yelvington.com

A thoughtful contrarian voice is always useful, and I'm enjoying keeping an eye on the Inksniffer, the weblog of British newspaper consultant John Duncan. Two recent posts stand out. One is his Webster's Dictionary of Audience Exaggeration: How internet metrics promote the myth of the dying newspaper, and the other is his amusingly titled Why newspapers should get out of the internet business before it kills us all.

Duncan believes newspapers have abandoned print and are madly dashing off into a whole new business on the Internet with heavy investment and innovation focus, and he argues that's a bad thing.

We should be so lucky.

Newspapers are not abandoning print innovation to focus resources online. Print newspapers typically have no real innovation resources to begin with, and tend to focus on squeezing out as much quarterly operating profit as possible without a care for the future. And in general they've transferred that model to the Internet, along with a print-derived product model and business model. Small wonder they've had little success when put up against dotcom startups.

As for his criticism of Internet metrics, as I said in comments I posted to his blog, much of it is absolutely on target. I'm on record as having severely criticized my fellow onliners for tossing around meaningless and misleading monthly cumulative audience data, just as I've criticized the industry broadly for crowing about how print+online=growth when actual market penetration is measurably declining.

However, the notion that a newspaper's daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap, and especially so in markets where the newspaper is home delivered, such as is typical in the United States. Try dividing! Once again, I ran over this morning's paper with my car on my way to work.

Readership declines are very real, and they're way ahead of circulation declines. Newspapers are getting tossed into driveways and front lawns, and left to collect dew and spiders until the next trash day.

Newspapers are severely abusing ABC rules on bulk sales, and many are carrying canceled subscribers on their books for as much as six months after being notified.

We don't have a medium-change problem so much as a content relevancy problem and a general failure to grasp the unique strengths of print and online and use each to best advantage.

We are not, overall, seeing a migration of readers from print to online consumption of news. If that were true, we should not be worried, as the economics of operating a news source online are actually fairly attractive IF you can get people to pay attention.

The much bigger problem is a general decline of interest in serious journalism, mingled with the rise of much better solutions for some of the jobs for which newspapers once were a preferred solution. (Selling a car, getting a job, and entertaining yourself would be obvious examples.)

Some of our problems can be fixed and some can't. The first step is to be honest with ourselves and to separate fact from our own PR spin.

Awhile back a team of Rich Gordon's whiz kids from Northwestern University worked with Davenport's Quad-City Times on a combo print-online youth product called Your Mom.

Last year the paper pulled the plug on the printed product but kept the website. Now Will Sullivan notes that the Lee Enterprises newspaper has killed Your Mom online as well.

I have no inside information about Your Mom's numbers, but I do know one thing: Newspapers have a terrible track record at addressing the youth market and an equally terrible track record on innovation. It's the latter that I want to address here.

It's imperative that newspapers get inside the heads and hearts of young people, learn to understand them, and learn to build tomorrow's business around their needs and interests.

But in the culture and business context of a daily newspaper, a project like Your Mom is a distraction at best and a resource-sucking black hole at worst.

Who wants to advertise to these kids? Are those advertisers bad credit risks? How much will it cost us to call on them? From the ad salesperson's perspective: Will I get enough commission from this sales call to make it worth my time?

The guys from Innosight often advise us to separate innovative projects from the mothership. And they have a simple prescription: Be patient for scale, but impatient for profit. You need to discover whether a project makes business sense (i.e., can generate some sort of a profit) before you try to make it big.

Inside a newspaper, though, the drive is to make it big first, and hope for profit later. This can lead to big mistakes. A mistake is not always a bad thing, but you learn most quickly (with the least suffering) from a series of small mistakes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a team of Rich Gordon's college students to pull a perfect product out of a hat.

The issue for Lee Enterprises is not the success or failure of Your Mom, but rather what steps it takes next. Did it learn from Your Mom? How will it adapt to those learnings and try again? Because the generational dropoff in readership isn't going away.

I'm in Reston, Va., waiting for my turn in front of the room at the American Press Institute. The seminar is "Internet strategies for community markets." Gordon Borrell is up right now and is pointing out the inherent weakness of one-note news sites, citing Pew research that says the "yesterday market" -- the people who went online yesterday seeking local news -- is 9 percent at best, while there are many other things to do online.

He's so right.

For years I've been citing four key concepts: timely, useful, interactive, entertaining. So many local news sites are none of that. You can't build success on the Internet by building an HTML version of your daily print product.

I've only been here fore a couple of hours but it seems that most of the seminar participants get that, and are eager to dig into new areas, especially participation/interaction.