yelvington.com

Death to the 'death of journalism' meme

yelvington — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:47:31 +0000

The wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the rending of garments is getting tiresome. The "death of journalism" / "death of newspapers" meme has been useful, but it's time for it to die. It's not true, and it's outlived its usefulness.

Useful? Yes, useful. Five years ago American newsrooms were dominated by denyers who refused to face the facts about changes in the media landscape, and curmudgeons dedicated to the proposition that all change is inherently bad.

That is no longer true.

When Bruce Sherman's financial maneuvering brought Knight-Ridder crashing to the ground, the scales fell from many eyes.

That set off a familiar pattern to anyone who's studied emotional responses to change:

The struggle against denial. It can't be true. Oh, yes it is true. No way. Yes, way.
Storm and stress. It's true, but what does it mean? What can we do? The world as we knew it has been turned upside-down. We fear chaos and darkness. Woe, woe. All is lost.
Reluctant acceptance. We begin to see beyond the thunder and lightning. We adjust to the new realities, integrate them into our worldview. We may sigh. We may mourn. It is what it is.
We look forward and move on. We've adjusted to reality. Our feet are on the ground. We begin to see possibilities. We plan for the future. We get back to work.

The "death of journalism" meme is part of stage 2. It would be really nice if we could jump from stage 1 to stage 4 and skip all the sturm und drang, but it doesn't work that way. We have go through the stages. Some of us will move faster than others.

But let's not get stuck.

Let's come to grips with some realities.

Newspapers are not the alpha and omega of journalism and not the anointed vessels of the First Amendment. Journalism will happen with or without them.

But newspapers are not going away, not any time soon. They are far more healthy than generally believed. Don't confuse huge corporate finance mistakes with a failure of the advertising business model. Don't imagine that the problems of the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe are the problems of every newspaper.

Among the more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States, most are very profitable operations today by any reasonable business standard, even in the depths of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Newspapers can embrace change. I know of some that are making 20, 30 percent or more of their advertising revenue on digital products. Migrating from a single-product factory mentality to a customer-focused portfolio of solutions is hard, but it's necessary. It's not impossible.

The Internet is not your enemy. Your customers are not your enemy. Your competitors might sometimes be your enemy, not not always. You are part of a herd. If you're smart, you'll figure out how to be the alpha. (Hint: Organize the herd.)

The next time you hear or see someone wailing that there's no way to make money on the Internet, or that newspaper journalism is doomed, ask some questions. Has this person ever sold an ad? Has this person ever run a P&L? Does this person really understand the underlying business landscape? Odds are that all of the answers are "no." Understand that this person is simply going through the terror of the second stage.

There are other ways to get stuck in stage 2, of course. One way that is popular among some people in top management positions is to declare war on change. It is not a war you can win. Accept your defeat gracefully. Retire if necessary and let others carry on.

As we move to stages 3 and 4, we will find that the new reality is different, but not the dark and scary place we feared.

While much of the past will be gone -- including many individual newspapers -- much of the past will survive, as it always has. Remember, the flip side of Gibson's "the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed" is "the past is still with us; it's just unevenly distributed."

There are more horses in America today than before the invention of the motorcar. They're not, however, our primary mode of transportation; they're used for other purposes. We will still have printed periodicals for quite some time. Figure out what they'll be used for. But keep your eye on the new tools; that's where the big opportunities will be.

Innovation studios and newspaper factories

yelvington — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:04:40 +0000

My trip to Minneapolis has reminded me of how much the newspaper world lost when the McClatchy Company acquired the Star Tribune in 1998.

While it was never McClatchy's goal to do so, it snuffed out one of the few bright spots where innovation critically important to the future of newspapers might have happened.

McClatchy turned out to be very good at what it had set out to do: run newspapers profitably. In the following decade, the Star Tribune threw off vast quantities of cash. McClatchy used to that cash to pay down its considerable debt and position itself for its acquisition of Knight-Ridder.

Operational competence is a virtue for a company, but it's not the only one, and it's an entirely different strength than innovation.

Innovation requires several elements:

An understanding of what customers are struggling to do.
Creative ability to imagine a better way to get it done.
Freedom to experiment with solutions, because your first try is probably wrong.
A sense of urgency.

Innovation tends to happen in small, fast-moving settings.

