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To say the least, 2008 proved a difficult year for newspapers in many nations. Rising printing and distribution costs, waning circulations and fragmented audiences continued to challenge a business model that seems increasingly outdated. And despite many promising advancements made by newspaper companies in Internet and mobile, revenues remain far behind those of print.

But the news is far from all negative. Below is some food for thought for newsroom executives everywhere, ways in which newspapers began adapting to the modern media landscape in 2008 that will continue through 2009.

INTERNET TRENDS BECOMING NEW TOOLS FOR JOURNALISM
2008 saw the continued proliferation of social and professional networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn, with newspapers and journalists, with newspapers and journalists, such as the New York Times well-known columnist Nicholas Kristof, creating their own profiles, applications and connecting with new audiences. User-Generated Content (UGC) continued to gather speed as well, with CNN's iReport in the US and LePost in France among many others around the world. A December report by the Bivings Group also noted that 58% of US newspapers now use some form of UGC.

But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, Twitter, which allows users to post short messages for all to see, officially became a widespread tool for journalists in 2008. For example, journalists covering the US Presidential Elections took live notes from conventions and rallies that readers could follow and that also helped to shape those journalists' main story. During the Mumbai terrorist attacks, "tweets", or Twitter messages, appeared as the first news of the attacks. Twitter feeds can also be aggregated, bringing all angles of those covering a certain event into one, comprehensible, instantly-updated record.

Another Internet trend is the "Personalized Web", evoked by newspaper experiments such as MyTimes and start-ups such as Netvibes that provide customizable pages based on RSS feeds and widgets. Arguably the boldest example of personalized news is the BBC's revamped homepage, released in March 2008, which allows users to create their own page based on the BBC information they use most. But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the difficulties of the print product, more high-profile Internet-based sites began popping up in 2008. Perhaps most notably, The Huffington Post, launched in the summer of 2005, has already jumped to one of the US' top-30 news sites, bolstered by the US Presidential Elections, according to Nielsen Online. Media pundit, entrepreneur and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff trumpeted the late-'07 launch of his news aggregator Newser as a "revolution in how people get their news." One year after Wolff's launch, he gained a competitor in Tina Brown, a former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, who launched her own, rapidly growing online-only site, The Daily Beast, a mixture of aggregated and original articles. And these are only the high-profile, American examples. The relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit Minnpost.com. Former WSJ editor Paul Steiger did something similar with ProPublica. The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit NewAssignment.net, helped capture the 2008 Elections and the Knight News Challenge winner Spot.Us is collecting donations from the public to fund investigative stories. Even former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst Lauren Rich Fine backed the non-profit model in 2008.

With this in mind, are the days of major metropolitan and national newspapers digging up the dirt on businessmen and politicians over? For the time being, no. But newsrooms everywhere are under extreme economic pressures and have been cutting core staff, making it even more difficult for newspapers to conduct the type of investigative journalism their communities need. Don't be surprised if more non-profit (no dividends to shareholders), Internet based (low operating costs) ventures spring up to fill the gaps.

COMPETING NEWSPAPERS PARTNERING UP
As many newspaper newsrooms are cutting staff, wire services should be in greater demand than ever. But 2008 saw a backlash against the world's biggest news agency, the Associated Press, by its members. Several publishers handed in their notice to the non-profit agency partially in response to price hikes and complaining of low value for their money.

In response to the AP mini-exodus, some papers, even those in competition with one another, began joining forces. Papers in Ohio and Florida whose geographical coverage overlaps are swapping stories and even combining bureaux. Not only will this help the papers save money, but it frees up time for reporters to cover issues not being covered elsewhere. In the current economic climate, this trend will continue, but not without its effects on the industry.

Some traditional news hounds would argue that two papers covering similar stories in a certain region add depth and uncover more facts that may otherwise be lost to readers. This may be true. But is it really worth having two reporters on the scene to gather one or two more different pieces of information when there may be other stories elsewhere? And what about the multitude of photojournalists that different organizations send to press conferences and like events where the story subjects don't move much? Is it really worth sending all of those photogs? Couldn't photos just be shared? Without a doubt, these are questions that cash-strapped publishers and editors are asking themselves right now. Expect to see more cross-corporation cooperation in 2009.

IS PRINT REALLY THREATENED?
We've said it before and we'll say it again: print is not going to die. But, considering the trend of the past year, print's reach will be considerably reduced, at least in Western nations.

During the last few months of 2008, publishers' struggle to maintain the high costs of printing and distribution has become apparent. In October, The Christian Science Monitor, a beacon of quality American journalism, announced that it would stop printing its daily edition. In mid-December, the Detroit Free Press, which recently won a broadcast award, decided to limit home delivery to Friday's and weekends while trimming the daily single-copy sale paper to one section. Most recently, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is considering dropping "paper" from its name.

What do these cuts mean for the news"paper" industry? As circulations drop across the Western world, it could mean substantial savings. Weekday papers often make a loss to begin with, so cutting the costs of printing those papers should cover any lost advertising revenue in those same papers.

