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Community newspapers coming back
At a time when many other newspapers are failing, a small Valley publisher is gearing up to resume publication of three community newspapers. Independent Newspapers, which already publishes fiercely local newspapers in eleven communities around the valley, will start publishing three more beginning Jan. 6 --at Arrowhead Ranch, Chandler and Gilbert. Actually, Independent will be returning to those three communities. It had earlier pulled out of some communities when it was caught in the middle of a competitive battle between two of the country’s biggest corporate publishers: Virginia-based Gannett and Freedom Newspapers, which publishes the Daily News-Sun in the West Valley and the East Valley Tribune. “We simply couldn’t survive in those communities with those two corporate giants slugging it out,” Independent Publisher Bret McKeand admitted. But since Freedom has announced it is may be closing some of its publications --- including the East Valley Tribunes in Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa and Queen Creek --- McKeand believes there will be room for small locallyfocused publications in communities like Chandler, Gilbert and Arrowhead Ranch, and he believes residents deserve --- and will welcome --- a second media outlet. “We have no intention of competing with Gannett’s dailies,” McKeand said. “We will strictly be niche players --- providing read-
DECEMBER 2009
East valley resident L. R. Straub reads an Independent newspaper.
ers and advertisers with the modest alternative of a local community newspaper. We believe there is room for both --- and we are delighted that we are able to respond to these communities, which have been urging us to return.” One big difference, McKeand said, is that his newspapers will not be published daily. The newly re-launched Independents in Chandler and Gilbert will be published weekly, like the sister papers in Apache Junction-Gold Canyon, Paradise Valley, Peoria, Mesa, Queen Creek-San Tan Valley, Scottsdale, Sun City, Sun City West and Surprise; the paper in Arrowhead Ranch will be published monthly, beginning Jan. 27, 2010.
Another big difference is that much of the content in the Independent is contributed by readers and volunteer contributors. “By necessity, our staffs are small and we couldn’t do what we do without the help of our readers. Their contributions convince us there is still a huge interest in newspapers, and especially in community newspapers. It also allows our staff journalists and freelancers to focus most of their attention on coverage of important local public issues.” The Independents, like many other smaller publications around the valley, are printed at Valley Newspapers in Deer Valley, which installed new state-of-the-art highcontinued on page 2
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A call to action
The Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue opened about a year and a half ago. In our first year, we attracted more than 700,000 visitors, pretty good for a museum that charges admission in a city where other museums are free. You get what you pay for, and that’s one of my themes today. Charles Overby But first, I want to emphaCEO, Newseum size how important newspapers are to our Newseum and how much visitors enjoy looking at them every day. The Newseum displays Today’s Front Pages on the front of the building, one from every state and a few countries. I enjoy watching people stop and study these front pages. We carry more than 700 front pages daily on our Web site. The day after the election of President Obama, people were lined up sometimes 4-deep taking pictures of the front pages. Inside the Newseum, there are 368 historic newspapers on display, dating back to a 1526 news book about the Treaty of Madrid. The Newseum owns about 35,000 historic newspapers. Of course, we have a lot more than newspapers, from the most pieces of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany to the Unabomber cabin. This shows how engaging a newspaper can be, even for young people. I want to relay an incident from last week that brings the story of the Newseum and newspapers together. Regrettably, we announced last week that the Newseum was going to eliminate 29 positions to help balance revenue and expenses. Attendance at the Newseum has been good, up from our first year of operation. But fund-raising has been somewhat slower this year compared to last year. But that has been true for most museums and nonprofits. We get daily reports of Newseum mentions in
December 2009 ■ ANAgrams
Newspapers and Web sites. Gawker wrote: “News and museum combo The Newseum is laying off 13% of its staff, the second round of job cuts since the place opened just in time for the total collapse of the newspaper industry. These are the most predictable museum layoffs since … whatever is the auto industry museum. They probably had layoffs, too.” So the narrative is that newspapers are failing. Therefore, the Newseum must be failing. The Newseum certainly is not failing, and I believe newspapers control their destinies more than some people realize. The news about newspapers seems to get worse every month. There are a lot of people who seem almost gleeful about these doomsday reports. And the people who aren’t necessarily gleeful seem generally willing to accept and pass on to others this message of collective doom and destruction. I enjoy reading history, and I have recently completed a couple of books about the early days of World War II. Now if you want gloom and doom, read about London in the early 1940s. There