Ebb Tide, Greenwich, Connecticut  (click to enlarge)  – © Vin Crosbie

What makes September and October major months for travel? Projects conceived during summer vacations are launched then. My travels for clients always spikes during those months. Nevertheless, I'm now home for most of the remainder of the year!

My thanks to Aer Lingus, American Airlines; British Airways; the staffs of the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Dublin; Kempinski Hotel Airport Munich; MAN Roland in Westmont, Illinois; Ritz Carlton Seoul; the Korean Broadcasting System's wonderful online language lessons; and a few other people who can't be mentioned due to non-disclosure agreements.

Unless clients warrant, my only travel plans during the remainder of 2005 will be to attemd the Online News Association's annual conference October 28-29 in New York City and to speak about the topic of Signing the copyright transfer form… What has changed since the introduction of Open Access journals? at the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Current Topics in Copyright seminar on November 8th at the American Geophysical Union's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

During the past two months, I've collected a 5 centimeter-thick stack of periodical clippings and an even thicker online queue of stories about online publishing and broadcasting, digital editions, paid/premium content endeavors, periodical publishing to mobile device, and other topics. I've now time to write about those topics, and to shift Corante's Rebuilding Media group weblog into a higher gear. I'll also be making changes in this Digital Deliverance blog (such as restoring the Comments function).

An immediate one will involve how I blog. For years, I've been blogging in the form of mainly short (200 to 500 word) essays. I've used the essay format because I'd rather provide analysis and context than simple report events; there are plenty of other sites that report. However, the more client work and travel I do, the less time I have for pro bono blogging. Plus, the more behind my draft essays become; I've currently got nearly two dozen in various states of draft (likewise, many trade journal article drafts). That's why I'm going to switch to using the quick-mention blog format — pointing to events as they occur, so not to get behind, then later writing any analysis as warranted and time permits.

Here's a few things I was noting last week:

Continue reading "Home Again" »

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Emma & Maria, Thanksgiving Day dusk, Plum Island, Massachusetts

I've been away since mid-November on business assignments, plus some family time. But I'm now back at work, where each week I receive about two or three e-mailed queries from friends in the new-media business who ask me for informal advice about their professional projects. I've now got a backlog of these requests. Here are two recent examples:

"Not sure if you have seen the digital product that I talked about with you some time ago but it is now available on a free trial that is meant to end shortly. I had thought to inform you earlier but felt a little too uncomfortable putting it to professional scrutiny.

"It's fairly barebones but I actually think with this stuff simplicity is the key. If anything the package is too long. I am trying to get management to extend the free period and let us get the existing userbase to complete an online questionnaire to find out if we have achieved the right content mix and to assess its suitability and useabillity.

"This is a real low budget project and I think the interface needs a lot of tightening up.

"I am attaching a recent issue and you can access the latest version from our site but you will need to register.

"The idea behind the product is that subscribers have an edition they can print on letter or A4 at work and then take home to read over the weekend. I just don't think broadsheets and tabloids work in this type of format but short magazines can. Advertising is a hard sell with small circulations so the revenue has to come from the subscription price.

"If you have time let me know what you think (but don't be too cutting!)."

Or

"Unique monthly users against monthly pageviews:

"For example, if a site has 2.5 million uniques and 120 mm pageviews/month, is that a good ratio - does that mean the viewers look at a lot of pages?

What's a good ratio; what's a bad ratio?"

Please understand that although I'm business friends with these people, I haven't corresponded or talked to them in a year or more. In the years that I've known them, they've never been consulting clients and indeed have declined becoming clients when I have approached them about solving their business problems for a consulting fee. They receive steady salaries from their companies, but I'm unsalaried, self-employed, and live on the income from the fees I receive from my consulting advice.

How should I respond to business friends who ask me to give them for free the professional advice from which I make my livlihood?

My New England upbringing makes me shy away from bluntly pointing out that they should pay if they want my professional advice. Thus I'd for many years just answer their questions rather than point out their temerity. But during the past few years, I've begun feeling like a sucker answering their queries for free. So, lately I've not been answering their e-mails, which isn't a good solution either. However, I can now respond by simply pointing them to this posting.

— Vin Crosbie

p.s.: OK, so you want the answers to those two example questions?

If your daily newspaper site has 2.5 million unique users and generates 120 million pageviews per month, you can't tell whether that's a good or bad ratio until you first examine its visitation frequency -- the missing factor in that equation. For examples: The 2.5 million users could each be visiting daily and viewing 48 pages per day or they could each have visited only once that month and read 120 page that day (either of these examples are the extremes). Monthly usage figures are generally useless benchmarks for daily publications. (Imagine if a weekly magazine were touting its number of annual users!) What should be the benchmark to sites whose content changes daily is the daily usage.

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Tiananmen Gate, Beijing                      © Vin Crosbie, 2000

Less isn't more. Forcing people to register to read newspaper Web sites that simply shovel online generic content from printed editions will only diminish the number of people who will use those sites in an era when diminishing readership should be the last thing that any newspaper operation will do.

