In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

“Instead of starting with a fresh article every time we want to cover something inside a regular beat, which might require a long catch-up introduction, context, background and so forth, we could just put fresh news at the top and let the reader scroll down to read previous updates.”

Readers stay longer and read more

What happened when this approach started getting rolled out, Dannen says, was fairly dramatic. As he puts it in his post, the results “blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic.” Among other things, the tech site’s “bounce rate” — that is, the rate at which readers decided to quit reading and go elsewhere — dropped substantially. The average amount of time spent at the site also increased, as did the number of pages per visit that were read by users.

Dannen says it’s too early to tell how permanent these effects will be for Fast Co. Labs, just as it’s impossible to know whether those favorable results stem from the changes they made in their approach to longer stories. But he says that regardless of these caveats, “it sure as hell looks like it’s working,” and that he believes long-form journalism is the future.

It’s not length, it’s engagement

I am a big believer in the value of longer pieces in general, and I think the once-popular myth that people don’t read longform articles online has been largely disproven (although I wonder how many of those who praised the New York Times feature Snow Fall read the whole thing). But it’s also true that editors and publishers often conflate length and quality — as Caroline O’Donovan pointed out in a (short) post on Fast Co.’s experience at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I think Fast Company’s results actually show something very different from the appeal of longform articles per se: since these posts began with “stub” articles and then grew over time, as more news or analysis emerged about the topic itself, I think they show the value of engaging readers by following a story over time and providing some kind of comprehensive background and context, instead of just bombarding them with a stream of news briefs.

That approach may result in longer stories, but I think that’s almost a side effect rather than the main attraction. No one is going to read those kinds of posts simply because they are long — but if a site builds a narrative and a point of view and some context over time about an issue (the mobile news-reading app Circa is trying to do this by allowing users to “follow” specific breaking news stories, and then alerting them to updates) then it pays off in engagement.

There are lessons in there not just for new-media players but for traditional media outlets that are trying to find a recipe for success online as well.

Note: This post was updated on May 14 at 12:12 am to correct the spelling of Chris Dannen’s name.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Scholastic

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Variety announced the moves early Tuesday, saying the tabloid will drop its daily print edition as of March 1 and publish only a weekly version on paper. The paywall, which charged users $250 a year for access to Variety content, comes down at the same time — Penske called it “an interesting experiment that didn’t work” — and in a somewhat unusual decision, the paper’s editor has been replaced with three editors, each of whom will run different sections of the magazine.

Penske, the son of famed race-car driver and NASCAR operator Roger Penske, isn’t a newcomer to the power of digital: he was a co-founder of Mail.com, which he sold to a German internet company in 2010, and before that helped start a mobile company aimed at children called Firefly.

We're all going to miss Daily Variety in print but now we'll be faster and more nimble. It's a good move.

—
David S. Cohen (@Variety_DSCohen) February 26, 2013

The new owner bought Variety in October from owner Reed Elsevier for $25 million, after the European publishing conglomerate reportedly cut the price it was asking for the magazine — once reportedly valued at more than $200 million — by 25 percent. Penske added it to a stable of online properties that includes the Deadline site and MovieLine.com, as well as the well-regarded technology blog Boy Genius Report and HollywoodLife.com, a site run by former the former editor of Cosmopolitan, Bonnie Fuller.

If Penske was hoping that his moves would be applauded by his other sites, he doesn’t know veteran Hollywood gossip writer Nikke Finke, who runs Deadline Hollywood. In a scathing post about the dropping of the paywall and the decline of what she called “the beleaguered trade,” Finke said editorial morale at the entertainment trade magazine “is at its lowest ebb and anxiety is running sky high,” and described advertising as “non-existent” and readers as “few and far between.”

Sharon Waxman, who runs an online competitor called The Wrap, also warned that Variety could have a lot of work on its hands, since — like many other newspapers and magazines — print advertising in the daily edition likely made up a large proportion of its revenues.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia and Flickr user Pew Center

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The report, which was produced as part of the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, looked at four newspapers that emerged as potential success stories from an earlier piece of research the center did called “The Search For a New Business Model.” That study noted the grim fact that for every dollar in digital advertising revenue, the average newspaper was losing 7 dollars in print ad revenue — a statistic that has now gotten even worse: the Pew Center now says that an average of 16 dollars in print revenue is lost for every dollar of digital revenue gained.

Different pathways to success

The newspapers that are profiled in the Pew report are all small to medium-sized dailies in four states: Florida, California, Utah and Tennessee. All have managed to boost their revenue over the past year using a combination of strategies — some focused on protecting print and some focused on growing the digital side. If nothing else, the report makes it clear that the path to success can be very different from newspaper to newspaper.

