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Since the 50 newspaper company CEOs who attended the “Crisis Summit” hosted by the American Press Institute recently did not appear to have come out of that one-day session with The Answer to the industry’s woes, I took it upon myself to offer them some advice in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column: “My ‘Crisis’ Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder.”

Yeah, it might have been more useful for them to ponder my suggestions before the summit. Oh well, there’s still time to save the newspaper industry. Right?

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As the father of two American girls, now ages 11 and 16, I get to watch the younger generation’s (digital) media habits up close, which is useful in my line of work as a media trend watcher.

Something I noticed some time ago with my teen daughter is that e-mail is used in limited ways. She and her friends mostly communicate via social networks (MySpace and Facebook, in her case) and phone text messaging and instant messaging on the computer. If I send her an e-mail and want her to read it, I need to alert her to check her in-box.

However, with the 11-year-old, e-mail is big. The “big” social networks haven’t caught on with her and her friends — though they do get into some social networking activity via sites like Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz, etc. Of course, technically you’re supposed to be 13 to get a MySpace account. And Facebook accounts you can’t get unless you’re at least in high school, so that’s a big part of it.

So this is just a little tip for anyone targeting kids with content or services. When you hear that today’s kids don’t use e-mail so much and that it’s a communications preference more for the older generations, remember that that generalization doesn’t apply as much to the pre-teen crowd.

For more info about kids’ and teens’ online habits, check out this new research funded by the MacArthur Foundation.

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This morning I posted a few words to my Twitter account about PC Magazine’s decision to cease print publication…

My Twitter posts also get fed automatically to my Facebook account, where Tom Regan, a smart and talented journalist and media thinker I know, posted what I thought was a profound comment:

“I have a feeling that with the (Christian Science) Monitor and now PC Mag going in the online direction, it’s just the start of a tsunami over the next two years. The current economic situation, more than any other factor, will accomplish what a decade worth of net evangelism has failed to do.”

He’s so right. All the Editor & Publisher columns I’ve written over the years, all the blog posts, etc. perhaps pushed the needle a bit over the years. All the words and speeches from gurus like Jeff Jarvis, Mark Potts, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Vin Crosbie, and many others — all imploring traditional news company leaders to let go of their pasts and put online/digital first — mostly just set the stage.

It’s the sad economic situation that is finally going to force the old news companies to do what needs to be done.

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The latest from the API Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs: not much.

As Fitz and Jen at Editor & Publisher report: a conference call about the summit’s outcome was scheduled for today, but was canceled at the last minute. Jen quoted an e-mail from Mark Mulholland, associate director at API:

“Because no reportable consensus was reached at last week’s ‘API Summit on Saving An Industry In Crisis,’ today’s press conference call originally scheduled for 11 a.m. EST has been canceled. The summit conference was a constructive dialog among senior industry leaders, serving as a catalyst for continuing conversation and efforts at reversing declining revenue and profit trends. As progress toward those goals is made, additional information will be provided. We apologize for the short notice of the press conference cancellation.”

Yes, it’s true, none of us outside that API conference room should have expected miracles to come out of a 7-hour meeting of the CEO minds aided by a couple of corporate turnaround gurus. On the other hand, what has come out following the session is disappointing, to say the least. It doesn’t exactly promote faith in the ability of top newspaper executives to lead the industry out of the mess it’s in.

I’d still like to hear from some of the API summit participants. Hey, CEOs, how about blogging of your experience that day and your perceptions? Blogging not your thing? I’d love to chat with you about the summit; here’s my office phone number: 303-543-7810. I’d be happy to take a break from my other work and blog about our conversation. Or e-mail me: steve@outing.us

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OK, we have a little clarification about last Thursday’s behind-closed-doors American Press Institute Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs. You’ll recall the brouhaha over an API staff summary of the 7-hour event, which concluded with, “Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration.” That got a bunch of people upset (including me): What?! You’ve been told your industry is in serious crisis and many of your companies are on the brink of bankruptcy, and you want to wait 6 months?