Those sites are using registration as Bandaids™ to cover their failed previous strategy of hoping that gross sales of banner ads would adequately subsidize their formerly gateless sites. Their thinking is that maybe advertisers will pay more for ads if given better demographic information about the sites' users. That's true in principle, but there nevertheless are two problems with this new strategy:

First, these sites' core problem is infrequent use. Printed newspaper readership is steadily shrinking, but at least that readership reads long and frequently. A survey two years ago by the Readership Institute of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University reported that the average user of a printed newspaper in America reads the paper 3.4 times per week (14.7 times per month) and spend an average of 28.2 minutes doing so each time. By contrast, the average users of the average American newspaper's Web site visits only 2 to 4 times per month and spends less than 35 minutes total there all month, according to Nielsen//Netratings and to ComScore Media Metrix.

The sites that are going force registration will ironically increase their average user statistics — but only by sifting out anyone who's less than a fervent reader of the site. Imagine a newspaper company saying that it will only give a reader a printed copy if that user first identifies and provides some demographic information about himself!

The core problem is usage, not advertising demographic statistics. If usage were much more frequent and longer, advertisers would be attracted. According to the Forrester Reseach report News Destination Sites are Dead Ends, 49 percent of North American online consumers have never visited a newspaper Web site. If most newspaper sites force user registration, that percentage will grow worse.

Second, speaking of advertising demographics, is something that Jim Wilson recently noted in a response to a Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits item about How to Appease Registration Opponents:

Here's why registration won't ultimately work: because most newspaper websites won't hire anyone to study the mounds of data that will be collected. If the data is not studied, parsed and then boiled down for use by salespeople to help make more money for the site, what GOOD does registration actually do? Very little. Some could argue it lets people get customized weather forecasts or movie showtimes. BIG DEAL. The reason we keep hearing for sites to do registration is to make money. How do you make more money with registration? You have sales people target specific advertisers based on user data. How do you figure out that data? You hire someone to analyze it. Someone please name me one newspaper site that has hired a full-time person (that is what it would take) to do this. PLEASE!!!

Our guess is that newspaper Web sites will at least use the gathered data to compile aggregate demographics about users, much as printed magazines and TV now do. Yet that's a rather lame mass media advertising strategy for interactive media vehicles such as Web sites. The gathered data should be used individually to deliver to each user whatever stories and advertising fits that individual user (see above).

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Self-Portrait at the Apocalypse  (click to enlarge) © Vin Crosbie, 1980

I'm having a blast! Sometimes a person must put his money where his mouth is and go for broke. In early December, I made a promise to disclose the business plan for newspaper publishing in the 21st Century. Yes, it was a bold promise, but one I don't regret; I'm looking forward to it. I said the work had a mid-January deadline and a publication date of Spring 2004.

Since then, some friends and observers have noted that this promise is coming due and had even expressed some worries that I might overpromise and underdeliver:

He offers this teaser as explanation for why he and his blog will be quiet for the next several weeks. I'll be listening, but I guess he's never heard of underpromise and overdeliver. Should we believe the hype? Vin, don't disappoint us now!

I understand those concerns, and today thought I'd give an update about the schedule. My plan will be published in three phases:

1. The January deadline that I'd mentioned for Spring publication was for an academic journal that is soliciting viable business models for traditional media publishing on the Internet. But late in December that journal postponed its submissions deadline until the middle of this month and also postponed its resulting publication date until September. So, if my plan is accepted for publication by that journal, then the peer-reviewed, academic language version of the business plan won't be published until late Summer.
2. I all along have planned to self-publish a complete, business-language version of the plan this Spring. That is still on schedule.
3. One of the journalism journals has meanwhile asked me to publish a part of the plan later this month. That part will focus only on the editorial facet of newspaper publishing in the 21st Century. I mention this because some people who read that journal article it might think this is the entire plan. No, it's just the editorial part of the plan from the publisher's viewpoint.

Meanwhile, my Publishing: Free to Fee monthly column at ClickZ.com next Wednesday will feature what I hope is an interesting profile — computer columnist Brian Livingston who has discovered that asking his subscribers for contributions generates more money than charging a fixed subscription price for his self-published Brian's Buzz column. My column will have details and financial analyses.

Stay tuned.
     – Vin Crosbie

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(Click to enlarge)                   © Vin Crosbie, 1971.

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With vertical mile of air separating him from the Bossons Glacier
below, Mike Kelley steps carefully some 12,600 feet (3,840
metres) up our climb of the Arête des Cosmiques on the Aiguille
du Midi, Mt. Blanc Range, France. (click to enlarge photo, © Vin
Crosbie, 1999). For a good video about climbing this ridge, see
TVMountain, la Montagne sur le Web (French narration).

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(CLICK IT TO ENLARGE)                                                                 © Vin Crosbie, 1973

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