The four papers profiled are:

• The Naples Daily News in Florida, which has a weekday circulation of about 45,000 and has seen revenue growth in 2011 and 2012, in part by protecting print revenue.
• The Santa Rosa Press Democrat in California, which has a circulation of about 53,000 and developed its own internal digital-media agency that has driven digital revenue growth.
• The Deseret News in Utah, which has a circulation of about 90,000 and is run by former Harvard Business professor Clark Gilbert, who significantly re-engineered the company.
• The Columbia Daily Herald in Tennessee, which has a circulation of about 12,000 and has prospered as a result of half a dozen new digital-revenue experiments.

As the Pew report notes, the Deseret News is something of a special case in the sense that the company’s CEO, former Harvard Business professor Clark Gilbert, built a career on teaching students and advising companies about disruption before he left to take on the challenge of running Deseret Digital Media — the parent company of the Deseret News — which is the new-media arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Part of Gilbert’s strategy has been to reach out to potential Mormon subscribers outside of the newspaper’s traditional coverage area.

Separation of traditional and digital

The biggest factor in Gilbert’s revamping of the company, according to the Pew Center, was his conviction that separating the digital from the traditional is a crucial element of any digital success story. This is a conclusion also arrived at by his former Harvard colleague Clay Christensen: in a recent study of the media industry’s woes entitled Breaking News, Christensen said separation of traditional and digital is the only way media companies can prosper. As the Pew report puts it:

“Gilbert has a theory of media evolution: The legacy business is the crocodile, the prehistoric creature that will shrink, but can survive. The digital business is the mammal, the new life form designed to dominate the future. And they need to be managed apart.”

This lesson is also brought home by the experience of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where the company created a separate marketing agency that helps advertising clients make the transition to digital, a unit that generated about 25 percent of its digital revenue in 2012 and is expected to see about 60-percent growth this year. The company’s digital director said it was important that the agency “have a start-up feel to it and not be swallowed by the older Press Democrat brand.”

In some cases, the lesson that these success stories can teach boils down to “know your market.” In Florida, for example, the Naples Daily News has spent a lot of time protecting its print revenue (in par by re-engineering its sales force) — but this strategy might not work as well for some communities as it does in a city where the median age is over 60, a segment of the market that typically enjoys print more than younger users do. The Orange County Register is making similar big bets on protecting the print franchise under new owner Aaron Kushner.

Four lessons worth considering

From my reading of the Pew report, here are the four lessons that these success stories seem to be trying to teach us:

• Separate your businesses: As Gilbert and Christensen both make clear, having the same people run both the traditional and the digital side simultaneously is like having the fox manage the chicken coop. It doesn’t work, and it annoys the chickens (or worse).
• Know your market: In some cases, a strategy like the one the Naples Daily News and Orange County Register are taking may work, but only if your market has enough print-heavy subscribers to justify the relative over-investment in that part of your business.
• Try almost everything: The tiny Columbia Daily Herald in Tennessee has managed to generate digital revenue growth that exceeds many of its larger competitors primarily because it has launched half a dozen different ventures on the digital side.
• Go big or go home: If there’s one over-arching lesson from the Pew study, it is that whatever strategy you decide on, you have to commit to it wholeheartedly or it will almost certainly fail. Incrementalism is not the key to success.

Not all of these lessons are going to be applicable to every situation — and some of the strategies that these newspapers have chosen to pursue may ultimately prove to be unwise. We don’t have a very long track record of success for other media outlets to look at for tips, but what we do have seems to suggest that if you aren’t experimenting with alternative digital revenue sources and allowing your paper to do that in a relatively independent way, you are unlikely to succeed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo and Pew Center

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Thompson said he wants to “dramatically expand” the number of blog posts that the site carries with the upcoming launch of a Science and Tech section, which will feature contributions from magazine regulars like Columbia law professor Tim Wu and author Ken Auletta as well as new writers. One of those new writers is former BuzzFeed staffer Matt Buchanan, who announced his move to the magazine on Wednesday:

Thanks everyone! I'm going to miss @buzzfeedben and @jwherrman BUZZFEED a lot, but I'm preeeetttty excited to be going to the New Yorker.

—
matt buchanan (@mattbuchanan) January 30, 2013

Until now, The Atlantic has been the poster child for the brainy traditional magazine that has succeeded at the new digital-media game. Owner David Bradley and president Justin Smith gambled heavily on an online strategy — one that included hiring strong writers like Alexis Madrigal and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, and online-first properties like Atlantic Cities.