But here comes explanation from Donna Barrett of API (which she posted in the lengthy comment thread of my previous blog item):

“I am one of the CEO participants and an executive officer of API. The API report got it wrong. No newspaper executive in the room suggested that we wait six months to meet again. When someone said we should have a timely follow-up, the facilitator said, ‘Like in six months?’ and was quickly told by the participants that it needed to be much sooner than that. There are other problems with the report. It is a poor reflection of the event, which I believe was over-hyped from the beginning. The forum was a constructive dialog between newspaper executives, period. This is all anyone should have realistically expected to accomplish in seven hours.”

Thanks for the clarification and insight, Donna. (This does demonstrate the dangers of closed-door meetings, where people start to form opinions based on limited information of what went on.)

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After 50 newspaper company CEOs met behind closed doors at the American Press Institute on Thursday for their “Crisis Summit,” I was tempted to comment, but wanted to wait to see what would come out of the meeting. Would some participants write what transpired that day? The API staff did publish this summary, but it’s pretty thin on detail. There was this at the end, under the heading “Next”:

“Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration. Some spoke of joint investment in research and development of both technologies and products, others of more formal means of sharing information.”

Well, I wasn’t the only person taken aback by that statement. On his News After Newspapers blog, Martin Langeveld, who recently retired after a long career in newspaper publishing, wrote what I too was thinking in “Busted Flat In Reston“:

“Six months? What are they thinking? They’ve laid off more than 10,000 people in the last six months — what will be left six months from now? They need to launch a Manhattan project to blow up their industry and start over. Now, not six months from now.”

Langeveld is right. The industry’s leaders keep putting off drastic change and hoping that incremental change will do the job. It won’t reset the trajectory to upward and it hasn’t so far.

The API staff reports that turnaround specialist James Shein, who addressed the 50 CEOs and who had researched the basic financials of the public companies represented at the summit, “concluded that as a whole the industry is at or approaching full-blown crisis stage, though individual companies are in various phases on the continuum. And he is pessimistic about their ability to halt their fall without outside help.”

I’m still eager to hear from some of the API summit’s participants (full list was published by E&P); perhaps there’s more to come out of Thursday’s meeting that’s not so discouraging. But from what we know so far, this still looks like an industry in denial about how much it must change, with many leaders whose heads are still high on Shein’s crisis curve (below) while their enterprises are much further down.

So, 50 newspaper CEOs, is there more to the story of what went on behind those closed doors? Because from outside, it’s not looking promising that you’re going to lead a reversal to the slide down that nasty-looking graph. If all that was accomplished at the Crisis Summit was to get everyone to accept that the problem really is big and agree to tackle the how in 6 months, that’s clearly not enough.

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Here’s another gem sent to me by my new e-mail buddy, retired management consultant Frank Pecarich. (Here’s my earlier blog item featuring his graphical representation of change-resistant industries like U.S. automakers and newspapers.)

So below is what it would look like if newspaper companies actually adapted to changes in the media landscape and watched (and reacted to) what’s happening with their audience/customers:

Pecarich says of such “change-sensitive” companies: “These organizations are certainly more rare these days but still exist. As fear immerses organizations and their members, there is less tendency to intellectually engage the actual ‘environment’ and a tendency to ‘hunker down’ and continue to deny the need to change.”

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In case you haven’t seen it, video guru and media consultant Michael Rosenblum gave a fiery speech to newspaper editors a the Society of Editors conference in Bristol, England. A 10-minute video of his speech is here.

A shorter version of his message can be absorbed in this 3-1/2-minute video interview:

His message — that newspapers need to blow up much (but not all) of their legacy business in order to reinvent themselves for the digital age — is something we’ve heard plenty of over the years. But now things are getting bad enough for newspapers that perhaps we’ll see some publishers take this kind of advice seriously. The Christian Science Monitor made a big step in that direction just this month by announcing that it will kill off its print edition during the week and become online-centric, publishing in print only on the weekend.

More commonly, newspapers are ignoring Rosenblum’s advice. Take the Tribune Co. which is doing major reinvention/redesigns of their titles’ print editions, expecting to attract new and younger readers. That’s just completely the wrong approach, as I wrote recently in my Editor & Publisher Online column.