Newspapers aren't innovation studios. They're factories assembling parts (news and advertising) into products. While newspaper people sometimes say the Daily Miracle is a new product every day, in reality it's not that at all.

Five days' worth of newspapers are no more "new products" than five consecutive Hummer SUVs rolling off an assembly line. And as autoworkers are now discovering, the efficient operation of the factory and the build quality of the car are unquestionably essential but can't deliver success if the product is a great big mistake.

So let's go back to the Star Tribune in the era of 1995 to 1998. It operated a booming business, with a great profit margin, new automated production tools (robots in the pressroom), and a smart and dedicated workforce. As a newspaper factory it was pretty awesome.

But it also had a host of innovative projects at various stages, of which startribune.com was just one, and enough innovation smarts to know that such projects needed enough separation from the factory floor to enable quick decisions. It encouraged experimentation. It had a tremendous focus on research and on listening to customers formally and informally. Multiple rooms were equipped with microphones and video cameras so focus groups and other discussions could be conducted in-house.

There was an acute and urgent sense that the era of the big "one size fits all" daily newspaper was about to end. Strategic thinking focused on personalization, customization, and entirely new lines of business derived from smart analysis of customers' business challenges. The Star Tribune had both the resources and the will to completely reinvent itself.

But its owners chose a different path.

I'm not suggesting that no one at McClatchy does any innovative thinking, or that McClatchy was unaware of the forces on the horizon that would come to threaten newspapers. But as someone observed in a side conversation today, McClatchy's real strategy was to be the last mass medium standing. And while my friends who stayed at the Star Tribune continued to do great work every day, I think something precious was lost.

(Note: I left the Star Tribune in 1999. McClatchy sold the Star Tribune in 2006 for half what it had paid in 1998. Today the Strib is still the biggest single mass media product in town, and it's bankrupt.)

What I'll be telling journalists in Minnesota

yelvington — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:19:31 +0000

Tuesday I'll be at a University of Minnesota conference titled "New Economic Models for News."

The conference is cosponsored by the Newspaper Guild, so I'm focusing my brief presentation on some things working journalists need to understand about their own business, and I'll be speaking from an inside-the-mainstream perspective.

I'll be joined in my session by Joel Kramer, who was my uberboss at the Star Tribune in the 1990s, and now runs the nonprofit startup Minnpost.com.

Here are some of the points I'm going to make:

We need to look backward to understand how we got here -- not to waste energy hunting for scapegoats.
Journalism has never had a business model of its own. It's always been a tool in the execution of some other agenda. This was true in the era of the partisan press, and it's true in the era of the commercial press.
Newspapers are in the business of helping other businesses sell their goods/services.
Journalism is useful in that business, but it's not essential.
Part of the reason newspapers are in trouble today is that there was a profitability bubble at the end of the 20th Century. That bubble has burst.
Despite the burst bubble, most newspapers are still profitable, and many at levels other businesses can only dream of.

I'll talk about where newspapers are making their money today, where they're likely to make their money in the future, and some risks that come with some of the great new ideas.

Been-dones and am-doings

yelvington — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:13:42 +0000

My friend Steve Outing has what he calls a "blog rant" listing a number of ways to "save" the newspaper industry, but says, "No longer do I have much confidence that newspaper CEOs and publishers will do the right thing."

While I often share that lack of confidence and while I'm perfectly aware that there are, indeed, morons scattered throughout the hierarchies of newspaper companies, I'm struck that his to-do list includes quite a few been-dones and am-doings.

As businesses, newspapers have done a terrible job of telling their own stories, allowing those pesky reporters to paint a gloom-and-doom picture that is ill-informed and generally distorted, and the various media critics have piled on without spending enough time looking at what's already been done.

Let me give from Outing's post some specific examples of this disconnect.

Outing: "When the time comes (for many papers, it’s here now), reduce the number of days the print edition is published (keep that print insert business alive a while longer) and rely on web and mobile distribution of news and advertising the rest of the week, transitioning the print audience to the new way, including paid digital-replica editions for the older demographic that still craves the 'print experience.'"

There are quite a few cases of reduction-of-frequency with Detroit leading the way. For awhile I've been tracking them, although I've probably fallen a bit behind. Many people in the newspaper industry think it's inevitable, although some fear that a drop in frequency will break reading habits and accelerate the downfall of profitable print. Paid e-editions aren't new, either, but they're not generating significant results.