were two primary optimists during that period—a couple of leaders named Churchill and Roosevelt. They refused to accept the conventional wisdom that Hitler was going to take over all of Europe. At the time, it was more than conventional wisdom. It was seen as inevitable that Hitler would win and dominate Europe and beyond. But on the strength of those two leaders Churchill and Roosevelt —determined, optimistic, unyielding— they stopped Hitler and changed the world. They made a lot of mistakes getting to the point of success. But they turned around public opinion, they motivated the Allied armed forces, and they provided the bold vision needed to stop the most dangerous tyrant of the 20th century. It is a hard thing to change public opinion, but it is done all the time as a result of strong leadership, bold actions, clear communications, and unyielding determination. I’ve put together another simplistic formula for today’s newspapers dilemma. continued on page 3
Con’t: Community newspapers coming back
continued from page 1 quality color printing presses last year. The Independents and Valley are owned by Independent Newspapers, Inc., a for-profit company that is owned by a non-profit journalistic trust. The company also provides community Web sites at www.newszap.com. Independent has been publishing in the valley for more than 30 years. “Like any company, we need to make a profit,” McKeand said. “However, all our after-tax profits are reinvested in the company’s mission of community service through independent journalism”.
ANAgrams ■ December 2009
Con’t: A call to action continued from page 2 A + B + C + D + E equals F, Future. Act, Believe, Compete, Differentiate, Evolve. These concepts equal the future. ACT: Do something, even if it’s wrong. It can’t be worse than simply giving away the news for free. The time for wringing our hands about the plight of newspapers is over. It is time to act now. Every day that newspaper owners continue to give away their product on the internet is a lost opportunity. This is not rocket science. In any business, if an owner decides to give away the product without gaining revenue from somewhere, that business will fail as a profitable enterprise. I believe the decision to start giving away the content of newspapers on the internet more than 10 years ago created a Lost Decade for newspapers. I’m hoping the next decade will be the Found Decade. It should not take us 10 years to recognize giving away the product was a mistake. Why don’t more newspaper owners act to correct this mistake? I believe they are paralyzed by critics who insist that to be cool and to be “with it” you must surrender your product to the internet for free. I am reminded of my wife’s uncle, Chauncey Godwin, who owned a shirt factory in Tupelo. He told me that he once pulled into a gas station, and the station owner said, “Hey, Chauncey, when are you going to give me some shirts from your factory?” Without blinking an eye, Chauncey said, “When you start giving me your gas.” The notion of giving away news is short-sighted and counter-productive. Newspaper owners spend a lot of money hiring reporters and editors to assemble news every day for their communities. They need to act now to reverse this destructive trend. BELIEVE: Newspaper owners, newspaper staffs and state newspaper association managers must begin by believing in their own product and believing in the viability of the news and advertising that is assembled every day. I have had the opportunity to work with Howard Baker, the senator from Tennessee who was majority leader of the Senate, chief of staff for President Reagan and ambassador to Japan. He is highly popular wherever he goes and in whatever role he accepts. In Tennessee, he was not known for having a great grassroots organization of precinct and county chairmen. But he always won. Someone asked him what the most important thing in politics was. He said, “You have to get the talk right.” In order to do that, you need the people around
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you and your supporters believing in you and telling others. The talk is not right about newspapers today. And part of that reason is that newspapers staffs and even some owners have quit believing in the future of newspapers. If the people who work for newspapers don’t believe the content is worth paying for, who will? From top to bottom, the people in the newspaper business have to start believing in themselves again. The community leaders need to believe that the content of newspapers is worth paying for. What if the people around Barak Obama had gone around saying, “We’ll never win.” Obama supporters really believed they were going to win, they dedicated themselves to winning, and they did. We need the same belief and dedication from people about newspapers and news content. Sure, it’s worth paying for. It always has been, and it always will be. This is nothing less than a campaign. Before it can be launched, the people closest to the newspaper business have to believe in it. The talk has to be right. COMPETE: For too long, newspapers did not have to compete to get people to buy newspapers and newspaper ads. They had to ask for the order—at least most of the time—but they didn’t really have to compete in the dog-eat-dog way required of many businesses. As a result, I believe newspapers got a little flabby, a little content, a little over confident. And that probably contributed to the disastrous decision to give their content away on the internet. Now, with circulation and ad revenues down, newspapers need to learn to compete aggressively to win back readers and advertisers. It is an all-out fight, and just doing what has always been done will not suffice. Newspaper publishers have to be willing to embrace new—even radical— approaches to change the momentum of what is happening. I believe newspapers must embrace the idea that they have to campaign to win back their communities. I want to repeat that for emphasis. Newspapers have to campaign to win their communities back. For a business that specializes in communicating to readers, newspapers do a pretty poor job of communicating about themselves. The publisher and the editor and the ad manager have to treat this like a political campaign. They have to organize, develop and target the right messages, gain endorsements, persuade doubters, confront the skeptics continued on page 4
