WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

As you know, Apple reports its quarterly earnings  today.

What we can expect?

Big numbers again, for sure.

Associated Prss goes wild and said a few minutes ago: Apple is expected to say Tuesday that its net income in the most recent quarter jumped 85 percent, boosted by brisk iPhone sales.

Apple said it expects earnings in the range of $2.06-$2.18 per share for the quarter and revenue of $11.0 billion-$11.4 billion.

Apple’s share price has been setting all-time highs since March 5, and last week it came near to $250.

That’s a 220% increase in 15 months.

With almost one million iPads sold in the first 17 day in the USA (remember that it took them 74 days to sell a million first-generation iPhones) the new Apple tablet could become a killing product for the next quarter.

Plus the new iPhone OS that can send the shares of Apple to the$300 mark.

But as always Apple will downplay the estimates… in order to beat them, again and again.

The San Francisco Chronicle explains all this very well.

UPDATE from Fortune:

The consensus on Wall Street, according to the latest poll by Thomson Financial, is that Apple will report earnings of $2.45 a share on revenue of $12.04 billion — which would make Q2 2010 easily Apple’s best second quarter ever.

The country is grounded.

The Sunday Times reports that:

Five million travelers, including as many as 1m Britons, are stranded or unable to fly.

Some have been told they may not get home until next month.

Schools are preparing for missing teachers and pupils tomorrow.

Cambridge University has cancelled exams because dozens of students and examiners are stranded abroad.

Hannah Montana was due to appear at the London premiere of her new film The Last Song, but Disney said she was still in America and unable to fly.

Geologists have no idea when it will stop.

An eruption in Iceland in 1973 lasted five months and 10 days.

And many British Sunday newspapers don’t get it!

The Observer opens its Sunday edition with a Thursday night story…

The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Express, and The Independent on Sunday ignore the news in their front pages.

Yes, nothing.

Nada!

Nada!

Nothing!

What a shame!

The Sunday Telegraph does better.

And sends reporters to watch the real ash cloud.

While The Sunday Times, the leading quality Sunday paper, opens with the ashes as the main story.

Any explanations?

Yes.

Two main reasons:

1. Sunday newspapers are becoming more and more features newspapers, so they don’t do reporting. Their editions go to the presses very early on Saturday and the real deadline in the newsrooms is Friday night… so relax, and wait until next Monday or Tuesday to say something as the regular sources and Mandarins will feed you. On Weekends they don’t work, like you.

2. When you have a newsroom organized around beats, of course you don’t have an “ashes” beat. And you don’t have enough flexibility to cover major news like this one. So your front page reflects the politicians agenda. Not the people’s one.

The mantra now in many European countries is to say that Sunday newspapers need to be re-invented.

Well, not really.

What they need is to do journalism 101.

Cover the news, write stories behind the news.

And serve the readers.

And not just cover the sources.

And please them.

Period.

Quotes and ideas from the first 226 comments published about the new Observer:

• The MAGAZINE is boring, and new font size is crazy (”please increase the font size in the Magazine to something that is readable without changing my reading glasses prescription”).

• The TV LISTINGS don’t make any sense (”The TV guide is a waste of paper. The information is easily available elsewhere”).

• THE NEW YORK TIMES section is a Guantanamo (”Why persist with the New York Times pullout?”).

• Where is TRAVEL?

• Too much POLITICAL GOSSIP.

• Go for THE SUNDAY GUARDIAN (”What my family wants is a SUNDAY GUARDIAN but with more depth!”).

• HOROSCOPE is gone!

• TRIVIAL content (”I wish you would invest in journalism rather than iPhone Apps and gimmicky redesigns”)

• The SPORTS is just a FOOTBALL section.

• We want more SECTIONS (”Sunday paper is for sharing: if you reduce the sections, we cant share anymore”). Are you sure? UK is becoming a single home occupant country!

• The CASH section is a joke (”The Cash section is so thin on content that it is laughable”).

My final take:

If The Observer wants to deliver more with less, must have BETTER CONTENT, FANTASTIC DESIGN, UNIQUE BREAKING-NEWS, COMPELLING STORIES, DRAMATIC INFOGRAPHICS, PROVOCATIVE  COLUMNISTS and more CAVIAR JOURNALISM.

Now there is too much spin and no substance.

Readers want strong double espresso, but not watered American coffee grande.

So, the new format is fine, the new content is bad.

As simple as that.

Poor value for £2.

An excellent TV commercial for the new relaunch of The Observer.

Another redesign for a newspaper with good design but mediocre content.

The Observer versus The Sunday Times is like a David versus Goliath battle.

Yes, we need less pages.

Less sections.

Less fat.

Less noise.

Less copycats.

