corporation but your team is publically featured in the mainstream media anyways.
Why not capitalize on the "feelings" they are sharing with that mainstream media anyways?
Broker your own ad relationship around it instead of dishing that $content$ out to the Newspaper guys?
Maybe the point you were trying to making about Journalism and blogging is that we don't need journalists to ask questions in order to portray the same information in a blog posting - you could just have the players post it up themselves
All they're answering after the game anyways is "what did you think of the game".
It would influence the "HDTV idea" I shared in the comment below earlier.
Posted at 3:13PM on May 20th 2007 by Ben McFerren
12. Newspapers as TV producers...aren't most newspapers now just a random collection of wire stories, a few ghostwritten 'celebrity' columns, a handful of pseudo politicos trying to gain influence and a tonne of advertising supplements?
I don't think it'll work for TV ;)
What has CNN got to gain from working with the NY Times? I'd argue both are held in the same regard by the general public.
Rupert Murdoch is a genius, he'll launch a WSJ orientated financial network and it'll be a success. He's got the scale and the financial niche is one of the best in TV, consistantly selling out the ad inventory.
NY Times? No brand value for CNN, nothing to gain.
Posted at 4:06PM on May 20th 2007 by Adam
13. "What I find interesting is how duplicative all their efforts are. Each of the above has a signifcant news departments with reporters out in the field looking to break stories or do a better job of reporting than their competitors, regardless of medium."
Bzzzt... wrong. Each of the above has a bunch of "journalists" who reprint press releases and other bits that are spoon-fed to them. Some have actual reporters that go out and get stories, delve for truth, etc., but at the end of the journalistic Alimentary Canal that most of us live at any actual reporting seems to happen by mistake.
What all of the above have in common are that they are in the content business and finding someone who can dig up a story and present it in a manner that's not as dry as the eyes in the courtroom at Paris Hilton's last sentencing are the two things that content companies hate: difficult and expensive. So we wind up with cheap filler - lazy retards that parrot each other and add their own "analysis" (the first two syllables being the operative part of that word) - a bunch of left-wing or right-wing flamebait to juice the content up a bit. Then, rather than actually discussing the event or information being reported on, the ongoing discussion is on the reportage itself, not what was being reported. I mean, how the hell else are you going to fill a newspaper or a cable news channel? You think that much real news actually happens in a day? I mean, news that the room-temperature-IQ "reporters" and Joe Bubba Jim Bob six-pack-of-beer (or Earth Moon Sunshine Peace six-pack-of-tofu) can actually 1) give a crap about, and 2) understand? Hell no. Much better to borrow from the good old Morton Downey Jr. school, but with military analysts and think tank geeks instead of pregnant trailer trash.
Want to make money in the news biz? You can either jump into that fray and join the race to the bottom (although I must confess I'd probably watch a show that involves Bill O'Reilly and Keith Obermann deciding issues by kicking each other in the balls over and over again), or you could create a news dead-tree / boob-tube / Web 2.0 hybrid that reports "just the facts ma'am" and lets those of us who occasionally exercise our brain cells between bar tabs work things out for ourselves. I know we're not the biggest market or anything, but I hope (for the sake of humanity) there's enough of us to make it worth pursuing.
Posted at 4:13PM on May 20th 2007 by Erik Carlseen
14. Newspapers should play to their strengths and go hyper-local to compete. Provide the best classified advertising rates, and make it easy to place and monitor ads online.
Local newspapers should be THE source for local search results...which I believe is The Next Big Thing in search. Take a look at CitySquares.com as an example of how to do local search right.
For more details see my blog http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/newspapers_need.html
15. Why brand professional blogs as something different at all. Why not simply call online reports “Online Reports.” I have the same expectations from a reporter if the story comes in the form of television report, newspaper article, or online update. So why differentiate a blog as something different and separate from a news organization’s other content?
Most news websites adhere to the strict standards of The Associated Press Stylebook (see newspaper style). Blogs are more informal and often take a conversational tone so it is obvious why print news wants to differentiate a reporter’s blog from a traditional story. Television news already strives toward conversational writing but still requires web reports to resemble the long-in-the-tooth print model.
There is a staff of web editors at most television stations who rewrite television copy for the web because the actual reporter who reported the story doesn’t have the time or has not been trained on how to post to the web. Who knows the details of a story better than the reporter who went and got the story?
