(Read some reactions to this post below.)

The US single day front pages featuring the same photo of Elizabeth Rose, a specialist at the Lehman Brothers, prove what a commodity the news becomes nowadays.

UK Guardian’s blogger Roy Greenslade writes in his weekly column at the London Evening Standard:

”The collapse of Lehman Brothers was a fact, as was Merrill Lynch’s sale and the US government’s rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What matters more, much more, is the analysis and the commentary to make those facts understandable.”

These are the simplest questions that should be asked, even if the answers are the hardest to investigate:

• Why has it happened?
• What can be done?
• What does it mean to us all?

(And many newspapers miss even asking these questions, so as Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Media Consulting writes, we get ”macro-financial news that readers don’t care and don’t understand.”)

Greenslade gives an example that some readers are happy to pay for the quality and updated comment. It is the Breaking Views website that charges 15,000 subscribers and has a very loyal readership (renewal rate is 95%). It is a niche website, but also a very interesting case.

”Breakingviews.com is a London-based website that publishes short analyses by 25 expert commentators based in London, New York, Paris, Washington, San Francisco and Madrid.

Its online content is also reproduced in print columns in many of the world’s most influential daily newspapers, such as France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El Pais and Germany’s Handelsblatt. Until recently, the column also featured in the Wall Street Journal and WSJ Europe. That arrangement came to an end after Rupert Murdoch’s takeover.”

[New York Times as well as the UK Daily Telegraph have just announced they will carry Breaking Views' columns].

Greenslade claims it is another example of how media can develop due to the digital revolution:

”Without the huge costs associated with producing and distributing newsprint, it enables a small group of highly-skilled journalists — whether in the fields of finance, sport or gardening — to write for specific audiences that require expert information and analysis. Both sides gain.”

On other hand, Breaking Views is just filling the niche that other media, including newspapers, have abondened. And now the publishers are buying the service from editors and journalists they used to employ.

Newspapers have outsourced their core mission: comment and advice. What an irony!

Update: some reactions to this post

For those who hated newspapers looking like clones, a designer Mario Garcia offers some “Strategies to create a front page with impact”.

Luis Vilches of the Virginian-Pilot (whose front page is present in the collection above) disagrees with all the critics:

“I find it cheap to put this fronts together and say it was a confortable solution. I have to disagree. They might look the same. But papers are designed, at least the Pilot, that I know, to satisfy the need of their readers to know all about it. They are not designed for pdf or jpg collectors. I agree with the picture choice, [it] shows desolation of a worker of one of the companies involved. I don’t see a problem with it. Our readers don’t care about other papers.”

Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation explains that the news commodity is not only a design issue:

“It’s about the daily dilemma of newspapers around the world.They still concentrate their coverage on yesterday’s news. Not on the news of today or tomorrow, but on old news that already has been watched, read and heard many hours before. So, this picture is not the issue. Just like the repetitive and trivial coverage of what the big boys are doing to transfer their mistakes to all of us, the U.S. taxpayers, is not the issue newspapers should be focusing on. The issue here is you and me, the readers. How this incredible crisis will affect us.”

Jay Small of Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group reminds that “coverage doesn’t equal insight”:

“Few in American journalism take on the challenge of explaining a story this severe and complex in terms that would be truly useful to everyday people that don’t happen to be economists.”

The New Statesman has a long track of investigative journalism. Stephen Gray wrote about CIA rendition flights, Martin Bright exposed the link between the Foreign Office’s and radical Islamists or Chris Ames worked on the government’s notorious dossier on weapons of mass destruction.

The editors believe there are five areas that they believe need investigating, but before they assigned these topics to any journalis in the newsroom, they had asked readers to vote and tell what the Statesman’s priorities should be.

The poll was announced online. Readers could vote and make comments with other story ideas.

Readers could choose following topics:

• Who funds the UK Conservative Party?
• What is the influence of giant multinational PR and lobbying companies?
• What Prinve Charles is really doing and will he stop his meddling in the areas of agriculture, architecture and education when he becomes king?
• What is the state of British Childhood? Why is it that British children always end up near the bottom of international “happiness” comparisons?
• Asylum Crisis – why one of the richest countries in the world leaves asylum seekers on the streets with no access to benefits?

Finally, on Friday evening 84 % of votes went to the Asylum Crisis. The Statesman has not disclosed how many users voted.

The magazine’s political editor Martin Bright promised on his blog that the results of the investigation will be published by the end of the year. ”An investigation into such a controversial and complex issue will take some time,” he explained.

