Daily Archives: February 15, 2008

NewzJunky.com is a warning shot for all newspaper publishers

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Howard Owens

In writing about NewzJunky the other day, I think I buried the lede.

It’s only deep into the post that I get to the point that NewzJunky.com has trounced, both in audience and volume of advertising (I have no idea what the actual revenue is) the local newspaper site.

That’s no small feat. I don’t know of any comparable event in online media.

I’m not sure that point has sunk in for many people.

If any readers know about another local newspaper getting beat by a direct local competitor, I would like to know about it.

As Jack Lail points out in the comments to the previous post, this is more than a pay-vs.-free story. It’s much more than that.

It demonstrates what a one-man operation, or small-staff in a small market, can do. A small staff is more nimble and usually comprised of people with an ownership stake in the venture (talk about motivation!).
It shows that you don’t need a big news staff to win the local market online. Many journalists take too much comfort in the notion that, “we have a big staff, so we have an advantage.” Have you seen the news about layoffs recently — a big staff in the future is by no means guaranteed. The other side, of course, is that a small, nimble, hard working staff can beat a bigger, more institutional, bureaucratic staff.
It shows that traditional local advertisers will defect to viable local online competitors, and it shows there is a greater hunger for local advertisers to reach a local audience than many local sales staffs can admit. I’ve heard from many small publishers who say, “Our advertisers are not yet interested in online.” Bunk.
It shows that users will flock to a site where they can make their own local news contributions, and they value the contributions of other users.
It challenges traditional notions about design and usability — what matters is content, both in width (not necessarily depth, which is not the competitive advantage many editors assume it is) and frequency.
There are a lot of people in our communities who hate our guts — read some of the comments on the previous post … they will sound strangely familiar to people who have been in the business a while. Give those people an under-dog outlet to rally around, and they might just become the instigators of an inflection point.
It demonstrates perfectly how disruption works — delivering a product that is just good enough to take customers away from incumbent players, and that disruption can come in many forms.

While in the NewzJunky.com vs. WatertownDailyTimes.com race, the newspaper’s former pay wall may have been a huge help to NewzJunky winning the race (for now — the race, of course, is not over), but newspaper.com publishers should not take too much comfort in the fact that they offer their content for free. There is an element of the NewzJunky story that demonstrates that any newspaper.com is susceptible to disruptive competition.

On the other hand — this is just one event. Currently, I’m reading Fooled by Randomness. The lesson of that book is just about any outcome in inevitable. Warren Buffet, the guy who gets all of his trades right, is inevitable, given the millions of traders who have tried, and it is probably inevitable that at least one local start-up will beat an incumbent media leader.

Still, I’m not sure newspapers can afford to take too much comfort in the vagaries of randomness.

This is a much bigger story than just a couple of blog posts. Is the sort of thing the trade press should examine more fully. Let’s see if they do.

UPDATE: I stumbled across Quantcast months and months ago, and then lost the link and couldn’t remember the name of the site … thanks to a friend, I just found it again. Relevance here, some confirming evidence that NewzJunky.com is indeed trouncing WatertownDailyTimes.com. Again, NewzJunky’s audience is twice the size of the Daily Times. Amazing. Continue reading →

Tagged competition, disruption, newspapers, newspapes, watertown | 2 Comments

Webcasts are hard to produce well, harder still to make a hit

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Howard Owens

Long ago, I disavowed my former praise of TimesCast.

As I dove deeper into web casts, I found a number that were stunningly good, and realized the bar was much higher for episodic video than daily news video. If you want people to watch the same show every day or every week, it better be good. An audience will forgive less technical and product quality for something they’ll watch only once for a minute or two, but to keep them coming back for an episodic show of three-to-six minutes, it needs to be good.

Webcasts are something where good enough isn’t good enough. They need to be good. Period.

Examples of good:

What do the good have in common:

Great production values
A well defined, and consistently followed theme (focus)
Interesting content
Great on-screen talent that delivers the content in a personal, engaging manner (not like TV’s robotic anchors)

So far, I don’t know of any newspaper webcast production that hits on all four attributes — many hit on none of them. The best of the lot, Miami Herald’s What the Five and Naples News Studio55 suffer from less-than-personal on-screen talent. The hosts on What the Five come across as a morning radio team dropped unexpectedly in a video studio, and Studio55 tries too hard to be TV.

And if I wanted to take the time — and be that insulting — I could surf around and find links to many truly horrid newspaper webcasts.

The most common fault is either trying to be like TV, or trying to shoehorn the newspaper (“Let’s read the headlines and ledes on camera!”) onto video. There is also the problem of putting people on camera who have no business on camera, or at least need a lot more training and coaching before they should be doing this professionally.

(I should mention, there is another class of webcasts — the lone reporter who has camera and access to YouTube and one day goes, “I’m going to make a news cast!” These productions rarely make it past the third episode before the reporter loses interest, but I applaud the entrepreneurial, willing-to-experiment-and-learn attitude. We need more of that in our industry.)

It’s not just newspapers that get it wrong, either. There are supposedly professional video companies trying to enter the webcast/video podcast space, and their results can be just as bad.

Consider Fountain Head Studios — supposedly a serious effort to produce great webcasts, and every one of their efforts so far fail miserably (hat tip to NewTeeVee). Compare Stock Rockets, for example, to WallStrip … clearly a ripoff attempt, but it suffers painfully from bad writing and bad talent and lacks WallStrip’s defined theme, except in a broad, unfocused way (it’s about stocks, not about stocks with an interesting story to tell in an interesting way). All of Fountain Head’s shows demonstrate the same lack of clear focus, plus poor writing and less than stellar hosts.

Let that be a lesson to you.

If you’re going to do a webcast, you should spend the money and take the time to get it right. You may get only one shot at getting right — and as music and television producers will tell you, it may take hundreds of shots to find one hit — this is tough stuff. Continue reading →