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Investigating the economics of local newspapers

Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Deutsch: Karte der Verwaltungsgliederung des V...

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There is a grim certainty that the existence of local and regional newspapers are under threat in the UK and other developed economies. There are no shortage of articles from commentators saying this is generally a bad thing. Northcliffe’s East Kent Gazette is the latest in a long line of closures.

But what are the realities of this situation? Are papers really all doomed? What’s the minimum overheads and revenue you’d need to keep a title going, whether online or in print? Are papers better off in large PLC ownership or should they,  as many have argued recently, return to local, independent ownership? Can’t they exist as online-only titles?

I’m putting together an article (possibly a series) for TheMediaBriefing.com that asks all these questions – but I need some evidence and in the spirit of open, networked investigations, I’m asking for your help:

– If anyone has any information, data or figures on how their local newspaper is run as a business, please get in touch. I’m interested in costs and income. Anonymity and discretion are assured – I won’t necessarily mention the title nor the company. (For the time being I’m just looking at the UK situation).

– Views, opinions and ideas on how to make local and regional papers into viable businesses are very welcome. Think about business models – aside from paper ad sales and coverprice, what could business managers do to build genuine, renewable and reliable revenue streams?

I’ve been gathering some figures so far on this and the results are very revealing – some titles are making healthy profits and have small costs, for example. I don’t think the world needs another “isn’t it sad” style blog post from anyone on this – I’m more interested in data, evidence and what might happen next.

Email me on patrick dot smith at briefingmedia.com or call on 07904587050.

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On probability, statistics and journalism

Friday, September 23, 2011
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This should pose a good teaser for any working reporter and news editor who uses percentages of chance on a day-to-day basis.

If a woman is given a positive screening result after a mammogram, which is bad, what is the probability that she does not have cancer?

Answer: 91 percent.

Why is this? Cambridge University professor David Spiegelhalter explains in the September UK edition of Wired (emphasis is mine):

Mammography correctly classifies around 90 percent of women who go for breast-cancer screening. So when a middle-aged woman is told she has a positive test result, what’s the probability she doesn’t have cancer? The answer, which is surprising to most people, is around 91 per cent. The crucial missing piece of information is the size of her background risk.

So suppose she is from a population in which around one in 100 have breast cancer. Then, out of 100 such women tested, one would have breast cancer and will most likely test positive. But of the 99 who do not have breast cancer, we would still expect around ten to test positive — as the test is only 90 percent accurate. That makes 11 positive tests, only one of which involves cancer, which gives a 10/11 = 91 percent probability that someone who tests positive does not have breast cancer.

Spiegelhalter writes that this is difficult to understand because it is difficult to understand: probability doesn’t make sense, nor follow the rule of logic we think govern our lives and the outcomes of decisions.

But he also correctly identifies a flaw in news reporting where the numerator – the amount of things - is enthusiastically reported, without mentioning the amount of times the event could have happened, the denominator.

So the amount of health scare stories (mentioning no names) that are perpetually reported – invariably from unpublished, unreviewed studies and promoted by PR officers – are lacking in context and thus utterly misleading.  Ben Goldacre has been making this point for years.

Health scare stories may be right to mention that while the relative risk of, for example, getting cancer from drinking/not drinking red wine/eating peanuts/reading the Daily Mail may be increased or decreased. But the absolute risk may be statistically unchanged – when a person is considered as part of a wider population, not just the 1,000 or so that took part in the study.

News naturally focuses on the unlikely and the shocking – it would be boring otherwise. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be misleading.

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Thoughts on LinkedIn groups for media brands

Wednesday, September 14, 2011
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LinkedIn has certainly grown in importance for me in the past year since TheMediaBriefing.com started.

We run a group now running at just under 500 members and it’s been very rewarding to have started some interesting discussions, that have fed into and inspired articles on TMB and hopefully proved useful to people in our community. Here are some entirely unscientific thoughts based on what I’ve learned and also what I see from other groups from media brands:

