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QIT #6 News and music are incomparable

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I’ve was listening on the radio (You & Yours, I think) to a debate about the PPL and PRS licences businesses need in order to play music in the workplace.

As a quick explanation, this is from law firm Hammonds (warning – it’s a pdf):

Any copyright music which is played within a business and can be heard by more than one person (whether staff members or the general public) is likely to require a licence. This includes music played almost anywhere outside a private dwelling, for example in offices and factories; shops and stores; leisure facilities; kitchens; staff rooms; post rooms; and even music played on the telephone whilst customers are put on hold; as well as the usual public areas such as waiting rooms, restaurants and bars.

That lead me to think of all the newspapers sitting in cafes, bars and waiting rooms across the UK. Each newspaper is only bought once but many may read and benefit from it.

In some respects it doesn’t really matter how this has come to pass – whether it is because of competition from other platforms, the public perception of news being a right or just the newspaper industry historically undervaluing itself – the point it illustrates is that the news industry doesn’t really believe its content has any value other than to provide structure around which to place advertising.

This seriously effects how the industry can now move forward and, with such different attitudes to the value of their content, how can we suggest that the answers to the news industry’s woes can be found in the experiences of the music industry?

A big thank you and an invite

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I have been utterly blown away by the response to my new job blog post last week and have felt guilty that I haven’t been able to thank everyone for their kind comments.

If I haven’t been in touch – please know I’m chuffed to bits and very grateful for the good wishes.

To answer the main questions: my last day at The Birmingham Post will be March 6th. After that I will be off to SXSWi and will start at The Times on March 23rd. Inbetween I will find somewhere to live in London!

In the meantime I would like to invite my friends and colleagues to join me for a drink at Pennyblacks in the Mailbox, Birmingham on March 6th. It would be great to see you there.

New Job

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Today I have resigned from my job at the Birmingham Post.

I will be leaving the paper and Birmingham in just over a month to take up a new position as a web development editor for The Times.

This is a pretty big deal for me. The Post was where I got my first break into journalism and where I had the opportunity to develop my interest in the web. I am a passionate supporter of the title and of the city and I will miss both immensely.

I’m really grateful to everyone at the paper who supported me and encouraged me to develop my expertise in blogging and social media. Also, big thanks to Birmingham’s exceptionally friendly and welcoming online community who have been generous with their time and taught me so much.

Looking forward, The Times is a phenomenally exciting opportunity for me and, in very many ways, my dream job. I’ll go into the details in another post soon, but suffice to say I’m really looking forward to it and will, I hope, be able to fill you in about my London adventures via this blog.

Seven things you’d never need to know about me

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I’ve been meaning to get around to writing this meme post for some time. Thanks to Kat and Bruce for tagging me with this dubious honour.

So, here goes:

1. I once won first prize in a roller dance competition by performing a freestyle arrangement to the theme tune of Paddington Bear.

2. I have advertised alpaca shawls on local Bolivian TV.

3. I was one grade away from fulfilling the requirements of a place offered to me at Mansfield College, Oxford. Given the choice to retake, I chose instead to stick to my plan of taking a year out and traveling the world. I sometimes regret that decision, but mostly I don’t.

4. I was selected to try out for the UK Women’s Waterpolo Team… but didn’t make it in.

5. I fear that the things I do are not quite good enough (especially this sentence, which on the first go was very poorly constructed – see below).

6. I have eaten cow brains.

7. I have had a gun held against my head.

To continue this meme I call upon Julia Gilbert, Chris Unitt, Jaki Booth, D’Log (for he is a man of mystery), dp (as before), Karen Strunks and Fiona Handscomb.

“Everyone just Googles”

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This is a quote taken from a conversation I had with a lawyer about her consumption of news:

“The problem is you people in the media are stuck in your own little world and forget that we’re also quite busy in our own little world and we don’t have time to keep up with what you’re doing.
“We don’t want to have to understand your RSS feeds, we just want to get the information that we need as quickly and easily as possible.
“Handing over 50p and getting that information printed on paper is an easy transaction. It makes sense.
“Fiddling around trying to understand and set up an RSS reader doesn’t.
“When it comes to information online the quickest way is to Google for it. Everyone just Googles.
“Then, if you find a useful easy-to-use site in the Google search results, that’s the site you’ll go back to.”

Beyond the parasitic news model (and why Kindle won’t save us either)

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So it’s 2009 and the search for a sustainable online newspaper business continues.

Even Google hasn’t quite worked out how traditional newspapers safely navigate past the Rusbridger Cross to emerge as businesses that generates most of their revenue from online operations.

The problem: print commands much higher premiums for advertising then the web does.

In order to compensate for that, web businesses either need to significantly scale up output, or significantly cut back on costs.

Currently one common solution espoused by those immersed in online business is to find someone else to worry about most of the costs for you.

The thinking is thus: the web is already awash with stories produced by other news orgainsations and these can be used as a free resource.

With a bit of repurposing and organising by a small team of copy editors, stories can be presented as an entirely new, high-volume, comprehensive news service.

It’s a smart model – one that could also disrupt the many news aggregation subscription services that exist.

You could also argue that, by combining stories from many sources, better organising them or by integrating social media, these news businesses are occupying a space that could/should have been filled by newspapers a long time ago.

But I still can’t see how their businesses can be sustainable in the long term. By relying on the mainstream media to produce their information in the first place,  they are tying themselves into the very business model they claim to be replacing.

If the mainstream media fails, these new businesses fail with it.

Mainstream media provides a volume of news online that is yet to have an equivalent.

I know it’s not a popular argument to make, but I’m afraid no other online content (as it currently stands) will cut it as a replacement. (If you don’t believe me, ask Eric Schmidt.)