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Con’t: A call to action continued from page 3 and use every means available to win the community back. This will take more than rhetorical flourishes and a few well-turned phrases. The competition starts with content and pricing. If it means producing different or better content, produce it. If it takes better pricing, adopt it. This goes on in every other business every day. Everybody in the newspaper business should wake up every morning thinking of ways to compete better for the paying reader. DIFFERENTIATE: To reclaim paying customers, newspapers need to do more to differentiate their content from the things that are free on the internet. First, that means either charging on the internet for those different things or not putting them on the internet at all. I have been involved with newspapers for more than 50 years, first as a newspaper carrier and then a reporter and editor. Even I wince at writing a check for $18 each month for my subscription to my local newspaper. I wince because I already read that information on the internet for free. Every month when I write that check for $18, I feel that I am making a charitable contribution to that newspaper. Because my local newspaper is owned by Gannett, I feel I am making a charitable contribution to Gannett. How many people out there want to make charitable contributions to Gannett or any other big media company? People want substance, and they are willing to pay for it. They want to give their charitable dollars to other causes. Just look at television. Television used to be free. Now people pay a lot of money every month to cable companies to get stuff on their TV. Why do people pay the cable companies? Because they are getting content they can’t get anywhere else for free. Newspapers would do well to study the cable television model and figure out what they can provide that customers will pay for. The premium channels on cable bring in a lot of money. A few newspapers are beginning to look at providing readers with premium packages for a fee. The key to more paying customers is differentiation. Newspapers have the ability to produce better, more interesting daily products than any other local media. The question is will they do it and will they have the courage to quit giving it away. Too many newspapers are dangerously close to cutting their news budgets in a way that will make it harder to produce distinctive, different news products. You cannot produce interesting, informative different news products every day on the cheap. Readers notice,
December 2009 ■ ANAgrams
especially when given a choice between paying and free. EVOLVE: Now after all this, you might think that I believe only in a 7-day-a-week home delivered print newspaper. That would be wrong. I believe in news, and I believe in delivering it to the public for a fee. But the paper part of that surely will evolve over time. Of course, it is already evolving. I subscribe to the print versions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA TODAY. I also get them my Kindle. I get the e-edition of USA TODAY on the internet. I believe we are evolving toward a wireless tablet, large enough to capture the feel of newspapers, both in pictures and display ads. That time is probably closer than we realize, but in the meantime there are other evolutionary things that are important to the future of newspapers. Many newspapers are experimenting with evolving models, and that’s a good thing. In Detroit, the Detroit Free Press delivers to homes Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays but continues to print all seven days. They sell the paper on the other days as single copies at 18,000 different locations. In San Francisco, the Chronicle is trying glossy paper to improve the look and feel of the paper. The point is that every community newspaper should feel free to experiment, to evolve into the future. FUTURE: That brings us to the F word, Future. The country has always depended on the delivery of news to its citizens. The Newseum carries the famous quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Of course, after Jefferson became president, he had other ideas about newspapers, but go to the Newseum if you want to hear about that. President Obama offered his own version of the Jefferson quote recently: “A government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts is not an option for the United States of America.” The future of our democracy depends on an informed citizenry. Newspapers – and the content they provide in evolving models – are central to that future. So, I ask you to consider the A, B, C, D and E of the Future: ACT, BELIEVE, COMPETE, DIFFERENTIATE and EVOLVE. The future of newspapers and the important content they provide will continue to be essential to our citizens, IF our leaders act decisively and wisely.