Even if this experiment is not as unique as the UK news magazine claims, it shows that something changes at the respected newsrooms – editors try to engage readers in new ways.

Interaction is no longer just a selection of letters to the editor published on page number 87.

How a new daily involved… every household

Probably the most fascinating example of a similar poll that I know about is the case of Divya Bhaskar, a daily newspaper in Gujarat, India.

Before it was launched in 2001, the newspaper’s representatives had visited personally (sic!) all (sic!) 800,000 (sic!) households in Gujarat three times (sic!).

Firstly they asked what kind of newspaper people would like to have, secondly to find what they did or didn’t like in their old paper, and thirdly to show people a dummy and an order form for a three-month subscription.

The launch of Divya Bhaskar was accompanied with a an advertising campaign with a simple slogan: “Now your wish will prevail.”

No wonder the new daily was number one on the market from day one.

I have learnt this story at the IFRA International Newsroom Summit in 2007 in Paris.

Asking questions is not enough

Asking readers for tips and votes is only a beginning. From my own experience, it is much harder to listen to what they really say.

Many newspapers ask questions, but they don’t really care about answers. Many newspapers invite readers to join the debate, but want to control this debate on every stage.

People in the newsroom interacting with readers often face problems like these:

• How to explain to a journalist that a reader complaining about a story or sending a correction is not a foe?
• How to convince a journalist that maybe the story idea submitted by a reader should have a higher priority that a story this journalist is working on?
• How to convince an editor that reader’s question or view may not be less important than traditional sources of opinion – like scientists, analysts, lobbyists, politicians, spokesmen etc.?

These are common problems in many newspapers and we don’t even touch issues like usage of user-generated content, crowd-sourcing etc.

Where are the limits of readers’ involvement

I asked Sue Matthias, an acting editor of the New Statesman, the following questions:

1. The Statesman has limited the readers involvement to vote on the topics and to share people’s views of what media have missed when covering the issue. Have the magazine ever considered any deeper involvement of readers?
   Just as an example I mean: collaboration in data gathering, analysis of documents, or any other activity assigned usually to proffesional journalists.
2. Can they imagine that a news organisation like the Statesman goes deeper into a collaboration like this in the future? And what would be the troubles, or challenges one would have to face?
3. In the Statesman’s poll Asylum Crisis story was a winner. What will happen to other story ideas like party funding or lobbying? I understand the editors have found them important enough to put them on the list. Will they investigate these issues even if they don’t get readers’ appreciation in the voting?

I will publish Sue’s answers here as soon as I get them.

Join the debate

What do you think: are there any limits of readers’ involvment in editorial work? Should editors of respected newspapers and news magazines go deeper in collaborations like this? What would be the troubles, or challenges they would have to face?

Just before downloads of “stolen” music on the Internet with Napster became popular (do you remember? It was the first P2P program in 1999, although it seems that it happened centuries ago), some dinosaurs of the music industry (is a humiliation to say their name) predicted: “physical support will never die. Everybody wants to have its CD, touch it, look at it, see the wonderful creativity we usually do on the cover, admire how its music library grows. The music in electronic files has poor quality and will never succeed.” Failed forecast by excessive complacency.

Later, when Internet started to be “faster”, the video downloads appeared and an industry representative predicted: “It will not affect us so much as it happened with the music. An entire film needs a lot of megabytes and nobody wants to be waiting for 2 weeks to obtain a poor quality product”. Now, you can get it in a few hours in a good quality. The video industry is depressed.

Recently, I have attended the “Media and entertainment” seminar at IESE Business School in Madrid where 30 professionals from different companies and sectors were discussing, among some other topics, the future of newspapers and books, sharing our challenges about the future.

I personally think that a big disruption will come to the publishing industry as soon as manufacturers of electronic devices impose an e-book reader and standardize its format. A minute later, millions of electronic archives will begin to illegally circulate on the Internet and the publishing industry will collapse within a few years.

I have no doubt that this will happen very soon and we should be prepared after having seen what happened to the CD and DVD.

I shared this idea with a counselor of my publishing group, a 61-years-old man (I have to omit his name, because he is more powerful than me) and his answer was: “No way. People love books, love to touch it, love collecting books in their library and by the way — you can badly read a book on a screen. Neither movies killed the radio, neither TV killed the movies and neither digital paper will kill books”. Now, I have more reasons to be scared.

In 2006 Sony launched the Sony Digital Book Reader and in 2008 the updated version PRS-505. In its black and white screen it reads different formats and needs a PC to enter the information. This was the beginning.