  • Saying ‘what do you think?’ isn’t always enough to get a discussion going. Often people will say to themselves “er, I don’t think anything” and move on to answering emails. If you ask a  specific questions, it might result in some specific answers. Rory asked people what advice they’d give a younger version of themselves – the title of an article he did for the site – and 25 comments later the thread is still going (my favourite tip: “Go into investment banking”).
  • Shovelware can be useful, but not always. We added the LinkedIn sharing buttons to every page on TheMediaBriefing, which is a good way for readers to add a story to their professional network. Some posts are shared more than 20 times, which for a professional B2B brand like TMB means our articles are being seen by 100s of senior media people – our core target audience. Increasingly, LinkedIn is being used a content discovery platform. But, adding a link to the group using the button only starts a discussion - it doesn’t develop it. Plus, the automated way LinkedIn’s API presents button-fed links looks automated and a bit inhuman. It doesn’t look like part of a lively community.
  • Posts with more comments get more comments: the first thing people see when they log in to the group are the “Most popular”, “Latest updates” and “Managers’ choice”. As with news articles, people drop into the discussions with lots of comments and are far more likely to add their thoughts when people (particularly people they know) have already said something. Not many people like to be the first to say something.
  • Be tough but fair on self-promoters: It’s only a matter of time after starting a LinkedIn group before someone posts a link promoting their site or product. We even get people linking to their own discussions elsewhere. There’s an easy way to deal with this: “Mark as promotion”. This takes the link into the promotions section and out of the main discussion list. I’m more than happy for people to start a thread on something and link to themselves if appropriate (TMB likes linking in a big way, of course), but it has to be a discussion, not just a link-dumping, traffic-boosting exercise. Some marketers do this on an automated basis, incidentally.
I’d be very interested to hear any tips or advice anyone else has, or links to guides that are worth reading.
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What Spinal Tap can tell you about product management

Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Stonehenge at sunset on a cloudy day.

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One thing they certainly don’t teach in journalism schools is digital product management. But it’s one of the things that people who came through print publishing careers into the online world are increasingly being asked to get to grips with.

Working on TheMediaBriefing.com has certainly been a learning curve – we’re working now with partners at Idio to redevelop the main site and we already have (what I think) is a nifty mobile-optimised site. It’s going to have an improved user interface and more things people can do on the site – with more of an emphasis on our original content, while highlighting the usefulness of our curated links.

There have been all sorts of useful posts and resources that can help with this kind of thing, such as this from the AOP.

But I keep thinking of a particular scene in Spinal Tap. Guitarist David St Hubbins has requested a life-size model of Stonehenge to accompany a particularly overblown performance of Tap’s epic song of the same name. Hastily he scribbles an outline with ” 18′ ” on a napkin and hands it to his manager. Of course, he should have wrote 18′, meaning 18 feet, instead of 18 inches. The finished product is not very impressive (embedding disabled, annoyingly).

The first time the band see the finished product is when it’s lowered onto the stage as part of a big finale:

Are you sure your developers know what you want the final product to look like? The right kind of communication is obviously key here.

On a slightly more serious note, you may be interested in this article and video from the AOP’s product management forum in from December.

Update: Still on a rock theme, any graphic designers will enjoy this jaunty Dio-era Sabbath style song, summing up much of what clients ever ask designers to do: Make the logo bigger!

p.s. TheMediaBriefing is having a party in London on 27th September – all welcome. Sign up to our Meetup group for more details as they’re announced.

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#SIPAUK2011: Links and slides from my presentation on journalism, aggregation and curation

Wednesday, July 13, 2011


Today I’m speaking at the Specialised Information Publishers’ Association’s UK conference on a breakout session on digital tools for editors and publishers, in a session with my erstwhile colleague Martin Stabe, now an interactive producer at FT.com.

To sum it up very briefly, I was talking about curation, aggregation and the importance of transparency in online publishing.

Here are some of the links that I mentioned during the talk:

  • Ben Goldacre on why he doesn’t trust journalists that don’t link to primary sources (here, here)
  • Benoît Raphaël  of Owni.fr on the “Google newsroom”  - decentralising news production from a physical location and using free online tools to innovatively track trends, write analysis and use the wisdom of your audience.
  • Journal Register CEO John Paton’s excellent post of his excellent presentation at the WAN-IFRA Summit in Zurich last month. He really did reinvent the newsroom, the products and the business by putting online first and went from bankruptcy to profit by doing so. No gimmicks – he took costs out of the business, stuck print journalists’ ego with a big fork and focused on what matters.
  • Adam Tinworth on why there can be no special pleading of “our audience doesn’t get social media”.
And here are the slides:
SIPA UK 2011 – Presentation by Patrick Smith

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A week is a long time in media

Monday, July 11, 2011
MANCHESTER, UNITED KINGDOM - JULY 10: A copy ...

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The last seven days have not been dull.

With the UK launch of Huffington Post utterly overshadowed by the on-going crisis (for once, this word is justified) at News Corporation, it’s one of those weeks where stories normally found on the media/business pages rocket their way to the front pages and the top of broadcast bulletins.

I wrote a few things on this:

– Phone hacking, journalism, transparency and why the readers are gaining power over brands - for TheMediaBriefing.com

– News of the World closure underlines Murdoch’s desperate objective: acquire Sky at all costs - also on TMB, and

– Why we’ll miss the ‘Screws’, for CNN.com, where I try to say something positive – or at least somehow balanced – about a newspaper which did have a proud tradition of investigations and exposure.