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The headline of this item was also the subject line of an e-mail I received today from Frank Pecarich, a retired management consultant who has been watching the newspaper industry lately with incredulity. In advance of this Thursday’s private summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs at the American Press Institute, I share Pecarich’s observation as something for that group to think about:

“As a retired management consultant, there is something terribly wrong with the management and executive decision making model for most newspapers. The correction process (action research model) calls for an appropriate management system response to an accurate critique of the management system or process. In the management literature as well as in my experience, it is clear that those organizations who fail to ‘correct course’ after receiving clear indications from the market to correct themselves, ultimately fail. This is happening almost daily as newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

Pecarich also shared this diagram:

What do you think? I find it hard to argue with Pecarich’s appraisal of the situation. But is there still time for newspaper industry leaders to make necessary course corrections? Is the industry just waiting for the “catastrophic event” that will force an abrupt transformation to stave off extinction?

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I liked media consultant Alan Mutter’s latest blog item, “It’s time to rip the lid off,” in which he urges newspapers to get serious about doing hard-hitting journalism in order to save themselves.

His advice complements my thoughts as expressed in my most recent Editor & Publisher Online column.

Publishers, now operating with severely lessened resources, need to stop focusing on the less important stuff and put everything they’ve (still) got into producing quality journalism, Mutter says.

“All but the most aggressively down-sized paper can generate excitement on a day-to-day basis by practicing the sort of muscular, crusading journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted by kicking over rocks, exposing social injustice and holding public officials and corporate leaders to account.”

It’s becoming pretty clear: Newspapers cannot continue to cut staff and cut back while continuing to try to serve everyone and try to attract new younger readers. Focus the print effort on print loyalists who are older and want serious journalism. Bring younger people to the newspaper brand by developing and improving digital offerings (web, mobile).

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A reader of my latest Editor & Publisher Online column (about intelligently redesigning print editions to please older print loyalists and not go after younger people) asked:

“As newspaper companies redefine their strategies, will home delivery be a thing of the past? Will it be a premium service or only available through online downloads? Can newspapers make up ‘insert’ revenues without home delivery?”

Given enough time, I do think that home delivery of the printed daily newspaper will become more of a luxury item than it’s been historically, with a higher fee charged than for alternative digital forms of the newspaper (full digital replica editions for reading on a PC or other large-screen device, and appropriately formatted digital editions for smaller devices like Amazon’s Kindle).

That is, as the number of print subscribers to daily newspapers dwindles over the coming years, it will cost more per subscriber to cover delivery expenses. Such price increases will convince even more of remaining print subscribers to cancel and switch to paid digital versions, or simply stop paying and rely on free newspaper websites, e-mail delivery, RSS feeds, and/or mobile delivery. (The latter may be free, as is generally the case now, of perhaps in the future a charged service if combined with personalization features.)

For national papers, I expect to see more of them go the way of the Christian Science Monitor, which next year will cease its print edition except for a single weekend edition — becoming foremost a digital news publisher with a secondary and limited print product. Don’t expect to see USA Today disappear from airport newsstands or no longer appear outside your hotel room in the morning anytime soon, though.

As for ad inserts, that’s still a huge business for local newspapers which will be around for a while longer. (Though I do think that if you look out far enough, those advertisers will begin to shift more of their inserts money to digital.) So we’ll likely see publishers continue to distribute inserts to non-subscribers of the printed newspaper along with a teaser edition delivered to homes once a week.

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Sticking to the topic of “micro-personal news” (see previous blog item), John Paul Titlow wrote me the following note which responds to my September Editor & Publisher Online column, “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” He makes some good points worth sharing, so with his permission here it is:

“I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. I am a 25 year-old news junkie and Web content delivery manager for a weekly newspaper company in Philadelphia. Personally, I am able to consume most of my ‘news’ from the home screen of my iPhone.

“That includes the NYTimes and NPR apps for iPhone, a Digg app to see what the Digg community is pushing, CNN to tune into what’s considered ‘news’ by one of the big cable players, and Google Reader (any number of Web design & tech blogs, newspaper industry sites, Reuters, about 2 dozen other sites I read).