Does the online audience care about such distinctions? If a reporter is giving me a timely update on a developing story, do I really care if it meets a strict formula? Tell me what is new and link back to the original story if necessary.
The Associated Press Stylebook is considered the Journalist’s Bible but has it changed with nature of the Internet? (I know, Blasphemy!) Blog writing is different from AP style because it utilizes the interactive and immediate nature of the web.
Online reporting is a new medium and will continue to develop it’s own distinct set of conventions over time. Until then, television producers and newspaper editors will call it blogging because they think of it as different from what they do.
Posted at 6:25PM on May 20th 2007 by Kyle Majors
16. WI agree with what you're saying Mark, but do the pols in Washington? Rumor has it that once Sam Zell completes his purchase of the Tribune, he may have to spin off WGN as whatever special dispensation the bureaucrats extended to the Tribune may not continue to its new owner?
I remember when Rupert Murdoch was forced to sell the Boston Herald over a decade ago, with Ted Kennedy berating Murdoch all along the way. The Herald hasn't been the same since.
When businesses look at what they do from the perspective of what the consumer wants, these convergences will come to the surface... with news, music, et. al.
mp/m
Posted at 7:40PM on May 20th 2007 by Mike Maddaloni
17. "When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts."
Posted at 9:29PM on May 20th 2007 by KindAndThoughtful
18. Why are blogs a "threat" in the first place? If there is a blog in a given local region that is pulling in a lot of readers why doesn't the local newspaper buy it out or offer the blogger a job? It seems like this is a great way to find good journalistic talent.
Posted at 9:58PM on May 20th 2007 by David L
19. The phrase "he has a face for radio" comes to mind. Likewise, there are plenty of super thoughtful writers that have terrible voices. When you think of news mainly as entertainment, each medium will have different stars. So I don't buy integration for cost savings. Perhaps to create a new value and interesting brand synergies, but not to wipe out overlap.
Posted at 10:55PM on May 20th 2007 by Brad Hutchings
20. Careful, Mark - advocating a further consolidation of opinion - especially in this country - is a very dangerous move (by you in particular).
We already have a glut of "lazy journalists" that a) don't leave the Green Zone, and take the Pentagon's word for it, b) copy Stephen A. Smith's take on anything east of the Mississippi, or c) follow the Rove/Snow direction for the "news" of the day.
I agree with you that we need a more integrated news-delivery service (broadcast + print + online). I disagree that the number of providers of this service should be reduced.
We already have hyper-consolidated entertainment/news industry: we the consumer are already devoid of contrarian thought. You know this: you started Broadcast.com and HDNet.
The bigger question is: how do we lower the entry costs of print and broadcast, so that those gaining traction online can more easily expand their reach?
Or will this simply work itself out evenutally anyway, especially in light of the online religion taking hold amongst the media execs?
Michael
Posted at 11:35PM on May 20th 2007 by Michael
1. While I agree it make sense (and cents) to integrate our various news medium vertically, it is likewise a scary though. The last thing we need is a smaller number of people controlling a larger percentage of our news. The current bias in news reporting renders it almost useless as it is. Thank god those unwashed masses are out there (however ineptly) attmepting to fill in the blind spots.
As to your comments at the end:
1) To me, it seems news outlets go out of their way to present Blogs to the public. They frequently spotlight the fact they have blogs on their homepages, no doubt hoping to attract the younger demographic advertisers crave.
2) I actually did a couple times this year in Mavs broadcasts, but I agree - the vast majority of question are bland, almoast literal rehashes of the same questions which have been asked repeatedly the last 25 years.
The most obvious answer is: sporting events are extremely repetitive in nature so one would expect the accompanying questions to be repetitive, as well. A baseball game is a baseball game is a baseball game. A basketball game is a basketball game is a basketball game. The names and situations change but the game itself largely remains the same. Every game has winners and losers; heroes and goats. Imagine how difficult it is to formulate new questions every game for 82 games in a row for an NBA season - year after year. Now, extend that imagination to baseball and it's 160+ games a year; year after year.
Finally, think about what happens if a reporter attempts to break out of the box on questions. First, the risk of asking a question deemed "out of bounds" by the scandal driven piranha-press increases exponentially. Second, if they ask a question the player thinks is too incisive, they risk that player's refusal to grant them interviews in the future.
The combination of all these factors results in the bland mush we get game after game.
Posted at 11:51AM on May 20th 2007 by Michael Brenner