So, more (and meaningful) pauses.

More (and better) reviews.

And more (and smarter) reflections.

Right now The Observer is not very compelling.

So, you cannot change only with brilliant promotional campaigns.

You need to deliver a great and unique product.

A different and better one.

Today, all the Sunday quality papers in the UK try to emulate The Sunday Times.

And you never will become a leader just imitating and following the leader.

Bryan Chaffin reports:

Apple’s new iPad has helped to define the broader tablet market, even though it has yet to ship, according to research firm ABI Research.

The firm said Tuesday that shipments of tablet devices – defined as touchscreen interface devices measuring five to eleven inches with WiFi, video and gaming capabilities, will measure four million units in 2010, and rise to 57 million units by 2015, prodded along by the iPad.

“Apple’s iPad is not the first media tablet,” senior ABI Research analyst Jeff Orr said in a statement. “But it does help define this new device category.

The news:

Gannett, McClatchy, and the New York Times Company last week reported unexpected second quarter profits on the backs of cost-cutting efforts amid 30% declines in advertising.

Gannett reported that 2009 second quarter earnings per diluted share were $0.30 compared to a net loss per share of $10.03 for the second quarter of 2008.

The McClatchy Company reported net income from continuing operations in the second quarter of 2009 of $42.0 million, or 50 cents per share – more than double the earnings per share in the second quarter of 2008.

The New York Times Company announced also second-quarter 2009 operating profit of $23.3 million.

Mort Zuckerman says he plans to spend the cash he’s raising from a sale of his real estate company stock on new color printing presses for his New York Daily News newspaper. Zuckerman has raised about $31.6 million in two stock sales this week.

My take:

Nothing has changed.

The newspaper industry faces today bigger challenges than one year ago.

So, they cannot dream with the past, that it’s gone.

They must face the future.

How?

Becoming not “print-centric” but “on-line centric” news organizations.”

Period.

First it was The Guardian versus News Corporation (News of the World phone-hacking claims).

And now it is News Corporation versus The Guardian (The Observer may close).

Well, The Sunday Times would be more than happy to see the death of The Observer.

My take:

This is just more “dog eats dog” journalism.

Bad for journalism.

Bad for newspapers.

And something that readers hate.

And advertisers ignore.

So, nobody wins.

Everybody loses.

Sammy Papert, CEO of Belden Associates, the great U.S. newspaper research company that many of us loved so much, announced yesterday that they will go out of business.

In his own words (bolds are mine):

“We’ve reluctantly concluded to discontinue operations while we can do so in an orderly fashion and, to the best of our abilities, take care of clients, colleagues and all Belden stakeholders.

The simple truth is that we were barely fulfilling the fundamental goal of any business — that is, to provide products and services which customers value (Are delighted by? Love?) at a fair price.

Far from investing in research to “understand existing audiences and identify new ones” in tough times such as these, there has been a “declining appetite” for proprietary audience research in recent years.

This will likely last and some have even suggested it will decline to, and reach, zero!”

“With such handwriting on the wall, the actual decision to put a great brand to bed was not as difficult as expected, but the execution of such a decision was fraught with anguish, sadness and melancholy that permeate still.

…

“We have noted here that beating up newspapers has become a popular sport certainly among outside observers.

But even during these dark days, there is still reason for optimism.

But and this is a big BUT, we are not moving fast enough and we are not aiming high enough.

The industry is simply not being bold enough to support the new audiences they want to reach and to me it’s criminal.”

This is really tragic.

The U.S. newspaper industry has been investing in research less and less.

So, they are ignoring what their audiences are saying and demanding.

A blind industry.

A man of courage died today.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner, has died.

He was 89 years old.

His voice and books will remain with us:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.

Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

(Picture by Sergei Karpukhin/AP)

From the most recent interview with NEW YORK TIMES’ Arthur Sulzberger Jr.:

ON COMPETING WITH MURDOCH’S JOURNAL:
“I saw when the Times of London was taken over by Rupert Murdoch.

Those newspapers reacted to it and said, ‘We are going to compete against them.’

And the result is: It didn’t help them, because they stopped remembering who they were. We’re not going to.”

ON NEWSPAPERS’ DECLINE:
“At a time when many of our great competitors are cutting back … and don’t have the fine staffs they used to have and don’t have the national staffs that they used to have — and I could continue on — the Times becomes more critical.”

ON HOW HE WANTS THE TIMES TO CONSIDER HIM:
“As someone who cares desperately about the mission of The New York Times and its core promise to society.”

The “young Sulzberger” is having a rough time.

Not only as the top manager of the New York Times Company, but also in his personal life.

Last May, after 33 years of marriage, Arthur Sulzberger separated from his wife, Gail Gregg.