“But what I find myself tapping just as often as Google Reader or NYTimes are Twitter and Facebook. You’re right; it’s addictive. In a few seconds, I can see what friends are tweeting or posting as their ’status’ on Facebook. It’s even called a ‘News Feed’ on Facebook.

“Before reading your column, however, I hadn’t thought of it that way — these status posts and tweets are just as much news to me as headlines about the Iraq war or tech news.

“Newspaper companies will have to find a way to leverage this. You correctly point out that the ‘open’ nature of (most) social networks and their API’s should help enable this. I would also add that recent moves towards a universal log-in (OpenID, etc.) should also make this vision of ‘news’ closer to a reality.

“Hopefully publishers will catch on before it’s too late.”

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Interesting. I’ve been getting a new round of e-mail comments about the Editor & Publisher Online column I did back in late September: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” (My most current one is here.)

Also, Paul Gillin over at NewspaperDeathWatch.com did a blog item about the column, “Your Friend Feed Is News,” published just today.

When I wrote that column, I really felt like it touched on an important concept that’s been largely ignored by the news industry (and newspapers, especially, for whom I target my E&P columns): People today have the opportunity to receive a stream of what I call “micro-personal news” from their friends and family via participation in social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, FriendFeed, et al). News organizations need to recognize that and incorporate it into their own definition of news, and start including micro-personal news in personalized or “individuated” news streams, along with traditional news content.

The column didn’t elicit as much reaction as I’d hoped for when first published, which I found disappointing. Maybe there’s another chance for these ideas to get more discussion and analysis?

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Even though most news websites now allow user comments, it still bugs me to see so little editorial staff participation in comment threads. Having editors and reporters take part and respond to reader comments is a powerful way to keep the discussion more focused and civil. Of course, it’s no guarantee of preventing things from getting out of control, but it helps, a lot.

I just spotted an excellent example (below) of a newspaper staff member diving into an active comment thread. Kudos to Erika Stutzman, editorial page editor of the Boulder Daily Camera, for responding to a user comment that was critical of the paper for publishing a story about its downtown building going up for sale. (The Daily Camera building is prime real estate on the west end of the fabled Pearl Street Mall.)

Yeah, it takes staff journalists extra time to participate. But the benefits of being more “social” online are significant. As modern media consumers now expect their interactions with media companies to be more interactive, diving in and talking directly with readers is necessary for a news organization to remain relevant.

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Jay Small, writing on his Small Initiatives blog, comments on my latest Editor & Publisher Online column about how to smartly redesign print editions of newspapers.

One of the key points in my column is that newspapers need to provide MANY more refers and pointers to online and mobile content, in an effort to guide older print readers to a better future of reading print and consuming digital news content together.

Jay, who overall gave my advice a thumbs up, added a key tip that I overlooked:

“I would add one thing: If loyal print readers trend older, promote the online features older people would be most likely to use. E-mail, for example, remains in heavy use among older Internet populations. So rather than steering people to a Web site for breaking news updates, consider pushing them toward sign-ups for e-mail alerts.”

Absolutely. That’s smart.

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Here’s my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, posted today: “Don’t Redesign the Print Edition to Ensure Failure.”

It’s an opinion piece about how the wave of print-edition redesigns by the newspaper industry is largely missing the boat.

Publishers need to focus on their core older audience when it comes to the print edition, and stop fruitlessly redesigning with the goal of attracting younger people to start reading the newspaper in paper form. And they must guide their older readers to digital offerings that supplement the thinning print product, rather than expecting them to continue to read print forever even as the quality of the product received continues going downhill.

Otherwise, look for printed newspapers to slide even faster than they have been.

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The Boston Globe introduced a modest redesign of its print edition today. It’s nowhere near as dramatic as the recent redesigns by Tribune Co. papers, so the paper still looks like itself.

Kudos to whoever wrote the redesign FAQ. Sure, there’s the predictable “we’re improving the paper for YOU!” wording, but it’s also tempered with acknowledgments that, yes, some things are getting cut because we have to save money because, as you know, the newspaper industry is in real trouble. My impression reading Tribune Co. redesign announcements was that those admissions were mostly left out in favor of the “we’re putting new lipstick on the pig!” model of PR.