These and other moves have driven large amounts of traffic, and also boosted digital revenues to the point where they now exceed print (Note: We’re going to be talking with Justin Smith about these and other topics at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 17).

The magazine has also put a substantial amount of resources into the new arena of “sponsored content” as a replacement for traditional advertising, although that has not come without controversy: a recent sponsored feature on the Church of Scientology drew a substantial amount of criticism, and the magazine said it has re-evaluated the way it handles such content as a result.

The Atlantic‘s moves have made others such as Time Inc. (which is facing some major cutbacks) look like they are stuck in neutral. Only Forbes has arguably equalled the Atlantic‘s progress, with initiatives like its “Brand Voice” platform (chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin will also be joining us at paidContent Live). Now it seems that both could be facing some competition from the New Yorker, which is encouraging to see.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rebecca Chatfield

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Rumors of widespread staff reductions at the publishing conglomerate have been floating around in media circles for several days, with some estimates of the cuts running as high as 700 people. According to a number of reports, the layoffs will hit virtually every aspect of the company, including most of its 21 magazine titles such as People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

At the eponymous magazine that started the empire, Time editor Rick Stengel said he was looking for half a dozen staffers to take a voluntary buyout, and if that number isn’t reached by Feb. 13, there will be mandatory layoffs. People magazine, one of the company’s top titles in terms of subscribers, said that it was looking for nine people to take voluntary buyouts — three writers and six reporters or researchers — or there will be layoffs.

Lang says Time needs to be more nimble

The bleeding is apparently so bad at the media giant that there was even a report from Reuters that Time may sell its iconic headquarters in New York City. Lang said in her memo that the cuts were required in order to transform Time into a more nimble, multi-platform company:

“With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.”

The broader story at Time is the same as it is at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post: print advertising revenue, which has been the company’s bread-and-butter for decades, is in free fall — and digital advertising and online revenue have not even come close to making up the difference. In the nine months ended in September, revenues at Time fell by 6 percent, and operating profit dropped a whopping 38 percent.

Since Lang arrived as CEO a year ago, the former ad agency executive has made a number of moves to try and boost Time’s digital revenues, including a deal with Apple to sell subscriptions through the company’s iOS Newsstand app. But the benefits of such arrangements — whatever they may be — don’t seem to be enough to stem the ongoing damage.

When his main competitor Newsweek announced that it was shutting down its print edition after a merger with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast online venture, Stengel said that Time magazine had “done very well and we’ll continue to do well.” But given what we’ve seen at other media entities, these cuts are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Time Inc.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Aperture 51

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David Leonhardt — who oversees the newspaper’s journalists in Washington and used to write the Economic Scene column for the Times — offered himself up to Redditors to talk about anything related to his job, although he said he mostly wanted to talk about the election and the recent debt negotiations. While those and other topics did come up, Leonhardt also took on some questions about journalism itself, including one about why newspapers like the NYT don’t challenge statements by politicians more, instead of defaulting to what Jay Rosen has called “the view from nowhere.”

Leonhardt: “It’s fairly easy for us to deal with an opinion, like ‘This policy should pass Congress;’ we also quote someone who says it shouldn’t. But the gray area is harder. And yet I think we need to deal with it: we sometimes need to look for ways to say which side in a debate has more claim on the available evidence.”

The Washington bureau chief was also asked whether he thought the rise of the web and social media — and the shift from print to web-based journalism — was a good thing for journalism as a whole, or whether it was leading to lower standards:

Leonhardt: “I think the Web has created a more responsible press, with higher standards. Think how much easier it is for readers to point out flaws (or perceived flaws!) in a story today than in the past. You don’t have to rely on our Letters to the Editor page or our Corrections process. You can write your own blog post or get the attention of a media critic (including our public editor, a job that didn’t exist until a decade ago). Such criticism isn’t always enjoyable — and we don’t always agree with it — but there is little question that it makes us better at our jobs.”

And Leonhardt also responded to a young would-be journalist who asked him what the future might hold for the practice, and whether social media and the web were not taking a lot of the life out of print-based media and the journalism industry:

Leonhardt: “The future of journalism is assured, I think. Journalism — facts and narration — predates newspapers and will outlast newspapers. The future of the printed word — that is, newspapers as we know them today — seems less certain. As a reader, I would be terribly sad not to wake up to printed copies of the NYT and Washington Post, among other papers. As a writer and editor, I don’t have a preference about whether people are reading our journalism on paper or a screen.”