Think about it: how many websites would you have to trawl through a day to find as many celebrity gossip stories as you would get from the combined feeds of The Sun, The Daily Star and The Mirror?

More scarily, how many websites would you have to trawl through a day to find an equivalent volume of quality business news that you get from The Financial Times feed?

An alternative theory is that the news industry needs to learn from the music industry and to replicate  iTunes or create some other form of paid-for model.

I’m not so sure that works either.

I agree that there is much we can learn from the music industry (that lawsuits and protectionist attitudes won’t save you – for example),  but I think there are also very distinct differences.

For example, when consumers download music off the internet for free, they pretty much know they are doing it illegally. The large record companies are not putting out their content for free on their own websites and there is no official Google Music.

We also do not have a market where consumers understand they have to invest in electronic devices for the purpose of accessing print content. This, in my opinion, is why the Amazon Kindle is unlikely to be the answer to the newspaper industry’s woes.

Perhaps a more fruitful investigation would be into developing paid-for products and services that reuse content or closely ally to the media brand.

QIT #5: The two most valuable assets for sustainable online journalism?

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This really is not thought out as well as I’d like, but it seems important so here goes:

In search of the sustainable business model for online journalism it seems to me that there are two areas that are key:

1. Well-organised data

News is information, information is data. The better the structures you have in place to organise and classify that data, the more likely you will be able to sell what you have as a unique service. You also have a better ability to repurpose, reinvent and diversify what you do for the changing needs of clients/customers.

2. A loyal network

In journalism you are nothing if you don’t have a community backing you. Newspapers need readers, sites need users. Online is no different, you may have the scale, but you also need some form of loyalty and personal buy in to what you do. These are the people who are of interest to sponsors/advertisers and they also might save you if times get tough.

How Created in Birmingham taught me about blogging

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If you follow my Twitterstream, you won’t have avoided being pestered to vote for Created in Birmingham for Best UK Blog in the Weblog Awards.

I am careful about partisanship on most topics, but this is one I am happy to put on my campaigning hat for and I want to use this post to explain why.

I came across CiB in 2007 when I was working as Media & Marketing Editor for the Post. I was tipped off about it by someone at Advantage West Midlands who happened to know then-author Pete Ashton.

At first, I think my reaction was pretty typical of journalists: I saw it as a two-bit, amateurish attempt at keeping tabs on the local creative community. Sweet and cuddly, but not REAL news. No threat there.

Except, that wasn’t exactly true. What I quickly came to realise was that CiB is  a unique resource for those in the creative sector.

Pete’s commitment to post at least once a day and the honest style in which posts were written (conversational, links out, making it clear where information came from) was the recipe for its success. It wasn’t long before it was a recognised name within the creative circles in the city.

It bought together the creative community in a way that traditional newspaper articles could not quite do. What was posted was not restricted by page space, nor limited by when it could be published AND it gave people a place to talk, connect and debate.

As CiB increasingly became a resource for my story ideas, I realised there was something in this blog lark that meant it had the potential to be genuine competition to “traditional” media.

Determined to understand more I pestered Pete to meet me (not something he was initially that keen to do – me being “evil mainstream media”). When we eventually did meet we started to realise there was quite a crossover in the work of CiB and my job as Media & Marketing Editor.

It was fantastic to go through that process . Pete started questioning how much of what the blog did was “journalism” and I started looking at the ways in which my work could better engage with a community and how the online news model would work as a business.

It was Pete that suggested I started this blog as a way of experimenting with a more “two-way” type of writing.

There is no doubt that has changed eveything.

My personal experience of blogging set me on a road that challenged all my beliefs about journalism and media. It introduced me to new online tools and helped me develop a new network of interesting sources, contacts and friends.

It has changed the way I think about my industry, about the businesses that form it and the organisations that claim to support it. It has also irrevocably changed my hopes and plans for a career in journalism.

Pete has now left CiB, but his good work has been continued by Chris Unitt and, I’m sure, will be by new author Kate Spragg. It is still a fantastic case study to use when looking at how blogs can impact on traditional media.

So please vote CiB, it helped this print journalist learn more that I can tell you.

Quick, incoherent thought #4: the power of print

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Why do we use newspaper instead of hardback books to distribute news?

Silly question, I know, but bear with me.

We use newspaper because – in the world of paper-based products – it is the most cost-effective, efficient way to transmit information to a defined audience on a regular basis.

But if there are new ways to transmit that information that is more cost-effective and more efficient (the Internet, for example), does that eradicate the value of newspaper?

Well, the people who queued outside The Washington Post for their special edition on Obama’s victory would tell you there was a value to print and it has been argued that this is proof that newspaper is still the format of choice for important events. “People didn’t print out the news on their computers”, goes the argument.

This is, of course, right. People didn’t print out the news from their computers. But then that doesn’t prove that web-delivered news is a lesser product or any less likely to disrupt the print media business. 

What it does prove is that there is an innate value placed on print that is not just defined by efficiency or speed of delivery. There is something valuable about it as an object, something to keep as a memory of an important occasion. Digital is, at the moment, still considered too transient a medium for keepsakes.

I know newspapers are great at creating special editions. Perhaps, however, there is a value in looking at how having a reputation for creating printed products could be used even more to our advantage.

Liverpool Daily Post’s current project of creating a book containing pictures submitted to their Flickr Group is a fascinating example. The value is not in the pictures themselves (which are mostly available online), but in the fact that they are in a big glossy book that can be kept as a keepsake of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture.

So, it was cheap and quick to print extra copies of the Washington Post on the day of Obama’s Victory. It made more money. What other print products could the Washington Post have sold on that day, or in that week? A special limited edition of all the articles it ran about Obama on the run up to the election? Some form of picture book?

Perhaps then, on some occasions, there would be a business case to argue that news would be better delivered in a hardback book…