I love Molly Ivins, but I wouldn’t go to her for business advice. Still, her column today reminds anyone who’s interested of a very good point about the recent sale of Knight-Ridder newspapers: that far from being failing businesses, the papers had a 20 percent profit margin.

Lots of business would kill for that kind of margin. Then why did the KR board bail? Because newspapers are seen as a "failing" business, one "in decline." It’s true that they’re losing circulation, but that could be perfectly good thing: why spend oodles of money reaching the N+1th reader who doesn’t see the value in your product? (Propping up circulation, by the way, is what killed Life magazine; circ acquisition and retention was costing more than the marginal rate increase the ad sales people could charge per reader.)

Of course, seeing a newspaper as a local branded information resource rather than a bunch of pulped pine trees might extend profitability. But that would require looking at a financial enterprise as more than a quarter-to-quarter business. As Molly says:

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I don’t know any of the players so I don’t know the inside baseball, but the Dow Jones reorganization announced today feels like most of a right move. It puts the online and print versions of the WSJ under the same management, so all those horses have at least a chance of pulling in the same direction. The NYTimes has the same idea, combining print and online into a common newsroom. (The NYT’s locution of its "Continuous News Desk" has always bugged me though; isn’t the very nature of news continuous?)

Sticking the DJ wire in a different group, along with the stock averages and other market services, first struck me as a little odd but has a strong logic. The wire and market services are, essentially, reseller services and are available to be repackaged. Not so much the Journal or Barrons. The client bases for the newspapers and the information services are just different.

The Ottaway newspapers are an entirely different business and need their own separate management.

 

A long Salon article that starts out unpromisingly by repeating old news about the dumbed down free tabloids aimed at young adults gets suddenly exciting at the end of the third take. (You’ll have to watch an ad to get that far, but it’s worth it.) That’s when Farhad Manjoo introduces us to Rob Curley, the new media editor of the Naples (Fla.) Daily News.

 Curley gets it — completely and profoundly:

The Curley method is to convert small regional newspapers into powerhouses on the Web and make them indispensable to their communities — as indispensable as print newspapers once were, or should have been, to the regions they served. He counsels newsrooms to focus their resources on gathering local news. With the Web, national news has been "commoditized"; you can get national news anywhere, and local newspapers aren’t going to beat out bigger papers — or other news sites, such as Yahoo — that provide national coverage.

 and…

When papers embrace their mission to provide local news thoroughly, efficiently and in any manner people choose — in print, online or whatever other device people may want to start using tomorrow — audiences will flock to them, Curley says. He points to his efforts in Lawrence, Kan., where the three Web sites he created for the Lawrence Journal-World became the center of that college town’s daily life.

Can this business model stand on its own? No one’s proven it yet. But this is where newspapers win — by divorcing themselves from the medium and focusing on the information and the audience.

Ten years ago, when I was editing NetGuide, we’d review hundreds of Web sites a month. My publisher once asked me what our criteria were. We ask ourselves, "Is it useful?" I told her. Does the site have good information presented in a way that its readers want? The publisher, expecting a detailed and weighted punch list of features, was puzzled by the response, which may be one reason NetGuide ultimately failed.

Ten years later, the answer’s still good. Own your market. Be useful. People will come.

Let me be clear: I want to either work for Rob Curley or be Rob Curley. This is a guy who knows the answer.

Slate’s Daniel Gross gets all meta today with a fin de siecle article claiming that blogging is dead because Big Media is noticing it and wants to play.  Like an good trend piece, he picks four data points and extrapolates:

• Whatever trend gets on magazine covers is immediately dead.
• Early entrants sell out
• Big Media buys in
• Gullible VCs buy in 

A close reading, however, shows that the four points are really just two: The Sports Illustrated Curse, and Money Changes Everything.

Is all the corporate money spent on blogging being spent wisely? Of course not; that’s why it’s called venture money. Money in media goes where the audience is and it’s insanely valuable to find an audience that already exists, as opposed to one that you have to try to create.

The problem isn’t that online media valuations are out of line. The problem, which Gross never quite gets to, is that big valuations expect big returns. Ad money is flowing out of print and out of mass media and into online media. The returns will be there, at least for a while, because the technical investment — servers and bandwidth and whatnot — is long since sunk.

The trick, as it always is, is to find a way to converse with this audience in ways it finds appropriate. And what’s different in 2006 than it was in 2001 is that the audience is much bigger now and that it grew by itself.  The other difference: marketers have five years’ experience in figuring out how to converse with an online audience — Slate’s own valuation notwithstanding.

And if they blow it? The audience will stop listening and find some other place to congregate and talk amongst itself. At which point the cycle will begin again.