What makes this comment from the NYT bureau chief so sensible is that it’s not a sweeping pro- or anti-web viewpoint, it’s just a realistic view of what the future probably holds — and what the past can teach us: namely, that print is probably in decline as a method of delivering news, that some people feel an emotional attachment to newspapers in print, and that as a writer and editor it doesn’t really matter where people are reading your work, so long as they are reading it. And journalism will survive, even if newspapers don’t.

Note: The New York Times has published a full transcript of the interview.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Donscarpo

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The bankruptcy filing by the Journal Register Co. seems to have sparked a lot of the recent dissent over the issue, if only because the chain of daily and weekly papers had been the poster child for digital initiatives at parent company Digital First Media — including a restructuring of management to focus on the web and innovative projects such as an open “community newsroom.” To some, the financial failure of the chain looks like a failure of the entire digital-first philosophy, despite the fact that Digital First CEO John Paton has explained the Journal-Register’s troubles are based more on legacy costs such as printing contracts and pension obligations for past employees.

A misunderstanding of what’s at stake

To take just one example, Bradshaw notes that industry magazine Editor & Publisher carried an editorial on Monday that questioned whether focusing on digital first is the right road to success, since even the Journal Register Co. couldn’t seem to make it work:

“[F]or all the hype about embracing digital platforms, the constant drum beat of new projects, and the relentless self-promotion, digital first wasn’t enough to keep JRC from sinking back into bankruptcy, leaving other publishers wondering, ‘If digital first won’t work, what will?’”

This kind of attitude shows a profound misunderstanding of where the newspaper industry is, and how it needs to move forward. Like virtually every other mainstream paper and magazine publisher — many of whom are likely fighting desperately to stave off a similar filing — the Journal Register’s biggest problem is that while its print business is still producing the lion’s share of its revenue, that figure is shrinking rapidly. And even though most executives in the industry seem to appreciate that digital has to come first, the revenue from that business isn’t picking up the slack. This is the “digital pennies for analog dimes” problem.

New York Times media writer David Carr had an enlightening and apt metaphor for this situation, which he described to me after a recent event in Toronto: there are two rooms, Carr said — the print room and the digital or web room — and newspapers know that they have to get from one to the other. But they can’t just turn the lights off in one room and move to the other, and so they are currently trapped in the long dark hallway between the two, groping around trying to find a handhold. And it isn’t clear when they bump into someone (like Twitter or Facebook) whether they are friend or foe.

Does that sound like a recipe for unqualified success? Hardly. And yet the transformation must be made, either slowly or quickly. As Bradshaw points out, there are plenty of reasons why that is the case, and we get further evidence of them every day — including Pew surveys that show news consumption is becoming increasingly mobile and multi-platform, for example, and research that shows the industry’s addiction to print is becoming more and more of a liability rather than an asset.

The future may not be obvious, but ignoring it isn’t an option

Is there a business to be had by ignoring the web completely and sticking to print? Perhaps. The Orange County Register seems to be doubling down on this strategy, locking everything up behind a paywall and actually instructing its writers to stop posting things on their blogs and focus on the print product instead. This approach has an ostrich-like feel to it at this point in the evolution of media, but the paper’s owner seems determined to focus solely on print readers. That may continue to be a business for some time to come, but it is almost certain to be a shrinking one. As Bradshaw puts it:

“No one has the answer to the question of paying for journalism, but we should at least acknowledge that the old system is broken. We cannot go back to print profit margins: readers have left, and advertisers are following.”

Meanwhile, the debate continues over whether advertising-driven digital media is destined to be a low-quality, volume-driven game — an argument that Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review revived in a recent column — and whether newspapers should focus on building subscription-based businesses instead, as the New York Times and the Financial Times are both doing. My sense is that only a few global brands (and possibly some hyper-local ones) will be able to get away with a fully subscription-powered approach, but the reality is that we simply don’t know where success lies.

What we do know (or at least should by now) is that it is long past time to stop debating whether the media industry needs to be “digital first.” As David Pakman of the venture capital firm Venrock Partners noted in a series of recent posts, different forms of content have different attributes, and the reality is that news or “informational” content has become a commodity, and is difficult to monetize. In a nutshell, that is what is fuelling the disruption that newspapers are experiencing — and while there may be many different models for how to deal with that, ignoring it is not really an option.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic

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According to a new report from research firm eMarketer, the search giant is expected to earn $2.31 billion in U.S. display ad revenue, up 38.5 percent from last year. Facebook, on the other hand, will bring in $2.16 billion, up 24.4 percent from last year.