ANAgrams ■ December 2009
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An online journalist’s 10 resolutions for 2010 Robert Niles The Online Journalism Review We’ve talked often on over the past 12 months about what online journalists should be doing to both prepare themselves for the changes coming to our field, as well as to take advantage of the changes already here. Now, at year’s end, let’s remind ourselves of 10 things that we can do in 2010 to help keep journalism vital in our readers’ lives... and keep our careers in journalism alive at the same time. 1. Make your website more mobile-friendly Everyone I’ve spoken with in the industry this year about this has reported the same thing: The percentage of readers accessing their websites on mobile devices is increasing. Significantly. I’m seeing high single-digit percentages on the sites I publish, up from the fractionof-a-point share I saw last year. You don’t have to build a smart phone app, or even a separate mobile version of your website, to serve the mobile audience. But if you don’t, you must, at the very least, offer clean code that performs gracefully on a mobile Web browser’s small screen. A basic threecolumn Web layout can perform well, especially when the content displays in a center column of between 250 and 500 pixels. I offered more tips on this topic last summer. 2. Don’t redirect mobile viewers requesting an article on your website to your mobile homepage I couldn’t resist repeating this tip. Redirecting deep links requests to a mobile home page is my biggest annoyance with Web design in 2009. Give these readers either the mobile version of the page they requested, or the regular version of that page. But don’t break deep links to your website, for anyone. Like the blink tag, framed navigations and scrolling tickers in the past, let’s ditch this lousy design idea in the new year. 3. Write better hypertext The ability to write hyperlinks into copy distinguishes the best online journalists from print refugees. Hyperlinks enable writers to add depth and context to a narrative, without weighing it down with detail that some readers don’t need. It also offers huge search engine optimization advantages, not only to the writer’s website, but to the publisher of the valuable information to which you’re linking. Hey, good writers and publishers have to look out for each other out there. 4. Don’t use Flash when an HTML page will do Keeping with the hyperlink topic, information embedded with Flash presentations can’t be linked, as basic HTML pages can. My wife’s railed against pub-
licists who commission fancy Flash sites, then encase all their press materials within them, making it impossible for her to link to individual profiles, album notes, photos, videos, etc. She’s right. Putting stuff inside a Flash presentation limits its usefulness within the Web community. Flash can be a great tool. It’s the current best method for embedding video and animation, for example. But use Flash as an embeddable component within a page, rather than a method for constructing an entire page (or website). Whenever you do use Flash, always provide readers with a link that gives them code to embed that Flash element on their own blog or website. Give readers the tools they need to make your content viral. 5. Rethink vacation In the 20th century, news organizations had large editorial staffs so individual reporters could take a week or two off while others on staff covered for them. In the 21st century, news media is much more centered around individual reporters. Maybe a staff’s down to a single writer covering a particular beat. Or even if others remain to file for the paper, a writer individually maintains a blog and Twitter feed. What happens to those when the writer goes on vacation? Too often, they go dark until the writer returns. No news organization can get away with that anymore, not in this hyper-competitive online news market. Curt Cavin of the Indianapolis Star wrote a great piece for us last year about his blog, which draws tens of thousands of IndyCar fans to the Star’s website each week (including me). Curt also maintains a great Twitter feed, providing real-time updates during races, something that’s rarely available on bigger sports websites, such as ESPN.com. Unfortunately for Cavin’s online fans, when he goes on vacation (as he is now), his blog and Twitter feed go dark. (It’s not Cavin’s fault - he tried in the past to update them on his own time, but Star management