WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

McClatchy will get a total $2.1 billion from the the dozen Knight Ridder papers brokered as it acquires the chain — and will use the money to pay its $.5 billion bill for the larger company. In the process, McClatchy managed to average a higher multiple than it is paying for KR: 11 times the trailing on-year cash flow compared to 9.5 times for the acquisition.

Right now it seems clear that they are quite better than KR not only running newspapers but also buying and selling them!

At Tribune, in 2006 online will account for 7% of total revenues. By 2010, Chairman-CEO Dennis FitzSimons said he hoped that online would be 12% to 15% of total revenues.

The New York Times Co. got 5.9% of its revenues from online in 2005; the company hopes to get that stat to 20% by 2012.

Lee Enterprises: online operations representing about 4% of consolidated revenues.

Online fever? Yes.

Online revenues? Not yet.

Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, who tracks magazine start-ups on his Web site (mrmagazine.com) says:

“The first time I heard print was dead was 1980, when I was a student,”

But the difficulty confronting the print media as online media grow in popularity “is not a problem of ink on paper,” Mr. Husni said. “It’s a problem of creating relevant content.”

“As long as the content is compelling, the readers will follow.”

Neil Friedman, a reader of The New York Times asks this question to the Editor:

“Several years ago a top N.Y. Times officer (maybe it was Max Frankel) admitted that the paper had not been able to fix some of its defects, notably the policy of articles starting on page A1 and continuing in other sections (the “jump”). Why have you not been able to fix this problem after so many years? It is hardly necessary to remind you of how it inconveniences readers: Someone else may be reading the other section when one reader is ready to “jump” to the continuation. Many of us like to carry one or two sections to read on the train or bus, but not the whole paper. And, it’s such a hassle to find the “jump” on an obscure page that many readers just give up at that point.

The obstacle to the Times fixing this defect is obviously not common sense but your own bureaucracy. Let’s look quickly at possible solutions:

Continue all front page stories on a later page in Section A, if necessary with a reference to another section at the end, e.g. “Related article page C3.”

Start all articles in the most relevant section, i.e. a top business story would start on page C1, continue later in the same section.

Have all top news on page A1 but when elaboration in another section is needed, just end the Front Page article on the front page and start another, more detailed article in that section, e.g. at end of front page brief article say “Detailed articles in Section C.” In my opinion, solution (3) would be best; solution (1) would be fine also; but solution (2) would be too much against the tradition of the Times to have the Front Page reflect all the day’s top stories, although it would certainly make the other sections more exciting to have some top stories start there.

And Bill Keller responds:

“I’m one of those readers who finds jumps into other sections a recurring source of frustration. There’s nothing worse than getting to the bottom of a compelling Metro story on Page A1 and discovering that my crime-obsessed 8-year-old has run off with the B section, where my story continues. (At least it means we’re making inroads into the third-grader demographic.) Jumps have been a perennial subject of debate within this newspaper and others, and the conversation continues. Our art director, Tom Bodkin, and I have agreed to give the issue a hard look as part of a general review of the A section this year.

Alas, it is not just a problem of newsroom bureaucracy. It is, first, a problem of space. There is a limit on the size of the A section imposed by the capacity of the printing presses. It’s roughly 40 pages — with some variation depending on the number of pages we print in color that day and the size of other sections being printed at the same time. On some days, if we put all the jumps of Page 1 business, metro and sports into the A section, we’d have to sharply reduce coverage of foreign and national news, which most readers regard as the bedrock of our news coverage. A second reason for jumps is that it they serve as a bridge to larger packages of coverage when a really big story breaks. When we have big business news, for example, we usually try to give readers a full plate of coverage: profiles of key players, graphics, analytical columns, etc. A rich package of stories about, say, a giant merger feels more at home in Business Day.

You have rightly identified the three main options, and we’ll be looking at those and other variations this year. I actually started my career at a newspaper, The Oregonian, that adopted your option 3. Every Page 1 story ended on Page 1, and instead of “Continued on…” you would find a note saying something like, “Additional details on…” It was not a perfect solution. For one thing, we all believed it reduced the odds a reader would turn to the rest of the story. For another, it created a certain amount of redundancy, since the “additional details” articles had to repeat at least the main thrust of the story.”