Also check out Journalism.co.uk’s podcast last week on the launch of HuffPo in the UK, featuring me blathering on about why I think it’s an exciting business model and why I’m not particularly outraged by the idea of people voluntarily writing for the site without being paid.

As I say on the pod, people write for a variety of reasons that don’t involve money. It’s interesting that the J.co.uk people actually went out and found some bloggers who are more than happy to contribute on an irregular basis. As so often happens, @Adders makes this point far better than I could.

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Hats off to Nick Davies

Friday, July 8, 2011
News of the World

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There’s so much coverage of the shutting down of the News of the World, including mine, but I’m not seeing anyone talking about the journalist at the heart of this story – but who comes out with his reputation and morals intact.

Nick Davies has for four years kept this story alive, ignoring every threat and denial from News International, and always trusting his sources and instincts.

News of the World editor told staff yesterday: “The Guardian was out to get us, and they got us,” almost inferring a personal vendetta. But this is business: Davies uncovers wrong-doing for a living. NOTW may have hacked as many as 4,000 phones, including missing schoolchildren and war heroes’ families.

This video chat with him is worth watching. Here’s an excerpt:

 It’s about power and the power elite and the way that the power elite tend to look after each other. I think it’s reasonable to observe that the Murdoch corporation has too much power and its’ evident in the way that the police, the Press Complaints Commission and some politicians automatically backed off and said ‘let’s not cause trouble, they might hurt us’, that they already had too much power when all this was going on on.

It seems to me highly unlikely that it’s in the interests of society as a whole to give that too powerful group yet more power.

I rather think the threat from Murdoch owning more stuff is slightly over-stated but it’s hard to argue with his analysis of the forces that were holding back the reporting of tabloid journalism’s excesses during the last few decades. Much like with MPs’ expenses, the rules or transparency have now been re-written.

Davies is scathing about the Met police, whose fear of “causing trouble with this newspaper empire” saw multiple investigations dropped, despite live evidence. “There are senior officers who must be seriously considering whether they should resign,” he says.

Oh and Davies also casually says that he’s spoken to NOTW hacks (pun intended) who in 2005 asked Glenn Mulcaire to hack the voicemails of David Cameron and George Osbourne. If Davies’s reporting on this so far is any guide, you’d be foolish to question him.

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Highly commendable disruption

Friday, June 10, 2011

If personal blogs aren’t for self-aggrandising posts when something good happens, then what are they for?

I was very pleased to be “highly commended” (a phrase reminiscent of school homework) in the Digital Editorial Individual category 2011 at the AOP Awards last night. See the full list here and congratulations to Emma from the Telegraph for winning the overall individual prize.

As if my swollen ego needed boosting further, the judges also provided a testimonial quote:

‘Single-handedly established a very credible and respected new brand for quite a cynical audience!’

Briefing Media – the parent company of TheMediaBriefing.com, which I edit – was also up for Independent Digital Publisher.  We lost out to Magicalia, well done to them, but it’s fantastic to get that sort of recognition so soon after launching.

Disruption in action

Self-promotion aside, there is a serious point to make here about the industry and digital media. Rory and Neil founded Briefing Media because there was a gap in the market for a digital B2B company. It’s still very early days in the evolution of what we’re doing but in nine months we’ve: published two world-class research reports; ran a leading summit on monetising media; organised a second conference (it’s about mobile, it’s on Tuesday, last few tickets remaining); sent out thousands upon thousands of email newsletters and been nominated for two industry awards alongside the biggest names in UK media.

TheMediaBriefing is just the first of several sites we plan to launch in different professional niches. The aim has always been not just to build a site but a diverse multi-platform company. On that note, by the way, we’re always interested to hear from digital journalists and sales/events professionals who might want to work with us.

So in short, I think that shows what’s possible when you launch something new.

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#newsrw: Heather Brooke on the PR gatekeepers of officialdom

Friday, May 27, 2011

The modern journalist’s role is not merely to report news, but to filter and distil masses of information that matters to the public and present it so they can act on it.

And reporters have to realise that supposedly independent government officials will always try to keep data secret where it might cause a negative headline.

That stirring call to arms is from Heather Brooke – journalist and freedom of information (FOI) campaigner – who was the keynote speaker at Journalism.co.uk’s fourth news:rewired event on Friday, at Reuters’ London HQ.