told him to stop, due to work rules.) It’s IndyCar’s offseason now, but the same thing happened in the middle of the season, when the Star was furloughing staffers. Other IndyCar bloggers and forums aren’t going dark for two weeks around the holidays. Sure, traffic’s down this time of year, but why not invite one of the better independent IndyCar bloggers to “guest host” for Cavin during his vacation? It’d build huge goodwill within the larger Web community of IndyCar fans, and maybe bring some new eyeballs to the Star’s coverage, rather than driving it away for two weeks and breaking fans’ habit of checking the Star website. I never go on vacation, even when I’m vacation. continued on page 6
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Con’t: An online journalist’s 10 resolutions for 2010 continued from page 5 This summer, my family and I spent 33 days on a cross-country roadtrip, and I filed from the road for my websites (and for OJR) all along the way. Granted, I work for myself now, and am protecting my financial asset when I file for my website. But wage-earning employees compete with publishers like me now. If you go dark on vacation, you’re just losing market share to competitors. Can you really afford that? 6. Take a reader to lunch Or to a concert, or to a theme park (actually, those are what we’ve done on my sites). Get in the habit of giving back to readers, and getting in contact with them offline. Pick someone who’s submitted a particularly engaging comment, forum response or e-mail, then offer to buy ‘em lunch, or even coffee, in exchange or an offline, offthe-record chat. Sure some might turn out to be duds, but you’ll often get some great feedback, not to mention gratitude, loyalty, and valuable word-of-mouth promotion. 7. Cross the wall, before you’re out of the building Don’t just reach outside of your organization. Reach out to people within the company as well. Chat up folks from the ad sales department. (Or, if you are outside already, try to make a connection, using networks such as LinkedIn. Just search for ad reps who used to work at the newspapers or stations you did.) Learn about the ad and business side of publishing. You’ll need that knowledge in the future,
Los Angeles native and long-time math and computer geek, Robert Niles
as journalism becomes more the domain of the entrepreneur. If you’re thinking about a nonprofit future, engage with folks on the development side of non-profits you cover, volunteer for or patronize. Reporting 101: Many people are happy to chat when you buy ‘em a meal. 8. Study up on new ways to make money from your work Which brings me to this... keep your eyes open, always, to learn more about how to make money from producing news and information. When you are reading or watching a report, ask yourself: “How are they getting paid to do this?” Your curiosity - indeed, your reporting - on this question will prepare you to synthesize an answer for how you will get paid in the future, as well. To get you started, here are three links from earlier this year where I lay out how a journalist can get going selling ads on his or her
website: part one, part two and part three. 9. Know the difference between your audience and your customers Knowing this will help you more effectively address the resolution above. Too many would-be publishers build large audiences, then fail to make any money from them because they never cultivated any customers who wanted to reach that audience. Remember, an audience is who views your work. The customer is who writes you the check to produce it - an advertiser, a foundation, a interest group, a patron, etc. Try to identify the audience and the customer whenever you read or watch news reports this year. Then start connecting which customers seem to go with what audiences. You’ll find valuable insights from those observations. 10. Don’t be above running a photo of cute kids or animals every once in a while Your predecessors in the news business did this all the time. Readers often need something to lighten their spirits, a reward for sticking with you and reading your work. Maybe it is literally a cute photo of a puppy in the local park. Or other fun photo, cartoon, wordplay or humor. Whatever you select, don’t ever forget that your readers, audience and customers alike, are people who need variety in their lives and sharp friend to provide it. Be that friend, and they’ll show you a friend’s loyalty in return. Happy new year and best wishes for 2010.