Outing: "Stop shipping newspapers long distances any day of the week and transition far-flung customers to web, e-mail, RSS, and/or mobile news versions of your news product."

Standard operational procedure. Most regional newspapers have already whacked out-of-core distribution and jacked up mail delivery prices. Cox's AJC is even killing delivery in the fairly nearby college town of Athens, Ga., which makes me happy, since my employer publishes the Athens paper.

Outing: "Stop spending money on locally producing what others do better online, thereby cutting expenses, and focus on the newspaper’s core competencies of local news coverage and community, and performing effective watchdog journalism. Do you really need a D.C. bureau? A local movie reviewer? A full-time food editor?"

Much of the newsroom layoff carnage in the last year or so has been among Washington and state capital bureaus, arts critics, food writers and the like, as well as copy editors, cartoonists and anyone else deemed not absolutely essential. Editors are desperately trying to protect the local reporting staff. Some papers are dropping wire services, or have given AP notice of intent (there's a time delay in the contract). It's been years since I met a newspaper editor who didn't completely grasp that the mission is local, local, local.

Outing: "Dump stocks pages of day-old listings, and the daily page of TV listings, and movie-time listings from the print edition. Use a small amount of space to point print readers to web and mobile versions, which might be the newspaper’s own or someone else’s."

Also standard procedure. Most American daily newspapers include little or no stock listings these days, even though cutting the listings brought a barrage of complaints from a probably small number of people who paradoxically have money but can't afford a computer.

Outing: "Turn to an agency model for advertising, selling not just into the company’s own print and digital products, but also giving advertisers one place for them to turn to get their message smartly distributed throughout the confusing digital landscape outside of the newspaper company’s product walls."

It's worth noting that newspapers have sold $50 million worth of advertising that was distributed through Yahoo's network, including both behaviorally targeted "display" ads and employment classifieds upsold to HotJobs. And of course newspapers have been creating networks for years, including Cars.com. Beware, though: If we can make money selling ads on other peoples' sites, why do we need to pay these guys in the newsroom?

Outing: "Accept that the web is about free and stop fighting it. (Learn from the music industry’s profound mistakes.) Develop “freemium” strategies for the web and mobile, where tiers of any particular service are offered, from free to several dollars a month; but always have a free option that offers some real value and isn’t just a ruse to get people to upgrade to paid immediately because the free version is so pathetic. "

If anybody actually listened to what Steven Brill pitched recently to the newspaper industry, that's pretty much what they would have heard. The problem is that journalism doesn't fit that "freemium" model very well. And gee, wasn't there a great wailing and gnashing of teeth when the New York Times tried to charge for access to its columnists? And didn't the numbers, not the wailing, lead to the end of that experiment? Developing strategies is easy. Successful execution is damned hard.

Outing: "Create and encourage newspaper readers and digital users to join a “membership program” with an automatic monthly or annual fee that not only gives them access to some special or premium content or services produced by the newspaper (say, personalization), but also offers a killer discount and freebies card (or mobile phone app) that leverages existing advertisers, brings them lots of new customers, and gives paying members so much value that they’d be crazy to pass on paying for a membership."

That would be pretty much what McClatchy did at the Sacramento Bee several years back. Actually, membership was bundled with the newspaper subscription. Others (including us) tried to copy it. The expenses of building and running such a system way, way, way outweigh the benefits.

Outing: "Allow various ways for readers to voluntarily support the news-gathering operation ...."

OK, that one's not being done anywhere that I know, but it's not going to work. You can't go begging for donations when you're turning 20-40 percent operating margins at some of your newspapers and the only reason you're in trouble is that you borrowed too much to fund your corporate takeovers. That just doesn't play well with the public.

When, how, and why did you go online?

yelvington — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:00:16 +0000

I used to ask new hires: When, how, and why did you "go online?"

The question seems quaint now, and it's been more than a decade since I asked it. After all, many of today's job prospects grew up with home broadband access to the World Wide Web, text messaging on their phones, and possibly a laptop in their bags.

But maybe it still applies.

I "went online" years before there was a Web. In the mid-1980s, I got a computer and a 300-bps modem. I discovered a whole world of online conversation. Before long, I was hooked, and within a year I was running my own Citadel bulletin board.

I learned the C programming language to write software so I could hook my Atari ST to Usenet. I begged and borrowed connections to get networked email, and discovered the Internet long before most people heard of it.