What print has been good at, historically, is gathering communities of like-minded people. If you read Flying, you’re probably a private pilot. If you read Popular Science, you probably care a lot about tomorrow. If you read The Economist, you most likely have a business with a global view. If you read a local newspaper, you care about the community that newspaper covers.

Traditional publishing, however, is a one-way conversation; the editors and advertisers tell readers what they think the readers want to know. The Internet facilitates multi-directional conversation — and the people who used to be called “readers” have discovered that they like controlling the conversation as much as the editors and advertisers do.

The good news is that existing media has the edge on gathering readers — and let’s call them that because that’s what we’ve always called them — because they’re already in the business of attracting them with professionally generated content and sometimes-effective (though always expensive) circulation marketing. The bad news is that readers are more willing than ever to abandon old habits and go wherever other readers similar interests are hanging out.

The worse news is that most print media has been actively driving away previously loyal readers, allowing them to find other places online where compatriots lurk. You all know — or ought to know — the statistics that show how younger readers are turning to pretty much anyone other than newspapers
for their news.

Newspapers aren’t dead. They just need to learn a few lessons that their readers have been telling them for the last 20 years or so.

By rights, a city’s newspaper should own its readers. After all, it supposedly knows the local ground better than any other medium, provides focused local content, and through its highly profitable Classified pages gives readers the opportunity to talk to each other.

Craig Newmark has not so much stolen the readers and revenues as much as he has gratefully accepted them as they wandered away. Local newspapers failed to understand that they are themselves the entire Town Square, where people gather to commune, and not just the monument in the middle.

For the moment, Craigslist is mostly a marketplace for goods and services. If you want to know what’s going on in a town, rely on the newspaper and TV.

But what happens if Craigslist begins being a weblog aggregator — a hub for citizen journalism? What happens if people can turn to Craigslist for reasonably accurate and self-correcting news and feature coverage of a town? There’s scant reason that couldn’t happen: the cost is low and there may be a critical mass of readers already there.

What happens? Game over for newspapers.

One problem is that local newspapers aren’t so local anymore. More and more, they’re owned by media conglomerates based far away, and carry mostly wire service copy and only a scattering of real local news. It’s even worse for local radio, which doesn’t even bother with hiring local announcers anymore — and doesn’t even carry news, now that the FCC doesn’t require it.

Fortunately, there is still time. Local newspapers are still valuable brands with long traditions of trust. But defending that brand by building ever-higher walls is 180 degrees from the right answer. Instead, local media should embrace the lessons of Craigslist and the weblog revolution of citizen journalism. Let your readers join and even drive the conversation. Let them commit to their communities by providing and encouraging a Town Square. Newspapers need to act locally, as though they were part of their communities, and not mere profit centers driven from Denver or Chicago or New York.

I’m not suggesting that newspapers simply turn over the Web site or news pages to any random Joe. Newspapers have editors. Use the citizen journalists as though they’re stringers. If the contributors are that interested, let them deal with a newsdesk, answering questions, refining the reporting. It’s hard to imagine that the vast majority of interested people could be any less skilled  than some kid six months out of J-school getting paid $16,000 to do night cops.

Compuserve and The Source set the explosives on the news cycle by making wire service feeds available to the public. CNN pressed the plunger, the same way that the Six O’Clock News detonated afternoon newspapers. Craigslist is the bulldozer that will knock over anything still standing.

But the Internet is a wonderfully level playing field. It’s proven true over and over: Let people be part of a community — give them the tools and a reason to come and stay — and they will be yours for a long time.

Unless you were deeply, madly, hopelessly deep into the worlds of online media and magazines, you probably don’t know John Evans, who passed away the other day at the age of 66.

Evans spent a lot of years an exec for Rupert Murdoch, which makes him sort of an odd person for me to have liked. When Murdoch was trying to figure out the US magazine business, he put Evans in charge. The result was some excellent titles that made it, like Automobile, and some that didn’t, like Men’s Life. At its peak, Murdoch Magazines also ran TV Guide.

When Murdoch got out of the magazine business, he became interested in the Internet, and was one of the very first Big Media people to dip much more of a toe into it. Evans ran Murdoch’s Net business in the early-to-mid 90s — Delphi and a bunch of companies I no longer remember — and spent an ungodly amount of money on noble experiments in content that never amounted to much but employed a lot of my colleagues. (Murdoch set up his Net shop in a desolate and underdeveloped area of Manhattan: 6th Ave in the low ’20s. That the neighborhood is now so vibrant is due in no small measure to Murdoch’s bet on those few blocks.)

My own affection for Evans came from his magazine days. I wrote a few days ago about John Klingel and my attempt to start a music magazine in the ’80s. By making a few selected cold calls and exhibiting perhaps more nerve than sense, I got a meeting with Automobile’s David E. Davis Jr., an editor I greatly admire, where we spent a couple of hours bouncing ideas around. Without my knowing, Davis passed my stuff along to Evans, whose assistant called shortly thereafter to set up a meeting. It took several days after that call for the blood to return to my head.