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ANAgrams ■ December 2009
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Adding fees and fences on media sites Richard Perez-Pena, Tim Arango New York Times Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free. Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close. Newspapers are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge. Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free. Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers. Media companies of all stripes
built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing. So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets? Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses. But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction. “Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies. He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point,
at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.” Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work. Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge. Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them. “I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.” For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising continued on page 8
December 2009 ■ ANAgrams
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Con’t: Adding fees and fences on media sites continued from page 7 downturn in memory. Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online. But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common. Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies. Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which
would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge. Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web. These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business. “We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York. A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-toodistant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work. The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying continued on page 9
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ANAgrams ■ December 2009
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Con’t: Adding fees and fences on media sites continued from page 8 for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites. “Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.” People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store. By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than
we’ve been adding,” he said. And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else. A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures. But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources. “One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”
Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism
The Worth Bingham Prize honors investigative reporting of stories of national significance where the public interest is being ill-served. These stories may involve state, local or national government, lobbyists or the press itself wherever there exists an “atmosphere of easy tolerance” that Worth Bingham himself once described in his reporting on the nation’s capital. The investigative reporting may cover actual violations of the law, rule or code; lax or ineffective administration or enforcement; or activities which create conflicts of interest, entail excessive secrecy or otherwise raise questions of propriety. Judges will be guided by such factors as obstacles overcome in getting information, accuracy, clarity of analysis and writing style, magnitude of the situation, and impact on the public, including any reforms that may have resulted. The prize for 2009 reporting will be $20,000 and will be presented on March 25, 2010, at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. All applications for the 2009 Worth Bingham Prize must be postmarked by Friday, January 8, 2010. For more detailed information, log on to http://www.nieman.harvard.edu and click on the “Awards” link.
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Introducing ABC’s New Community Newspaper Audit Service Newspapers participating in ABC’s Community Newspaper Audit service can take advantage of a streamlined audit that is cost effective and offers flexibility for newspapers with circulations under 25,000.
Streamlined Publisher’s Statement Reporting s 3IMPLIlED BASIC PRICE REPORTING s 3IMPLIlED EXPLANATORY REPORTING s .O PRICE POINT BREAKOUT s .O PREMIUM REPORTING s .O DAY OF WEEK REPORTING s .O GEOGRAPHIC MARKET REPORTING
This new service provides guaranteed flat rate pricing and flexible billing options: monthly, quarterly or semi-annually. In addition, optional access is granted to ABC’s eStatement ‘Reports and Data’ and other a la carte offerings.
s /PTION TO REPORT @POWER DAYS More Time to File s 5P TO DAYS AFTER THE CLOSE OF THE PERIOD
TO lLE SIX MONTH 0UBLISHER S 3TATEMENT
More Efficient Audit s %VERY OTHER YEAR AUDITS s /FF SITE AUDITS CONDUCTED VIA !UDIT &AST 4RACK
Audit Packages
Every-Other-Year Audit All-Inclusive Flat Rate Pricing Inclusion in FAS-FAX Access to Preprint Projection Center Semi-Annual Publisher’s Statements Flexible Billing Options Power Day Reporting Access to eStatements
CNA
CNA+
$2,000 per year
$2,250 per year
s 3IMPLIlED AUDIT SURVEY FORM s 3IMPLIlED AUDIT PROCEDURES
For more information contact ABC’s Jenn Havens, manager, marketing and sales, at (847) 879-8388 or jenn.havens@accessabc.com.