My experience was entirely focused on interpersonal communications -- one-to-one, many-to-many.

This shaped the way I looked at "online publishing" when Prodigy, AOL, and then the Internet began to upend everything we used to know about media.

The first newspaper online service I built, back in 1994-95, included community publishing for groups, discussion forums, private messaging and Internet mail.

Then came a wave of news companies rushing to get online, without stopping to think about how people use the medium. We wound up with shovelware "online editions" -- boring, predictable replicants of printed newspapers that failed to take advantage of any of the Internet's capabilities.

Most newspapers imagine themselves to have moved beyond that stage. I'm not so sure. "Allowing" comments on stories is hardly innovation.

So, how did you go online? And why? And how has it shaped your approach? Do you still think of it as a publishing medium? Or is it something else?

A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)

yelvington — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:59:07 +0000

Everybody is different from everybody else, and there are lots of ways to group people. But when looking at the audience of a newspaper website, there's one way that I continue to find compelling -- and troubling.

When we group users by frequency, we get something like this:

Our news websites tend to have a huge reach. This is the cumulative monthly unique-user count that we all like to brag about. It's the number newspapers tout when they claim they've grown total audience when print and web users are combined.

But this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. And since advertising requires repetition to be effective, these folks don't constitute a very attractive audience from an economic perspective.

There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month.

There's not much in between. Hardly anybody visits 10 times a month.

Let's set aside the business issues and just look at what this means for the journalism we practice today and tomorrow.

The common form of news storytelling that evolved in print journalism over the last century was shaped by not only the technology and scarcity of print, but also by consumption patterns that differed from what we're seeing today.

Just a generation ago, print was a major supplier of entertainment and diversion. Now attention is increasingly torn away from news by more glittery entertainment.

Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn't directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency -- and along with it, engagement with civic life.

On the Web, there's no home delivery -- you have to take an action to visit a website. The results are directly measurable, and painful to look at.

This isn't 1956, but we still typically write like Dwight Eisenhower is president.

That isn't a bad thing for everybody, but it fails for many.

For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, it actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. You might want more depth, more detail, but you won't want to be told what you already know. You won't want the background.

The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.

The Internet gives us a couple of new tools for dealing with this problem: The beat blog, and the topics page.

They're very different from one another, and ultimately complementary.

The beat blog focuses on the small circle, offering speed, depth and conversation among the reporter and people with high interest in the subject matter. While regular users are the primary beneficiaries, there is a secondary benefit to the casual user: the reporter gets better at his or her job. Better leads, better feedback, better ideas can lead to more interesting journalism.

The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle. A good topics page has several obvious components:

An editorially crafted synopsis. Who/what is this about? Why should I care? You won't get the answers by throwing together a link barn and calling it a day. This is where a reporter's expertise pays off.
Images, maps, or infographics. A picture is worth a thousand words, so choose the best that help a casual visitor understand the framework surrounding a story.
Links to Web resources. Be part of the Web, not just on the Web.
Links to conversation. If this is significant, won't people be talking about it? Where do I find them?
Links to multimedia components.
Links to incremental coverage. Let the drill-down begin.
Who covers this topic? How can I reach this person?

Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.

Done poorly -- and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl -- a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments.

The biggest dangers come from these sources:

Lack of a synopis that makes sense. Some sites don't even both writing a synopsis. Others seem to have assigned the work to interns from the marketing department.
Misplaced trust in automation. I found a USA Today topics page about the BBC. A bot had assembled it. Every oblique mention of the BBC was churned up. The page made no sense at all. If I want to run a search, I'll go to Google, thank you.
Inflexible formatting. A format or template should be a starting point, not an ending point. If your community has an awesome hip-hop culture, your hip-hop page should be awesome and hip-hop.

The episode in which I sell out to the promise of paid content

yelvington — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:09:23 +0000

Last week I put my stuff on the market. If you're a Kindle user, you can pay $1.99 a month to get my blog wirelessly delivered to your device. Setting myself up as a Kindle content vendor took about five minutes. Digging myself out of the crater that the stock market made of my 401K? That could take forever.

This isn't my first venture into paid content. In the 20th century, when I was editor of StarTribune.com (and its pre-Web ancestor, Star Tribune Online,) I had some experience marketing a subscription-based online service and with per-article archive charges. Neither was particularly successful.