Brooke’s FOI requests led to the release (via an unplanned leak to the Telegraph) of every MPs’ expense claims, which resulted in perhaps the most critical constitutional and political crisis in modern times. And her advice is timely…

Breaking down the backroom deals in news

Brooke learned her trade as a crime reporter in the US, where access to incident reports and other data is guaranteed. She came to the UK in 1997 the UK, and here it’s a different story, involving cosy private relationships between reporters and gatekeepers:

That’s why I became a campaigner for freedom of information in Britain – I didn’t like the way it was done here. It always came with strings attached, it was favouritism, it was about who you knew – so if you did something for them, they would do something for you.

So the agenda is decided by the people that have access to the information, not the media, whose job it should be to interpret data. As any regional hack knows, police “voicebank” phonelines – where coppers tell reporters what has happened in the last 24 hours, but seem to think police-run family fun days are breaking news – are very close to being worthless. Is this how the police-reporter relationship will always be?

Civil servants as PR gatekeepers

The people with access to official information – usually PR  and communications staff, but not always – had “an unhelpful attitude”, says Brooke: “People forget that they are there to serve the public. They think the information is theirs, that they own it.”

This is what’s happening across the world: they [officials] are trying to manage the reputation of their institution. We need to understand that in our data journalism. We need to make them understand that this [disclosure] is good for them above all.

This rings very true. Why are civil servants – who work for the public, not political parties – so careful about releasing information? Because it could genuinely negatively affect them in their jobs and their lives. But this is government by Daily Mail, not open disclosure for the public good.

Journalists’ data roles

“The journalist’s role is managing all this data and distilling it down into what is important to the public,” she says. And, without wanting to get into a “Is ice cream strawberry” style debate, for Brooke the interrogation of data is specifically what separates professional journalists from amateurs.

All that gathering data, checking, getting statements… this verification takes time and it takes money. But what many media organisations are forgetting is that this marks out a professional from a blogger or non-professional.

Brooke’s talk reminded me of the tenacity shown by journalist Chris Wheal in a conversation with a Treasury PR manager who was being mystifyingly unhelpful with his reasonable request for data (I wrote about it here).

It’s an uphill struggle finding the data you need to tell stories fully in the UK. But if you don’t take no for an answer, that’s a good place to start.

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Powerpoint, coffee and business cards: Media conference season gets underway

Monday, May 23, 2011
The Hollywood Hill's Mobile Media Summit

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It’s that time of year when media hacks get up early, head to a hotel, drink too much coffee and find out what the future of the industry is.

There are a few really good ones coming up – including the next from TheMediaBriefing.com – and I thought I’d mention them in the hope of meeting some interesting people by flagging up my attendence in advance.

News:rewired – Friday 27 May

With a focus on social media and data, the third news:rewired from Journalism.co.uk has a good line-up, featuring some of the best thinkers inUK digital media – including occasional TheMediaBriefing contributors Greg Hadfield and Kevin Anderson. (I’m told tickets are available).

These events are focused on the production and distribution of news content and it’s a very useful, practical forum for journalists, particularly those with management roles who are looking for solutions to all the complex problems we all have to deal with.

Mobile Media Strategies 2011 – 14 June

This is Briefing Media’s second full-length major conference, and I think we have an unbeatable lineup. I’m pleased that almost all the people I wanted on board said yes – which I hope shows that we’re providing an independent platform for industry leaders to share what they’re working on and discuss the challenges they face.

There aren’t make conferences that get the likes of Telegraph, Guardian, Sky to appear in one day, for example. Plus I’m really interesting to hear what book publisher Dorlin Kindersley and Swedish mag innovator Bonnier are doing with iPad apps.

Tickets are here (and don’t forget we do group discount) and see who’s signed up so far. Conferences are often as good as the people in the room and there are already some great people coming.

AOP Awards 2011 – June 9

I’ll be at the AOPs this year – nothing unusual there, but this is the first time I’ll be going as an individual nominee, for Digital Editorial Individual, which is very humbling. Briefing Media is also up for Independent Digital Publisher, among some fantastic brands.

SIPA UK Conference – 13 July

The Specialised Information Publishers’ Association kindly asked me to run an editorial breakout session at its annual London get-together, which I’m doing with former colleague and now FT.com data wizard Martin Stabe.

Some really good B2B folk are taking part (I’m hoping someone films the WGSN pres as I’ll be on stage in another room) and it will be interesting to see if David Gilbertson – the former Emap CEO who left the company this month – turns up and does his session as planned. He’s a good speaker and one of the trade publishing biz’s smartest guys so I hope he does.

And, finally, a mini-plug for WAN-IFRA’s Newsroom Summit in Zurich on 9/10 June. I won’t be there but my colleague Neil Thackray from Briefing Media will be and Neil is especially good value on conference panels so watch out for that and by all means have a chat with him about Briefing Media/TheMediaBriefing.com if you’re going.

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