Audit Bureau of Circulations
A la Carte Services Available > Audience-FAX Readership Audit > Audience-FAX Web Site Audit > Audit of Non-Paid Niche Products > Coupon Distribution Verification
Changing to Meet Your Needs
PDF questions ll Kevin’s inbox to the brim this month Kevin Slimp Institute of Newspaper Technology kevin@kevinslimp.com
It seems like I’m receiving more questions than usual this month. Maybe it’s the end of the year rush. Some have been real “head scratchers.” Let me share a few with you: From Shirley in Minnesota Hi Kevin, Just one question. I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I know ... bad decision. I can’t get my computer to communicate with my scanner. It’s a fairly new HP allin-one printer and works great. I reloaded the software with no luck. Any suggestions? Shirley, A lot of printers didn’t work with Snow Leopard when it was released. The problem is that their printer drivers didn’t work with the new operating system. HP has created compatible drivers for more than 60 of their
Where is Kevin? Jan 5-7: Sumter, South Carolina Jan 21: Lexington, Kentucky Feb 05: Des Moines, Iowa Feb 10-12: Nashville, Tennessee
Coming up in March & April: Syracuse NY, Saratoga Springs NY, Indiana Tour, Chicago IL, Des Moines IA, Regina SK To contact Kevin directly, email:
kevin@kevinslimp.com
all-in-one printers. Take a look at hp.com and see if your printer is on the list. You can also find drivers for printers not on this list at gutenprint.sourceforge.net. From Rita in New York Dear Kevin, We are still using Freehand, along with QuarkXpress. We know Freehand will not be available when we upgrade to new computers in the near future. We have installed a copy of Adobe Creative Suite which includes InDesign CS3 to see if we can open these files. We are not able to copy and paste or import our Freehand files into InDesign to make changes to them. Is there a way to open these Freehand files when we get our new computers? Rita, Fortunately, Adobe Illustrator can open Freehand files up to version 9. If you’re using a newer version of Freehand, export your files back to version 8 or 9. This should allow you to open and edit your ads and other artwork created in Freehand. From Darren in Tennessee I know we’ve talked about this before, Kevin. I still have problems with ads that have lines through them after they’re converted to PDF. The ads are designed in InDesign. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I use the Distiller or export the files. I still get the lines. Any ideas? Darren, These lines occur when nontransparent objects (usually text) are placed near transparent objects (such as drop shadows) in InDesign. There are a couple of
Those lines in PDF les are totally avoidable. One way to prevent this problem is by using Smart Objects in Photoshop. things you can try to keep these lines from popping up in PDF files. One sure-fire way to prevent this is to: 1) Design the ad in InDesign 2) Select everything in the ad (using Edit>Select All) 3) Copy the selection 4) Create a new document in Photoshop (it will automatically be the same size as whatever you copied) 5) Paste the copied information onto the Photoshop document (Edit>Paste). This creates what is called a “Smart Object” in Photoshop. It will look exactly like what you designed in InDesign, with an “X” through it. Simply double-click on the X and the ad becomes a layer in Photoshop. Now, simply save the file as an EPS file. Once you have the EPS file, you can place it in your InDesign document or convert it to PDF using Acrobat Distiller. This sounds like a lot of work, but it is easy to master once you’ve done it a couple of times. I ofent use this technique when creating more elaborate designs in InDesign. From Chris in Saskatchewan Hi Kevin, After hearing you speak in Regina over the weekend I came back eager try some of the things I learned in your seminar. While working with the Ink Manager in Acrobat 7.0, I found that ev-
ery time I converted spot colors to CMYK, it appeared that it worked. However, when I would Preflight the file, a warning appeared saying spot colors were still present. Any ideas? I really enjoyed your classes. Thanks Chris, Yes, I have an idea. You forgot a step I taught in Regina. After converting the spot colors to process using Ink Manager, save the file as an EPS file. If you need a PDF file, then open your EPS file in Acrobat Distiller and it will be converted. And, yes, the spots will be gone. From Joyce in West Virginia Good Morning Mr. Slimp, I need assistance with some problems we’re having with PDF files. Our biggest issue is with black text being set in process colors. We get these from advertisers and others and I need to convert them back to a true black to go on the press. Can you help me with this? Glad to help, Joyce. There’s a Photoshop fix that has been used with this problem since PDFs were in the early stages. However, a much easier option for you would be to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Pro 9. This latest version of Acrobat has a wonderful Color Conversion tool that does just what you’ve described, converting text that is on several plates to the black plate only.