Well, it seems to me that this reader has to become the new editor of the paper: he knows and tells what to do, but Mr. Keller still is not sure about what to do with the “jumps”.

Ask any reader and they will tell you the solution: Kill them!

The Boston Globe will integrate its news-gathering operations with the Boston.com website as part of its strategy of making its content more readily accessible on various media. Globe editor Martin Baron will oversee editorial operations for both operations and will coordinate how news.

The New York Times Company said yesterday that it was already expecting to save $12 million in newsprint costs this year by using lighter-weight paper at its newspapers and by eliminating the Television section at The Times and daily stock tables at The Times and The Boston Globe.

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates said Thursday that he would soon step back from day-to-day operations at the software giant, and instead devote more time to his charitable foundation.

Many family-owned media companies will be better if they learn this lesson from Bill Gates.

Last week I was in Moscow where more than 1.700 newspaper publishers and editors belonging to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) meet in the shadow of the Kremlin.

The WAN hosted the most interesting international newspaper meeting of the year (“Newspapers: A New Era of Innovation”) with two different events taking place in the same building but with two different programs in separate auditoriums.

At the World Newspaper Congress, the publishers discussed the traditional issues: how this industry is going to survive and if survival and progress are still possible.

At the World Editors Forum, the editors discussed the new challenges of the “We Media” revolution: how traditional newsrooms and journalism are going to survive and if survival and progress are still possible.

Because publishers in many markets are today more open to these changes and revolutions than editors, it was really interesting that the program for the editors was the one that devoted more sessions to these changes and revolutions.

The editors heard speakers from Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia and Microsoft, the greatest challengers to traditional media.

My feeling was that more and more, our industry is going to participate in two radically different kind of events: meetings like the recent Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas and gatherings like the recent We Media sessions in London.

One model examines how we can improve our speed with better trains: from slow steam-powered locomotives, to faster electric engines.

In this model, the participants are aware of the different kind of trains available, they realize that the tracks must improve but they don’t want to change the fundamentals of this transportation medium: going point to point, conducted by traditional drivers.

The other takes an opposite approach: how we can travel better with a different media model: a non-linear itinerary conducted by a new breed of cars and drivers.

What is fascinating to me is that in many ways this resembles what might have been parallel meetings a hundred years ago of makers of horse-drawn buggies and motor-car manufacturers.

And, as you know, at the end of the day no manufacturer of horse-drawn buggies was ever able to produce a motor-car. Period.

On Wednesday June 7, during one of the few joint sessions for publishers and editors, INNOVATION introduced the 2006 edition of its Innovations in Newspaper Global Report.

We started this publication in 1999 when the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) Annual Congress wanted to have every year two different presentations: one by McKinsey & Company that was more focused on general management issues and the other by the INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group more oriented to editorial and newsroom management issues.

Well, McKinsey is no longer on the program and we continue the tradition with the presentation of our Innovations in Newspapers report.

This year, as always, our report covers a wide range of issues. One essay by Ben Compaine, for instance, examines how publishers and editors need to examine the strategic issues of the new media revolution. Moving from the strategic to the practical, my own chapter focuses on what a Spanish regional newspaper, El Correo in Bilbao, is doing day-to-day to interact with its readers, testing in a big way the participatory journalism revolution.

What I find most interesting in El Correo’s experiment is this:

First: there is revolutionary change in the newsroom AND the newspaper’s content.

Second: a strong leadership role by the editor.

Third: the project is massive, and not a tentative, small-scale effort.

Four: It is successful.

Fifth: It can de copied everywhere.

Sixth: It doesn’t cost too much money.

Seventh: Readers like it.

Eighth: The advertisers like it, too.

Nineth: Young readers love it.

Tenth: It could be a good way to start the transition from horses to motors.

Ifyou are interested in the full report (we cover issues like blogs, classifieds, bi-media and multi-media newsrooms and compact newspapers), please go to our website: www.innovation-mediaconsulting.com

In the foreword to the report, Bengt Braun, CEO of Sweden’s Bonnier Group, with about 150 operating units in more than 20 countries, confronts the challenges to our industry and concludes that: “We must have the determination to adapt to the new realities”.

Amen.