I also realise you’re talking about bonafide academic research in these passages and how academics should be doing more relevant research for our industry. But that’s just the point. I believe we should be working with them so we create relevant research TOGETHER. We should develop a better dialogue. We should be working together to create an academic-industry practitioner association. We should seek funding together to build better research.

We are doing that now with the Future & Change Study, which is 100 percent quantitative data. This is the study we execute along with the academics. The study seeks to determine how much revenue each media company respondent is earning this year, how much revenue they will need to make up for lost revenue in the next year and five years, and how they will go about achieving that through revenue-making strategies (new product development being the number 1 answer by far). Then we ask about their product development strategies and their targeted areas for investment and cutbacks. We also ask about their appetite for change across the organisation, and plans for training and development across the value chain. We then analyse the topline trends and correlations for different sized companies, different regions of the world and so on.

Right now we’re also working on aggregating all known data about digital media usage patterns and revenue patterns by making partnerships with 70+ research companies around the world. The data is published in our World Digital Media Trends yearbook, which we’ve published for five years. It’s also not academic research, but it answers the questions you have in a different way.

We’re working on getting funding for other, much more profound research that answers some of your other questions, and we absolutely will make academics a key part of our research team.

So perhaps this is a call to action. Let’s absolutely be proactive about creating relevant research for our industry. This will require us to work alongside academics to design studies and surveys that will ultimately move our industry forward.

However, the type of research you’re talking about is of a different kind than what I *think* is the the thrust of this conversation. If I understand you correctly, what you’re describing is assembling and analyzing existing best practices/attitudes within the industry, etc. Certainly that’s very valuable. Especially so because of the WAN-Ifra global reach.

But what I’m hoping for — and what I think Vin and Earl are one about as well — is research being done outbound from the industry: i.e. analyzing the fundamental shifts in media consumption/patterns, deep study of public appetites from products, anthropological studies of contemporary media consumption, basic research into new means of communicating with the public, meaningful development of new tools, etc.

Example: Apple takes about 10% of revenue and throws it at pure R&D to study things that might never become a product because the 1 out of 100 that survive might change everything. I would love to newspapers do the same…

To its credit, the Knight Foundation did step up to the plate on this with their efforts to fund some open source projects. But still….

The study was first conceived of several years ago by Dr. Erik Wilberg, a prominent media consultant and professor at the prestigious Norwegian School of Management. The study was targeted to newspaper companies in the Nordic countries. Two years ago, I partnered with Erik and Francois Nel, a South African academic working at the Univ of Central Lancashire in the UK. With Erik’s partnership, Francois and I re-wrote the 22-question survey instrument to be appropriate for media companies around the world, and expanded the array of questions to include revenue patterns and projections, money-making and cost-savings strategies, and training/development/cultural change strategies in multiple media companies around the world. The survey is sent out in 10 languages. We at the SFN project produce the graphics and analysis, along with the academics, and finally, we produce a report together, which is available to WAN-IFRA membership. We will publish our second report in September. We have fantastic results. I can’t tell you how wonderful it’s been working with all of my colleagues.

Here’s the caveat: This type of industry research does not “count” toward fulfilling academic research requirements. It’s not academic enough. But my colleagues are more than willing to cooperate because they 1. Believe in practical and powerful industry research, and 2. The research results inform future research studies that should be made, and 3. Some of the existing research can be parlayed into other academic research.

We hope we can expand our academic partnerships. We are in final stages of negotiation with a few top ranked American universities to assist us on the study as well. We are working with London School of Economics on a new revenue consortium to benefit media companies. In this case, LSE and Brunel (UK) University have created a case study template and academics and industry practititioners can follow the format to create case studies on exemplars in the new revenue realm.

We’re also about to launch a new benchmarking study, to be explained later, which is a perfect hybrid between academics and industry professionals sharing the extraordinary research workload.

I am very optimistic that we have found the secret sauce in bringing the best of both worlds together: academic and industry practitioners on the same research team. I would be glad to make last year’s report available to anyone who wants it, and the new report when it is released next month.
–Martha L Stone

There is another factor that bears some scrutiny in this: the demonstrable lack of interest in R&D among newspaper leaders themselves.

A number of years ago, I made the remark at a conference that each year the dairy industry spends more money on R&D for yogurt alone than the entire newspaper industry spends on R&D. And we know pretty much everything we need to know about yogurt.

The newspaper industry remains a multibillion enterprise despite its withered. And yet even now, what passes for R&D at newspapers can be found in nothing more than marketing budgets that conduct focus groups (ughh…) that are specifically designed to produce the exact results desired by publishers.

Newspaper marketing departments don’t do real, honest product research — they produce spin designed to sooth battered executive egos and fool advertisers. Compare that to the way marketing departments operate in industries where there is an actual interest in innovation: those marketing departments are engaged in fundamental research that leads to actual development.

You could make the case that newspaper new media departments — now nearly all folded into the old school muffler of the traditional newsroom, which results in pure narcosis — were a stab at R&D.

However to make that case you have to ignore the simple fact that new media departments — often lead by visionaries — where actively restrained from doing things that might threaten the traditional business. They weren’t Research & Development so much as the were React & Defend.

Other than early experiments by the late, lamented Knight Ridder and Frank Daniel’s support of the early work at NandoNet, we have yet to see an publisher of consequence put up a few million a year to fund a PURE R&D division. Any of the top 10 publishers could afford it, even now. But they don’t.

