[My opening keynote speech at the Second Annual Global Conference on Individuated Newspapers, Denver, Colorado, June 26, 2008]

Some of you here know me. Since 1993 when I began working full-time in newspaper new media, I've given approximately 100 speeches at conferences. I've given speeches at E&P, WAN, Ifra, INMA, and Seybold. But this is the speech I've been waiting for all those years. I may not have known it then, but I know it now.

In it, I'm going to say some heretical things. But please remember that I'm a fifth-generation newspaperman. I literally grew up in a letterpress-era newsroom, can read teletype, work a linotype, cut press plates, and run a press. I've sold ads. I've driven delivery trucks. I've reported, edited, and general managed a daily. I'm a professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. If I speak what sounds like heresy or I criticize this industry, know that it is because I love the newspaper business. It's my family and my life.

The reason why this is the speech that I've been working up to all my life, is it distills all I know about this business and its future. The culmination of all I know as a newsman, newspaper, and professor. We've a bold agenda today.

Continue reading "Second Annual Global Conference on Individuated Newspapers" »

By Vin Crosbie at 10:40 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

Thanks, David! Two linguistic notes before I begin.

First, please forgive my Yank accent. My great-grandfather Crosbie, who was born in London, would wince at it.

Second, doe anyone here speak Chinese? I ask because, after people who read English, the second largest linguistic group online today is people who read Chinese. To make sure they benefit from my speech, I took the title that the conference organizers suggested - Thriving in the digital age: threats and opportunities for digital publishers - and put that into Google's English-to-Chinese translation engine. Then, just to make sure that I got the Chinese version right, I took that result and put it into Yahoo's Chinese-to-English translation engine. The resulting title is Watts that you say? Screw Gutenberg, the Change Underway is Even Larger. So that's what I'm going to talk about.

Gutenberg. The Screw. Watt. And why the changes today underway are even larger than during Gutenberg. (Don't worry, I'll explain the screw.)

Here is a slide of Gutenberg in Strasbourg. His statue in bronze and a target today for pigeons. He's also a target for quotes about the Internet. My guess is that you've all heard most the quotes before:

'The Internet is the biggest things since Gutenberg.'
'The change underway will be the biggest since Gutenberg.'
'The Internet will change things as much as Gutenberg did.'

Well, don't get me wrong: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press probably sparked the Renaissance. Yet it's time we understand something: The change today underway is even larger!

The change now underway is bigger than mass production was for the medieval calligraphers and scribes who Gutenberg's invention put out of work. Moreover, it's not just a change from production of single calligraphic editions to mass production of millions of books. What is underway is an intellectual jump. It's a quantum jump in how information is distributed to people and how they find information.

I've lately become an academic, and in academia we have a technical term for the magnitude of the change today underway. It is an academic term that combines Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. We call it a Mindf*ck.

It's like a jump from two to three dimensions. And from this new dimension arises phenomenal new opportunities for publishers. Opportunities we'll talk about.

Unfortunately, most publishers today still think only in the old two dimensions - and therein lay the only threat to their livelihoods. Their failure to understand the new dimension underway in publishing is the threat. Understand me: The only threat is not to understand the change underway.

Let's go back in time for a moment. The U.K. Statistics Office says there are more than 10,000 Britons who are more than 100 years old. In 1908, the streets outside this hotel, and all the streets of London, were full of horse carriages and horse carts. Though the 20th Century was new then, people nevertheless knew that the 21st Century would be a mechanized age despite the abundance of horses.

The early automobiles showed promise. Telephones were beginning to become common in offices and homes. Tesla and Marconi were each experimenting with something that would eventually be called radio. Yet nobody knew how quickly all those things would affect London's seven million people, one million horses, 25 daily newspapers. Also, more esoteric and far-reaching things were also being developed in 1908. Things like quantum mechanics, which would later give us devices such as television, the transistor, the computer, the laser, and the CD, DVD, etc.

Today in 2008, people still get information distributed on paper pulp or from analog broadcast transmitters that fundamentally have changed little since Marconi's time. Nevertheless, we know that our new century will be an all- digital age. An age of pervasive information. If the personal computer and mobile phone were our equivalents of the newfangled telephones and automobiles for people 100 years ago, so too can we now foresee things that are only recently being and invented, things we're starting to have a clue that will shape the 21st century.

The one million horses were gone from London's streets by 1920, only a dozen years' after 1908. Likewise, the changes between now and 2020 will be phenomenal. If you think that you've seen change during the past dozen years, you ain't seen nothing yet!