December 2009 ■ ANAgrams
Page 12
ANA JobBank FREELANCERS WANTED. Independent Newspapers is looking for writers/journalists who enjoy writing about local news to handle a variety of assignments for its East Valley community publications. Ability to take photographs helpful. Send samples of your work to Editor Terrance Thornton at tthornton@newszap.com. ADVERTISING ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE. West Valley View is looking for a motivated, experienced professional to sell advertising in a protected territory. The View is the number one print medium in the West Valley. Sales experience required; newspaper advertising sales experience and bilingual preferred. Non-smoking office. Salary plus commission to start. E-mail resumes, professional references and salary requirements to resumes@westvalleyview.com. Digital Marketing Communications Specialist. We are currently seeking a Digital Marketing Communications Specialist to join the Market Development team for Republic Media digital products including azcentral.com, momslikeme. com, metromix.com and community microsites through development of strategic and creative promotional plans. Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, Communications, Marketing or related field or 4 years experience in a related field. Three year’s marketing communication and/or journalism experience. Digital marketing experience a plus. Must have valid driver’s license. Must possess minimum state liability insurance and have access to a vehicle. Apply online at http://www.azcentral.com. Search job listings and resources on our Web site:
www.ananews.com/jobbank Have a job opening? Place your ad with us for free! Email p.collins@ananews.com.
Contact ANA Staff
2009-2010 ANA/Ad Services Board of Directors
Executive Director Paula Casey............... Ext. 102 p.casey@ananews.com
President Teri Hayt, Arizona Daily Star One-Year Dir./Daily
Directors Tom Arviso, Navajo Times Two-Year Director/Non-Daily
Communications Mgr. Perri Collins............... Ext. 110 p.collins@ananews.com
First Vice President Ginger Lamb, Arizona Capitol Times One-Year Dir./Non-Daily
Nicole Carroll, The Arizona Republic Two-Year Director/Daily
Accounting Assistant Liisa Straub................ Ext. 105 l.straub@ananews.com Media Buyer Cindy Meaux............. Ext. 112 c.meaux@ananews.com Network Ad MGR. Sharon Schwartz....... Ext. 108 s.schwartz@ananews.com Network Sales Rep. Don Ullmann............. Ext. 111 d.ullmann@ananews.com
SECOND VICE PRESIDENT Don Rowley, Arizona Daily Sun Two-Year Dir./Daily Third Vice President John Naughton, Payson Roundup One-Year Dir./Non-Daily Secretary/Treasurer Rick Schneider, Eastern Arizona Courier One-Year Dir./Non-Daily
Pam Miller, The Verde Independent Two-Year Dir./Non-Daily Joni Weerheim, The Sun (Yuma) One-Year Dir./Daily Greg Tock, White Mountain Independent (Show Low) One-Year Dir./At-large Dick Larson, Western News&Info, Inc. Past President
Your
New Career Begins Here!
Independent Newspapers, the Valley’s leading community newspaper group, is expanding and looking for motivated, successful sales associates to join our growing team! We’re looking for outside sales consultants and inside call center specialists who appreciate community newspapers, enjoy helping local businesses succeed and who want to establish a solid career with a company that has been serving the Valley of the Sun for over 40 years. Previous experience in print publishing or online advertising helpful. Part time/full time available Base Plus Commission
e-mail letter of interest and resume to:
azpublisher@newszap.com
Equal Opportunity Employer
Events Calendar January 14, 2010 First Amendment Coalition meeting, Perkins Coie Brown & Bain, Phoenix January 21, 2010 ANA Legislative Luncheon, Phoenix February 10, 2010 ANA Board of Directors meeting, Conference call March 3-5, 2010 Strategic Revenue Summit, Orlando March 11-14, 2010 IRE/NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference, Phoenix March 19-21, 2010 Society of American Business Writers and Editors national conference, Phoenix May 21, 2010
ANAgrams is an official publication Arizona Newspapers Association 1001 N. Central Ave., Suite 670 Phoenix, AZ 85004
ANA Excellence in Advertising awards reception, Phoenix