Amazon has launched the Kindle device that does not require a PC to feed contents and can receive daily newspapers paid by subscription through the wireless system Amazon Whispernet!. Until now it operates only in the United States and the e-paper screen black and white, but… is clearly a threat for the papers.

When reading books on an Apple iPhone or on a light PC (such as a notebook), despite of some other inconveniances, you need to be always connected to the Internet, so you have to forget about it in the subway, the park, the pool or millions of coffee shops.

With Kindle, you can receive the newspaper (however, not updated constantly) and record it in the device memory. And I can assure you that the quality of the screen is excellent.

I think that somebody will develop quickly a device with features like that:

• Screen 6 or 7 inches-wide.
• Screen without backlighting to avoid battery consumption and damage to the reader’s eyes.
• Permanent 3G wireless connection to the net. 
• Weight of around 150-200 grams (0,33 to 44 lb).
• Allowing reading only, not writing.

And when such a device appears on the market with an affordable price — and it will be much sooner that we think — the book sales will sharply drop and the daily paper will be deadly injured.

How will newspapers survive online with the advertising revenue only?

How will newspapers sell e-subscriptions after so bad experiences and readers used to have the online edition for free?

Are we prepared to face this new reality? Can we survive?

(Article contributed by Emilio Barberán Casanova, Associate Director of Planeta Marketing Institucional based in Barcelona.)

Join the debate

Do you share Emilio’s fears? Have you tried any of these e-paper devices and can tell us what you think about the experience you have had? Do you feel you are prepared to face this new reality and how your company is getting ready to it? Please make a comment below.

Useful links:

• Wikipedia: what is e-paper, how does it work and who is trying to make it commercial
• Sony Digital Book Reader: a device reading PDF, RTF and TXT files. It needs a PC to download files
• Amazon Kindle: e-paper device sold by a bookstore with a wireless bookstore service
• ILiad Reader: device by iRex Technologies used by some European newspapers to sell wireless subscriptions

In short: the memo says the editors should hold some stories before they apper in print. I reported the controversy about this memo here. 

Note that I am not the Inquirer’s reader and I cannot elaborate on the policy’s effect on this particular newspaper. I am going to focus rather on the general question.

I agree with Howard Owens that news online websites cannot and should not be exact copies of printed papers. I can support this view with my own experience as an editor at Gazeta Wyborcza, the best read Polish daily newspaper in both print and online. 

Our printed paper has around 6 million readers on an average week in a country of 38 million people. Our websites (including online edition of Gazeta) have 6.7 million real users on an average month in a market of roughly 15 million internet users.

I know it is a rare position for the newspaper publisher in the Western world. We compete in Poland with Google and portals similar to Yahoo rather than with other newspapers – the closest competitor from the printed world has 0,7 million real users on its website.

In general the main drivers for our traffic have been: 

• news (including breaking news, features, and user-submitted stories), 
• communities (message boards, photo sharing, blogs), 
• advertising (recruitment, real estate, public announcements, free lineage ads), 
• niche websites (targeted to different demographics and devoted to topics like sports, business, entertainment, parenting etc.).

Web-first, print-first

In the newsroom we also have a general policy of publishing stories online as quickly as they become available (written, edited and accepted by desk editors).

However, we hold some stories before they appear in print in order to secure the exclusivity and originality of the newspaper available at newsstands.

What do we usually hold?

• exclusive news stories (ie. that make the front page, investigative reports),
• main feature stories and opinion articles,
• contents of Gazeta’s weekly magazines (female, literary, opinion).

So one could say that we hold features that make readers buy this newspaper on every day despite a fierce competition in my country dominated by single-copy sales and where home delivery doesn’t exist in fact.

I can share a secret with you: holding these features for a day or two does not damage their readership online. They generate comparable traffic to the similar stories posted online before they appeared in print. Quality content always wins readers, even if it is “later” a little bit.

At the same time I have to admit that we often break this “print-first” exception to the general “online-first” rule, but it is planned, supervised and the results are traced.

We use our investigative reporting or great features to promote the copy sales by teasing them online. Sometimes we publish an excerpt, sometimes a “news story” about a feature story, a video (a traditional TV-style news report or an interview), or we even publish the whole article to support other stories in a supplement or a series. 

It works. We can sell tens of thousands of copies more on a particular day thanks to well-prepared editorial teasing on our website run a day before.

Re-invent story-telling and interactions

I personally believe it is not enough.

We – the newspaper editors – have to design our stories, or series, or campaigns in ways that suit the audiences of both media and use the best what those media can offer. This is what I understand – as Howard Owens put it – as “let print be print” and “let online be online”. 