Evans turned down the project, but I remember his courtesy and insight, and the seriousness with which he considered the pitch. I thought him an uncommon gentleman with an adventurous spirit, and never saw a reason to change my mind.

There’s been a recent flare-up in BlogSpace regarding the evergreen question of whether weblogging is or can be journalism. I do try to avoid excess navel-gazing, but there are so many otherwise smart people spinning their wheels on the subject, that I feel like I have to weigh in briefly.

The short version:

Don’t confuse the tool with the result. Is blogging journalism? It can be, if the people committing journalism use weblogs.

Weblogs are tools. What people do with those tools is up to them. Weblogs themselves are no more journalism than compilers are programming or automobiles are commuting.

Tool. Function. Result. They’re different. Why is that so hard to understand?

(For newcomers to this site, I have some small expertise in the area of journalism and technology.)
One thing that we know weblogging isn’t (except in a vanishingly small number of cases) is a paying gig, which leads to my next point.

There’s been some foaming in the last couple of days about the Pulitzers, which were announced yesterday. The question has arisen: will Pulitzer-level journalism ever come out of a weblog?

Sure. Why not? But first, the business case of weblogs has to be established. Journalism costs money and time — and excellent, in-depth journalism takes lots of both. The resources required to cover a state-wide wildfire, or a major corporation covering up an unsafe workplace, or events in a 40-year-old war half a world away, are more than considerable.

You want this kind of journalism coming out of the world of weblogs? Excellent. Figure out a way to make it pay for journalists and the businessmen who support them, and only then will you see serious, top-flight, finished-work reportage.

Weblogs allow a different kind of storytelling than we’ve seen before, just as radio and television tell stories differently than newspapers. That’s going to be exciting to see happen. Asking whether weblogging is journalism is the wrong question. The right question is asking how weblogging can be used to tell news in a different and, (one hopes) more informative way than ever before.

For more reading on this, check out Jay Rosen’s weblog. He’s a media critic and j-school professor at NYU, and appears to have a pretty good, nuanced handle on the question.

About 20 years ago, I’d decided that I wanted to launch a magazine. Though I had lots of experience in the wire service business and had written for many magazines, I’d never actually worked on staff anywhere.

Not being a total idiot, I realized that I needed maybe a little more information before diving in. That’s when I found Jim Tobak.

Tobak is pretty much the World’s Leading Expert about magazine launches, and I spent a couple of days in a seminar room with him at a Folio: magazine show. Tobak has been consulting for something like 50 years; I’ve forgotten details of his background, but he’s successful enough that he lives up in Connecticut and apparently manages to stay true to his stated goal of never having to wear long pants again. He wore shorts to my seminar, and it was not a warm day.

Tobak’s advice about how to launch magazines hasn’t changed much in the 15 years since I first met him. I’ve learned a ton about the process since then, and I can only say that he’s as right now as he was then.
Here, from the current Folio: are his nut grafs:

The basics have changed little: Despite technological advances, we still print magazines en masse and get most of them to readers via the mail. And most mags still depend on advertisers who target certain readers….

A magazine exists because people have an interest. If that interest is strong enough ﾖ and a magazine satisfies it ﾖ the magazine will be profitable. If you can’t see that a magazine will be highly profitable, you shouldn’t be in the business.

Wishful thinking about what interests people remains the biggest cause of failure in new magazines.

Tobak was not impressed by my projections or ideas, which didn’t stop me from getting a pretty serious look from Rupert Murdoch. Some 15 years later, though, the magazine I had in mind has finally been launched : the intriguing Tracks. At the time, though Tobak was right: I couldn’t prove that a) there was an audience, b) that I was the right guy to find it, I still have our exchange of memos, and I prize them.

Tobak was right about a point c), too: that a big company was almost certainly not the right place to publish it. Simon Dumenco writes, also in this month’s Folio:, about the difference between a BigCo launch and a LittleCo launch — and why the latter is better from pretty much everyone involved.

Maybe the worst-kept secret in publishing has been Time Inc.’s plan to launch a newsstand magazine exclusively distributed through Wal*Marts. (Why Wal*Mart? Because it sells 15 percent of all newsstand copies in the U.S.)

Name of the magazine: All You.

Oh-kay

In the interest of providing some free consulting to Time Inc., here are some proposals for local and demographic editions of All You:

All Youse, for the Brooklyn/New Jersey market

All Y’All, for the southern demo

All Ewe, for the rural/agricultural market, and general Arkansas readership

All Me, for actors, performers, and other celebrity readers

All You People, for bigots