I've a bold agenda this morning. My job is to tell you how much things will change and explain the general themes and opportunities in those changes for publishers in the 21st century.

• I will explain why 1.3 billion people have gravitate online despite their already having access to mass media in much more convenient formats than online.


• I will explain why the fragmentation of audiences is an illusion.


• I will explain why traditional newspapers' and news magazines' circulations, and news broadcasts' viewerships, must ineluctably evaporate. And the reason is not because people don't want news.


• I will explain why most newspapers' and news magazines' and news broadcasters' Web sites won't save their companies. (In other words, why what you here in British publishing circles are calling the Rusbridger Cross won't occur.)


• And I'll explain why people will be even better served by New Media than by Mass Media. In other words, why the change today is even greater than that during Gutenberg's era.

Continue reading "EPublishing Innovations Forum 2008" »

By Vin Crosbie at 10:45 AM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

If you work in the media industries and are serious, ask yourself this questions right now: 'Where should I be working to have the most beneficial affect on my industry?'

If you aren't working there now, why aren't you?

Is it because of money? Are you working where you are because that job pays you more than other jobs? Well, if that job pays you just enough to care well for you (and your spouse and family, if you have those), then rest easy.

But if instead you are working where you are because your job is highly lucrative, then know I have the credentials to say to you, shame on you. I earned more than $200,000 in each of the years from 1998 until just recently. But I realized that lucrative earnings˜trying to take as much money as possible from industries that are challenged by fundamental changes in their environment˜is not leadership but exploitation of those industries and the people who work in those indiustries. You might think you are a leader but you definitely are not; you are fooling yourself. You are merely a high-level bureaucrat who is managing decline; you are an incompetent general who is trying to manage a retreat.

Oh, and if you a middle-level manager who is reading this and you think your bosses should be doing more but you are afraid of telling them so, then you as nearly culpable as they are. If you what you do as a middle manager isn't bold enough and forward enough to nearly get you fired during this turbulent time in our industries, then you aren't ably doing your job and you yourself aren't showing the traits of leadership.A lieutenant or captain, no less than a general, has to put herself at risk.

I am the fifth generation of my family in the newspaper business: the son, grandson, great grandson, great-great grandson, and great-great-great grandson of men and women who worked their entire lives to make that business succeed. What they did was mainly for the public good. What right should I have to cash out when during my watch that industry is undergoing challenges that I could otherwise show it how to overcome? What right do you who work in it today, no matter your ancestory, have to cash out in that case despite thousands of your predecessors who've worked to make it succeed?

I've recently left consulting full-time after 12 years and taken a job that will probably cut my income by 75%. But the remainding 25% gives me enough to live on while I work where I can have the most beneficial affect on my industry.

What are you doing? There are people in the media industries who quite literally risk their lives every day. If all you've done is cut staffs and haven't invested long-term in your industry, then you're a bureaucrat no matter how high is your job title. It's time to put your career and livilihood to risk. Make the long-term decisions. Make the long-term decisions. Lead from the front. That's what real generals do.

By Vin Crosbie at 10:58 PM | Permalink Comments (3) TrackBacks (0)

Who I knew in the 1980s when we both worked for United Press International in New York City. Good guy. Great entertainment journalist. We'll miss him.

By Vin Crosbie at 06:04 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)

"But Mr. Hiller said the paper was investing as much as it could, especially in its Web site, and the cuts were nothing more than an acceptance of reality.

'Last year, our operating cash flow went down by about 20 percent,' he said.

'Can you solve the newspaper industry's problems by spending more?' Mr. Hiller said. 'It's an attractive theory, but it doesn't work.'" - as reported by The New York Times

The Los Angeles Times (and the American newspaper industry in general) has cut its newsrooms budget dozens of times and none of those cuts have increased circulation or gross revenues. Likewise, this wasn't the first time that the publisher of the Times has fired an editor who refused further to cut newsroom budgets (and a previous publisher had been fired for refusing to cut newsroom budgets further).

Then why would the David Hiller, latest publisher of The Los Angeles Times, think that further cutting the newsroom budget - or firing an editor who refused to do so - will change anything or result in any different outcome? It certainly won't reverse the newspaper's plummeting circulation or revenues.

Benjamin Franklin said that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Insanity and lack of leadership.

By Vin Crosbie at 08:08 PM | Permalink Comments (1) TrackBacks (0)

Hope and faith aren't business plans.

In an article entitled Online Salvation, American Journal Review, examines the continuing delusion among American newspaper executives that their industry's troubles are somehow 'cyclical,' that because newspapers were people's major source of news for centuries then newspapers will somehow continue to be that major source, that double-digit annual increases in the industry's relatively small online advertising revenues will ever compensate for the single-digit annaul decreases in the industry's relatively gargantuan print advertising revenues, and that perhaps fedoras will return in men's fashions. (OK, I made up that part about hats).