Google’s earnings will comprise 15.4 percent of the total $14.98 billion display ad market in the U.S., compared to 14.4 percent for Facebook and 9.3 percent for Yahoo. Microsoft and AOL trail with 4.5 percent and 3.6 percent respectively.

The total display ad market is expected to grow 21.5 percent, eMarketer estimates, fueled by the growth of both Google and Facebook’s ad platforms, the expansion of online ad inventory, mobile growth and additional spending on digital video advertising, particularly on YouTube.

An earlier forecast from eMarketer predicted an even larger overall market, but the research firm said it pulled back its estimate because of lower prices for display ads on ad networks and hesitation from big brands to spend big in digital display.

Google’s rise is being driven by the strength of its ad network, on YouTube and mobile display ads. According to eMarketer, Google now dominates the search, display and mobile advertising markets.

Earlier this year, eMarketer predicted that Facebook would lead Google in display advertising, but amid reports of underperformance, the research firm cut its estimates for Facebook.

Under pressure from Wall Street, Facebook will continue to push hard in advertising on all fronts, so it will be interesting to see how those numbers shift over the coming years. But by 2014, eMarketer expects Facebook and Google combined to represent 37 percent of all display ad revenue, so it’s clear that the two tech titans will continue to be the main power players when it comes to online ads.

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As my colleague Mathew Ingram recently wrote, the Post has been more innovative than many of its rivals with its new media projects. In addition to SocialCode, the company has launched the Trove news-recommendation service and a social reader app on Facebook. Don Graham, the company’s CEO and a member of Facebook’s board, has been vocal about going “where the readers are.”

Gannett purchased digital marketing company PointRoll in 2005 and social media tech company Ripple6 in 2008, but the addition of BLiNQ could help it make new headway in the emerging social media management space, which has recently seen heightened activity. In the past few months, Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver and Wildfire have all been snapped by tech heavyweights Salesforce, Oracle and Google.

Gannett already has relationships with national and local advertisers through its many media properties, and according to TechCrunch the company has been working with BLiNQ for the past year.

Gannett Blog author Jim Hopkins says the reported acquisition could be one of the biggest ever signed by Gannett, with the other candidate being the reported $100 million the company paid for PointRoll. He also points out that in the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Gracia Martore said investments in “strategic initiatives” were expected to reach no more than $10 million to $15 million in the third quarter — although TechCrunch says the BLiNQ buy would be paid out over three to four years, with $23 million paid upfront.

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Facebook Stories will curate content around a monthly theme. This month, the theme is “memories” and the content includes a video report about a man who lost his memory when he got meningitis and a news story about a group of Ontario residents who used a Facebook page to help save the local Petrie Building.

In addition, each issue of Facebook Stories will have regular features: The Bookshelf has “a Goodreads list of books that helps you dig deeper into each month’s theme,” while “Playlist” curates songs from Spotify. And “Reading List” includes “exclusive access to the archives of some of the world’s best storytellers.” This month, three pieces from the New Yorker — stories that are normally available only to subscribers — are included. Facebook is also running a monthly Stories podcast, and a monthly infographic focuses on the issue’s theme. This month, it analyzes how people around the world share “life’s biggest moments.” Users are invited to share their own stories, which might be included in a future issue.

The Facebook design team’s Skip Bronkie and Peter Jordan are leading the project. Dan Fletcher, who was hired as Facebook’s managing editor in January 2012 and was previously a reporter at Time magazine, is editing and vetting stories from users. He also wrote the “Guelph, Ontario: Saving a Slice of Downtown” story in this month’s issue. Other team members include Allie Townsend, formerly Time‘s social media producer; editorial producer Jeffrey Gerson; Matthew Harnack and Mandy Zibart.

This is only the first issue of Facebook Stories, but there are a number of paths that it could take. Facebook spokesman Bounds warned against interpreting this as a competitor to other news sites, though. “The Facebook Stories site is designed to work with media partners and contributors who are providing us original content,” he told me, “and we are helping showcase their content in the context of unique user stories that we’re discovering on Facebook.”

Still, Facebook Stories’ geographic focus — you can click on “Map” to see the stories arranged on a world map — hints that it could be a possible competitor to AOL’s Patch, though if each local story is required to have a Facebook angle, that concept could wear thin. Its mosaic layout is tablet-friendly and already makes it look a bit like personalized iPad magazine Flipboard or Zite. Then there’s the aggregated content from the New Yorker, and the original content from people like NPR’s White House correspondent Ari Shapiro – a combo with hints of Daily Beast or Huffington Post. A tablet magazine consisting of user-generated local content, aggregated content and original content is an ambitious move — but it seems possible when you consider that such a magazine could have over a billion readers.

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