And yet some actual R&D would produce meaningful near-term results.

So absent any desire to actually innovate within the industry, why should academia? Give me one publisher — ONE! — who decides to invest in pure R&D to turn the tide in the industry and I think we would see important things happen.

Any other mature industry beset by the kinds of technological and demographic earthquakes newspapers face would head right to the lab. In the newspaper industry, leaders have headed right to the golf course instead….

Lastly, I want to offer up an impassioned defense of Earl Wilkinson and INMA. I’ve known Earl and his organization for more than 12 years and I assure anyone reading this that few people in the world know more about the industry than Earl, few people in the world think more deeply about the industry than Earl, and few people are willing to take the risk to state the blunt truths about the industry than Earl. Globally, INMA has been the force for significant efforts to reform the industry’s antiquated practices. This is an important organization that has fought the good fight. They deserve the applause of anyone hoping to see a better day and new thinking in newspapers.

INMA rightly dropped the “marketing” portion of the acronym some years ago. For anyone to suggest that it’s simply a “marketing” association misunderstands both INMA’s work and results. And it also misunderstands what marketing departments do in grown up industries.

Granted it’s an easy mistake to make if you come from newspapers — our view of marketing is enfeebled and shallow. Our view of marketing is tricking advertisers with the latest crazy ABC circ rules. But that’s not what marketing should be…

Rant off :)

Eight years ago, the INMA Board of Directors encouraged me to conduct outreach to the academic community to see if there could be creative linkages that would add value to the newspaper industry. U.S. newspaper executives are often dismissive of the academic community, though there are tighter connections between industry and academia in Europe, Asia and the South Pacific (INMA’s nearly 5,000 members are in 80+ countries).

I found AEJMC to be the most efficient way to peer into the world of journalism education. I attended their conference. I was invited to speak two or three times. I was fascinated that so much research and academic study was being done on the newspaper industry – yet none of it was being considered by people who could make practical use of it.

I networked with many AEJMC members and leaders, who openly and clearly yearned for a deeper connection to the industry they dedicated their livelihoods analyzing and supporting.

The beauty of AEJMC and journalism education is insatiable curiosity. There will always be people entrenched in their views. Yet AEJMC members encouraged me to dig deeper and make connections no matter how politically incorrect. It’s fantastic to be surrounded by passionate thinkers.

So with INMA and AEJMC mandates, I poured through the thousands of academic papers. INMA created a link archive to the best papers. (It was funny that a few authors didn’t like the idea that the general public could so easily access their work.)

What we concluded, simply, was that in the loose and decentralized process of deciding what subjects got researched across mostly North American universities – from graduate students to professors to foundation-funded institutions – there wasn’t enough material being produced that was practically useful to newspaper publishers. I didn’t ascribe any emotion to it. I didn’t have an agenda. I wasn’t looking for any specific answers to industry questions.

And I reported that back to the AEJMC membership – along with a list of recommended subjects specifically suggested by INMA members in the trenches looking for insights on growing audience.

The academic community feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I could sense torches, pitchforks and a midnight revolution.

Then nothing happened.

I concluded, over time, there simply wasn’t a strong enough central governing mechanism within academia to practically do anything about it.

To the INMA Board of Directors, I reported back that academia represented a weak 2 percent proposition if they were looking for hidden research gold. And I pointed them to the gold that I found.

Meanwhile, if the academic community wants a tighter connection to news publishers, they’re going to have find a way to nudge research at their discretion toward the fascinating and challenging subjects publishers consider actionable.

When that day comes, INMA will be a willing and able conduit.

However, I do think that a segment of academics are their allies. For example, I recently encountered a senior and influential academic who told me that the computerized data harvesting methods which Adrian Holovaty (chicagocrime.org, everyblock.com, etc.) has been pioneering AREN’T journalism. Or another who tells me that a story isn’t actually published until its in print.

As for Earl Wilkinson, while I know scores of newspaper business executives who fit the portrait you paint, he’s not one of them. Among the folks I know at ASNE, NAA, APME, INMA, or WAN, few have done more than Wilkinson to help newspapers as a means of both citizenship and public engagement. A true crossover character, it’s too bad he doesn’t work in a newsroom. – Vin Crosbie

More troubling to me was the invention of so-called proprietary research tools developed and promoted by major media firms (I speak in this case of advertising and media buying agencies). These were conceived from the beginning as sales tools but represented as solid research. Frankly, they were considered internally as being contrived pieces of window dressing, yet treated outwardly as guiding research of real value. When you already take that (cynical) view of the value of research — that it is something that can be leveraged to sell a service or point of view — then it becomes difficult to appreciate and value more empirical academic research.

That said, I also look at some academic research as sorely lacking in real-word grounding. Often it is hard to accomplish great things in academia with limited funds coming from grants and such. Meanwhile, major corporations can direct millions toward their own research to support their own needs and, occasionally, expected outcomes. Neither is perfect, and each side can learn from the other. The newspaper industry, unfortunately, squandered its opportunity to lead with new technology over a decade ago. For those like Mr. Wilkinson to dismiss the value of scholarly understanding of the new media consumer says much about why the newspaper industry is rapidly becoming irrelevant to the typical media consumer.