You can find many examples for that on this website. Here are just two of them to prove my point:

• A month ago we were publishing in Gazeta a biography of legendary Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. 7-part series written by Gazeta’s best reporters was a clear circulation-driver for the printed newspaper. At the same time we were running a crowd-sourcing project on the website: we invited readers to collect their memories on Mr. Walesa in order to create another version of biography. Read more about this project here.
• How to combine the best features of a physical printed newspaper and online communication tools? Look how we encouraged readers to show their solidarity with Tibetans. We printed a flag as the cover of one of the paper’s supplement and invited readers to take photos of them with this flag and upload those photos on the website to create an unique gallery and online community. More details here.

Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing, David Carr and Roy Greenslade are probably right when they predict that the web is the future medium for journalism, but I am not sure it will work as they demand from the Inquirer: that the old-style stories from print will be moved to the web. I don’t also think that we need to be that kind of revolutionists who demolish all remains of the past right now. Who knows: maybe we will need the physical features of printed newspaper and its distribution network for some reasons we can’t imagine now?

I prefer to try to re-invent the way we tell stories and we interact with our readers… whatever medium they use.

By the way: this is the mission of this website too.

Memo: hold stories online until they’re in print

In a memo published by Romenesko blog, the US Philadephia Inquirer managing editor Mike Leary tells his staff:

“Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. [...] This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace. On the contrary.”

Against: if the future is online, this policy is a suicide

Jeff Jarvis, author of the Buzz Machine blog, attacked fiercely:

“You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Steve Outing, a journalist, consultant and entrepreneur, followed:

“It’s disheartening to see a major newspaper go backward. [...] What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.” But the industry didn’t do that, for the most part, instead settling for incremental innovation that wouldn’t upset things too much on the legacy side.”

David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, added:

“The Inquirer seems to be making a mistake. If the future of our business is online, then why set up a firewall, delaying the best content to protect a legacy product? And more adept reporters are beginning to realize that the Web is not just a way to broadcast news, it is a great way to assemble it as well.”

Roy Greenslade, the UK Guardian’s blogger and the (London) Evening Standard columnist:

“What Leary is trying to do is convince his paper’s audience that the web is only good for one kind of content, breaking news, and that print is the proper place for all other editorial material. That strikes me as completely reactionary. He is playing Canute, trying to turn back the waves of people in societies across the globe who read everything on their computers, whether it be news, comment, analysis or sports results. They watch video clips, they participate and they communicate via their lap-tops. They live on them. It is the medium of now and the medium of the future.
They are not going to change their habits at the behest of a maverick managing editor.”

For: differentiation of products and better serving audiences’ needs

Chris Krewson, the managing editor of the Inquirer, responded to these critics in two interviews with Ryan Sholin and Poynter’s Amy Gahran:

“This policy shift is part of a strategy to create complementary differentiation between the roles of the print and online operations.”
“Let me clarify by saying this will be print-Web simultaneous publishing, never really print first.
We’re honestly mostly talking about features stories, restaurant reviews, big-name critics – but (this is an important change) NOT movie reviews, day-after-the-concert movie reviews or things of that nature.
Also, there’s an argument to be made that a major investigative piece will have a much larger potential audience at 6 am — combined with a strong print push — than if that same long, narrative-driven story is posted at 11 pm the previous night.
Since I arrived here in November ‘07, we’ve tried hard to figure out how people actually use the paper and the Web site. obviously, that’s for different reasons. And we’re just trying to make sure we’re careful about what we do — roughly 75 percent of that will not change.
The other 25 will be us taking more care, making case-by-case decisions, armed by whatever information we have about how people use our products.”

Howard Owens who is blogging on newspapers online asked:

“Why is it wrong now to say “let print be print” and “let online be online”?

Your online product should focus on:
1) Frequency. Plenty of updates. Web-first publishing. Tell me what is happening in my town right now.
2) When there is a big story, hammer it. Own it. Frequent updates, a flood of information, video, blogs, forums, public documents, databases, maps, graphics.
On a pure news basis, those two approaches are proven audience growth winners.
Reproducing the print edition online, not so much.

Even better, make sure your kickass print reporters know how to write for the web, which means more of a blog style, more of a conversational style, maybe even a little opinion, when doing those web-first updates.
There are a ton of other web-centric things newspapers can and should do with their web sites, but none of them include publishing first online enterprise and investigative pieces, columnist, lengthy features, trend stories and even analysis pieces.”

Join the debate

What’s your opinion on the Inquirer’s policy change? What’s the policy in your newspaper or news organisation? Please make a comment below.