But what the heck. Amazon made it all easy. Too easy, as it turns out; there are reports that you can register anybody else's blog as a Kindle product and collect the revenues until you get caught.

What revenues? I have no idea. Amazon's deal is even more opaque than Google's Adsense. I don't know why my blog was priced at $1.99 when some others are priced at half that. I don't know whether anyone will buy it (and I have my doubts, since the idiot who manages this operation gives away the same content on the Web). I don't know what kind of reports, if any, I'll get from Amazon. We'll see, I guess.

Signing up as a Kindle publisher made me wonder about the right way to convert journalism into products in Kindle-space. Far too many newspaper people have the problem of Maslow's Hammer (if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail). So they look at the E.Ink tablets as a way to distribute newspapers. What if people would rather subscribe to a columnist/blogger? Or to all the coverage of the Cardinals? Or everything geotagged within a 3-mile radius of their homes? Perhaps some experimentation might make sense.

And will the Kindle market ever be big enough to be significant? I have my doubts.

The few Kindle owners I know really gush about the product. But so do the netbook owners that I know. And while the Kindle costs $349, a Dell Mini 10V now costs $299.

I know they're not replacements for one another. The Kindle is more friendly for reading books, while the Mini is better at everything else. But I have a feeling about where this is headed over the next five years, and it's not good for the proprietary Kindle. I wouldn't at all be surprised to look up in 2014 to see Amazon selling far more e-books (and maybe even a few blogs) on open platforms.

Your co-workers are all Star Trek aliens

yelvington — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:12:06 +0000

It's Star Trek weekend, so here's a Trek-centric look at The Mess We're In.

The strength of Star Trek has always been its ability to make us look at ourselves -- our own human traits, good and bad, projected onto "alien" species.

Klingons are the ultimate romantic warriors, quoting literature while blowing one another away in the name of honor. I have known many mild-mannered reporters who were Klingon in heart and soul, longing to wield the bat'leth against management -- or, if necessary, other reporters. They will not get very far, nor accomplish much in the big picture, but they will feel superior in their epic failure.

Romulans are the ultimate bureaucracy, relentlessly organized and internally focused. They have lots of committees and meetings. They would run the human resources department. Maybe IT as well. Surely they would love Microsoft Exchange and the Bluecoat content-filtering firewall. The security guard at the front desk is a low-level Romulan functionary.

Ferengi, my favorites, typify the senior decisionmakers of the American-style corporation, with their Rules of Acquisition eclipsing any lowly hew-monn ethics. Their hunger for acquisition knows no bounds, leading them occasionally to their own destruction. The Ferengi have taken over everything from our obviously overleveraged media companies to the local Starbucks. Why am I singling out Starbucks? Just look at what they peddle: an overpriced froth of unhealthy sugar and fat, "giving the public what it wants" in a never-ending quest for "growth" and "shareholder value." A Ferengi would sell his own grandmother for a profit and tell any lie necessary to do so. Surely Rush Limbaugh is just a fat drug-addled Ferengi.

Vulcans, of course, are unflappable, relentlessly logical, and currently in control of the White House. They really do want you to live long and prosper, so long as it's prosperity within their logical and scientific framework. You are not ready to use that warp drive. Not yet. And remember, a Vulcan never lies. Unless he needs to for the good of all.

Obsolete jobs: Wire editor, features editor

yelvington — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:12:10 +0000

Charles Apple has highlighted some structural changes at the Tribune Company newspapers that many find troubling. The comments on his blog post are especially interesting.

Some of the reaction struck me as reflecting a big disconnect between working journalists and economic reality.

Tribune is consolidating some editorial functions in Chicago, producing standard shared page modules for nonlocal information that slip seamlessly into local newspapers in Orlando, Baltimore, Fort Lauderdale, Hartford, Allentown and Newport News. This enables fewer hands to do essentially the same work; in Orlando, "half the design desk and two-thirds of the copy desk was laid off."

Read my lips: This is not a temporary maneuver in response to an economic cycle. This is permanent structural change.

As a medium, print is on an irreversible decline relative to digital. We are headed for an inflection point at which print newspapers as we knew them in the past will be unsustainable.

Like it or not, print must change.

For print newspapers to continue to exist at all, their production must become radically more efficient, and for journalism to thrive, energies and efforts must be redirected at digital media and new products.