And here’s something smart that I noticed in the Globe’s FAQ:

“The font size for the entire paper was also increased slightly. We believe these changes will help improve the readability of the Globe.”

Very smart. Let’s acknowledge that readers who are sticking with print editions of newspapers are older. Increasing the font size to reflect that is a logical adjustment. (Of course, typography experts will say that it’s possible to monkey with font selection and x-heights to make body type more readable without actually increasing the font size.)

I’m a bigger fan of the Globe’s redesign than the flashier Tribune Co. ones, because the Globe appears to be going for improving quality and attractiveness that will keep its existing print readers around, while the Trib redesigns appear to be seeking to attract more younger readers to print (which I consider to be a fool’s errand).

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I just got back from parents weekend at my 16-year-old daughter’s boarding school in New England. At the end of the program, the kids got kicked off campus for a couple days, so she and I traveled around the region until school reopened. It was a great opportunity to observe the media habits of a typical American teenager (not to mention a little father-daughter bonding).

In our hotel one evening, I observed her watching a DVD on her Macbook (The Return of the King). No full-screen view for her; she had the movie going in a window that took up only part of the screen. Also attracting her attention elsewhere on the screen were IM chat sessions with friends (multiple conversations), and sometimes Facebook or MySpace interactions. And then occasionally her iPhone would beep with an incoming text message.

She didn’t stop the movie to engage in the IM sessions. She’s comfortable doing multiple things at once in the digital environment, which is what I’ve noticed with her friends as well. Perhaps if this had been the first time she’d seen that movie, she would have focused intently on it.

I sometimes wonder if media executives who struggle with adapting to the new digital realities have spent much time watching young people use media. It doesn’t take long to understand a few simple truths about digital natives like my daughter:

1. They expect their media to allow them to interact and communicate, not be passive.
2. They are seldom loyal to one brand for very long.
3. If they do focus on a single brand, it likely will get only part of their attention.
4. The online content that they view is frequently found as a result of friends’ recommendations (e.g., by instant messages or phone text messages).
5. If your brand expects to reach them, it better be in lots of places online, and especially those places where young people hang out online.

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Does anyone know about current trends in newspaper racks? I ask because on Monday I was hanging out with my daughter in the impressive and recently renovated Natick Collection (a.k.a., Natick Mall) near Boston. I wanted a copy of the Boston papers, but couldn’t spot any newspaper racks.

I asked the guy stationed at the impressive information booth in the middle of the mall, who informed me that there was no place to get a newspaper inside the mall other than a CVS drug store on the far end of the bottom floor that sold them.

Hmmm. Perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention to such things. But it struck me as surprising that newspaper racks have disappeared from some shopping malls.

Is this the situation at the mall near you?

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Here’s a little prediction that’s been spinning around my head lately. I’ll release it here on my blog to leave room in there for something else.

As newspapers (especially the larger metros, which face the worst declines) continue to lose staff, lose ad revenues, and in general get lower in quality, their loyal older readers will get fed up. Flashy designs (like those at Tribune Co. papers) will be seen as merely masking the decline of the product, and we’ll see newspapers’ core older audience of print readers and subscribers flee in significant numbers.

Of course, that demographic (I’m talking mostly about over-45) will still want news, but the quality decline of print newspapers will force them to look elsewhere. The decimation of print editions will move older news consumers — many of whom have resisted the siren call of digital news — to adapt to the digital media lifestyle, at last.

Newspaper companies of course will have the opportunity to retain these older readers. But they’ll need to put most of their resources into improving digital news delivery and innovating further there, rather than focusing majority effort on modernizing the print edition.

I’d love to get the reaction of Tribune Co. folks to this prediction, since they seem to be investing so much into resurrecting their print franchises. (We haven’t heard as much about Tribune’s digital innovations, so I’m curious to learn more about their thinking there.)

What do you think? Am I being too pessimistic? Or do you think this is how the newspaper situation will play out in the next year or two?

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