The article quotes Harvard University's Thomas Patterson as seeing a two-tier news system developing, in which national sites continue to see online traffic increase but online traffic falling at mid-sized and smaller newspaper sites.

I don't know what data Patterson is seeing, but traffic isn't falling at smaller sites, though it is at mid-sized newspapers. The reason that traffic is slowly increasing at national and small newspapers is but not at mid-sized newspapers is that people are visiting the sites of national and small newspapers to use those newspapers respective core competencies of national and local news. Mid-sized newspapers have core competency in neither national nor local news (national newspaper do far better at national and the small newspapers that surround the mid-sized ones do far better at local).

I've always been amazed by one other article of faith among American newspaper executives, which wasn't mentioned in this AJR article. That article of faith is American newspaper executives' belief that the woes of their industry can be reversed at any time. They failed to reverse those woes years ago, but they believe they can reverse them today. And if they fail to reverse those woes today, they believe they can somehow reverse them in the future. Those newspaper executives apparently don't live in the temporal world. Their faith is like that of perennial sinners who believe they can still go to heaven if they repent in the very last seconds before their deaths. A very convenient belief.

Unfortunately, the reality-based world doesn't permit 'eleventh hour' redemptions and eternal salvation. 'Windows of opportunity' are stay open only temporarily, not eternally. Had American newspapers cooperated online years ago, they would have been today's Google Newes, CraigsLists, and Ebays. But their windows of opportunities to do those things have closed years ago. To do great things now at all, they must work with Google, Yahoo!, CraigsList, Ebay, etc.

In another article, American Journalism Review assesses U.S. newspaper websites' use of online video:

News organizations are embracing video on their Web sites in a big way. The quality ranges from bad to basic to superb. And for some journalists, the advent of video is a terrific new career opportunity.

On another topic, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is the newspaper industry's latest attempt to control how the online search engines access and index newspaper content. It's online coding that aims to replace the antiquated robots.txt protocol that still controls how the search engines' access and index websites.

A driving force behind ACAP is the World Association of Newspapers, which not long ago wanted to prohibit and sue the search engines from accessing and indexing newspapers' contents. WAN apparently now realizes that that strategy wouldn't be successful, hence its backing of development of ACAP.

Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines aren't involved or cooperating with the ACAP effort. They would need to be for ACAP to be successful, otherwise their search engines will just ignored the new protocol. Moreover, some of the preliminary reviews of ACAP, even within the newspaper industry, see no benefits in it for consumers.

The Times of London is the first major newspaper to use ACAP.

The Financial Times last week reported that the ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox television networks earned approximately $120 million from video advertising on their websites. That sounds like a lot, but the FT article happened to mention in passing that an estimated $1.3 billion was spent on video advertising on U.S. web sites last year. So, it seems to me that those traditional networks have been losing the lion's share of it. Meanwhile, the BBC has apparently underestimated the growth of its online revenues.

It's been a very dangerous year in which to be a journalists. Roy Greenslade of The Guardian noted last week that:

At least 171 journalists and other news media staff have died as a result of their work around the world so far this year, making 2007 the bloodiest year on record for the industry.

With more than a month still to go before the end of the year, the all-time high of 168 deaths recorded in 2006 was exceeded on Tuesday when at least three editorial staff were killed in Sri Lanka during a military air strike on a radio station.

"This horrible statistic should be regarded as a low point in the safety and welfare of the media profession. We need better protection for media workers worldwide," said the president of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), Chris Cramer.

Last month, I met numerous journalists who've been beaten, shot, and almost blown to bits. Here's what I was doing in Guatemala for the Media Development Loan fund, an organizationt that funds freedom of the press in countries with repressive regimes.

Hey, if anything we produce is now automatically copyrighted when we produce it, tell the copyright lawyers that everytime they sing 'Happy Birthday' to their kids, every time they include a full text of a correspondent's e-mail when they reply to it, and every time they snap a family photo that happens to have an artwork, poster, or advertisement in the background, they are infringing on someone's else copyright. University of Utah law professor John Tehranian estimates that he himself infringes to the tune of $12.45 million in liabilities each day. What's your own total?

Totals? Math? Oh, yes, In case you care, the Internet is growing sigmoidally,not exponentially. What would Sigmoid Froid say?

By Vin Crosbie at 08:43 PM | Permalink Comments (0) TrackBacks (0)