If you are a wire editor or features editor, your odds of surviving in such a position until retirement are slim to none. Those jobs are obsolete. We can not save a system in which thousands of people sit around reinventing the wheel in parallel processes all around the country.

The Tribune Company's bankruptcy raises the urgency of facing this issue, but it will be an issue for everyone sooner or later. This is just another case of "the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed."

If you imagine that jobs will simply move from a print focus to an Internet focus, you're wrong. Some jobs, like the wire editor and the features editor, will disappear. The Internet presents us with completely new tasks, requiring different skill sets.

Most smaller daily newspapers no longer have wire editors (if they ever did). The percentage of nonlocal content in midrange and small dailies has dropped, in some cases to near zero. Newspapers -- including those owned by the Tribune -- are beginning to restructure the physical product as it becomes more locally focused, merging the redundant "metro section" into the A section.

On the Internet, we have no need of wire editors; if we wish to have wire content on our websites, we can plug in AP Hosted News, or run a full feed of AP Online or some similar product from another service. But with everything on the Internet just a click away, the value of such branded and hosted wire content is low (and measurable), and even that may go away before long, based on simple cost-benefit analysis. We may be better off sending users to CNN, MSNBC and NYtimes.

The situation for the features editor is only slightly different.

One of the "jobs to be done" that leads a consumer to read a newspaper is "entertain me in my spare time." Spare time is becoming scarce, but some of us like to read while we eat breakfast, or ride the bus, and the printed features section, much of it consisting of nonlocal syndicated content, fulfills that need.

But the job simply doesn't transport to digital media. Again, everything on the planet is just a click away, much of it more interesting, entertaining and informative than can be found in the typical daily newspaper's features. This is why efforts such as the AP's Web-based ASAP "youth product" are doomed before they're even built. Print has only to compete with whatever is in the room at the moment (TV?), but a Web product has to compete with everything.

This isn't a case of good guys (journalists) against the bad guys (management).

I know some people are offended by the description of print production jobs as "manufacturing," but they are. Newsrooms of the past were integrated parts of newspaper factories. We're leaving that behind.

I understand the concerns about quality as copy editing becomes minimal. I worked as a copy editor for years. In some situations my job was more rewriting than editing, as talented gatherers of news are not always talented tellers of stories.

If you are one of those talented gatherers of news who can't write clean publishable copy, you can pretty much consider your job to be in the same at-risk category as wire editing and features editing.

Daily journalism and monkey screech

yelvington — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:38:00 +0000

I have a theory. Maybe some grad student will test this. My theory is that you can take a random story from a newspaper, and a random person from the community, put them together, and have about a 50 percent chance that the person won't understand it.

If you've been following an issue, the latest story is likely to make sense. If you haven't been following along, the latest incremental nugget may make as much sense as a macaque. It's a data point without context. A fact without meaning. And that's our problem. For a large and growing segment of the community, the paper is full of monkey screech. We might get the emotional context now and then, but mostly it's a puzzle.

You can see how we got here. Newsprint and broadcast air time are scarce. Stories must be short and to the point. The bulletin, which is easy to write, crowds out the explainer, which is hard. Journalists use terms such as insurgency and talk about analysts and use other code words that are full of meaning for those inside the circle, and meaningless for those outside.

As journalism has to compete with more and more glittery fun from the world of programmed entertainment and YouTube videos, the audience wanders away from the continuing story, and loses the ability to understand the daily report.

I am thinking about this because tomorrow morning I'm off to Washington for a "Future of Context" discussion put together by Matt Thompson for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. It's timely. We have no shortage of crises to face in journalism right now -- finance, business models, technological transformation of the media landscape, rise of the amateur, decline of the institution, you name it. Add context to that list.

One of the benefits of the Internet is measurability. I don't have to guess about the readership of a story. I don't have to guess about reach and frequency. I have data that, under duress, can be persuaded to reveal truth. Some of the truths that I have wrung out of this data are troubling.

One that I've mentioned many times in the past: On the Internet, there are no average readers, but there are clear groups. One very large group visits a news site perhaps once or twice in a month, looking for something specific and then moving on. Another group, distressingly small, behaves more like the imaginary daily newspaper reader of the past, visiting not only daily but perhaps multiple times a day. For the second group, incremental stories may make a great deal of sense. For the first group, most conventional journalism is wasted.

We need to move beyond monkey screech. I have some ideas about that, and so do some other folks. I look forward to the conversation.