Perhaps the question publishers should be asking themselves is "Do cutbacks on the paper product matter to readers"? Well, cutbacks will certainly change the face of the newspaper industry. But in the end, media houses are in the news "distribution" business, not the news"paper" business. As long as their news is published, media houses will have completed their service to the public.

Brian Till, one of the US's youngest syndicated columnists, had an epiphany during his discussions about the decline in American journalism.  

Although he spends "hours a day reading news," and has countless resources at his disposal, he has only purchased "bout a dozen American papers in the last year." Till finds that, ipso facto, his actions have helped diminish the newspaper industry.  

"I am the murderer of news," he writes, along with his generation, who has failed to recognize the role they've played. Growing up with free news, Till writes, has left his generation clueless to the fact that they were the "free riders killing the industry."

Is the recent Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich scandal proof that the newspaper industry still has relevance?    

Blagojevich's efforts to remove editorial members of the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times' David Carr argues, show that the newspaper still has an impact--if a governor is willing to allegedly extort money in return for favorable press, then the paper must be doing something right.  

The scandal, he says, is justification for investigative journalism through a print medium.  A daily paper is a "civic necessity." If a community lacks a proper outlet, or was "too diminished" for full reporting, then what would have been the result in Illinois?

"Who says the modern American newspaper doesn't matter?" Carr asks.

TJ Sullivan.  In his LA Observed column "Native Intelligence," Sullivan argues the opposite point.

"Newspapers don't matter," he writes. "Otherwise people would be reading them."

"Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," said Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for the Media at The Century Foundation, after a $125 million payout for publishers and authors who sued the major search engine for rights to digitize copyrighted books.

Despite the "myriad" of issues left to be resolved for the publishing industry, the event has called into question the use of news on search engines.

Barely a day goes by at the moment without a raft of stories on the financial crisis, the US election and... the Associated Press. The Associated Press's communications team have never been so in demand, and the venerated news agency is moving dangerously close to becoming the story rather than being the one that writes about it.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Tom Brettingen, Chief Revenue Officer and Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at the AP, to discuss bad publicity, editorial content, price structure, and editorial cuts at the agency.

EW: Have you been surprised at the reaction to the price structure changes?

TB: "Generally, and for most of the industry, what we were offering was much more content for less money and a broader license to use it. We expected people to be happy, and most people were happy, the people you are seeing in the news were people, as the economic situation got worse, who were expecting larger decreases in their rates."

EW: Why were these changes necessary?

TB: "In the beginning, the goal was not drastic rate cuts, it was more about content. We wanted to help newspapers find the content that was specifically right for them in their markets and keep rates flat in doing that. We did all the work to devise the specifics and as these discussions went on the situation in the market became a lot worse and the global economy got worse. So, now the pricing and packaging that we started off with has run into this buzz of newspaper challenges and general economic challenges and that's why you find today all the stuff in the news about us"

EW: Is the AP having the same financial difficulties as the rest of the industry?

TB: "If our customers, who are generally ad supported, are hurt by the challenges that all newspapers are facing, compounded by the global economy, then of course it affects us as well"

EW: Looking back, would you have done anything differently with regard implementing the price structure changes? Do you think communication was an issue?

TB: "Some of the clients found the new packaging unnecessarily complicated. We created one level that contained all of the Breaking News, and then separate to this we had additional levels, Premium vertical segments, such as Sports, Business, Lifestyle, Entertainment and Analysis. Our thinking was "Breaking News" would satisfy a lot of customers, but some of our clients with more specialized newspapers might want to buy additional sports and business. Breaking News did have a huge amount of sports and business, but some of it was separated into Premium categories, so only those newspapers that wanted it needed to buy it."

"If we had foreseen how much more difficult the economic situation was going to get, we probably would have jumped ahead farther and skipped some of the intermediate steps. Things were not great 2 years ago, but they weren't nearly as bad as they are now.

"I am sure that (sic: communication) was part of it.... We were making this brand new separation from Breaking News, which on its face seems straightforward enough. However, say you are looking at Sports; you get the baseball results and match report, but what about analysis and sidebars? We had that planned, but we didn't have it live in the new web platform, so newspapers hearing from us couldn't go immediately to the website and see what we were talking about."

"If we'd had more time to announce it so that we could have finished the programming so that the distinctions between Breaking News and Premium would be clearer.... yeah, we could have timed that better. We were racing to get the program built and explained so people could make their choices in time for 2009. Newspapers didn't have the ability to see the differences to Breaking and Premium, and that would be something we could have done better.

"There was a huge amount of communication, it just wasn't necessarily what everyone wanted to hear"

EW: What was AP's reaction to the business-wide and economic crisis?

TB: "Last week, as the economic situation worsened and newspapers wanted a further reduction in their pricings from us, we did two things, for the small percentages of newspapers that saw a price increase in 2009, that was called off, and then we decided to abandon the two tier model. We made it part of one package, so premium is available to everyone."

EW: What is in the future for the AP?

TB: "We are undertaking a major review of what we need to do beyond changes in 2009. That will be a wide-ranging review. There are some benefits to membership of the AP, you vote for the board, you have an ownership stake; however, maybe some newspapers would prefer to not support the co-op to that level. Maybe some newspapers would prefer to be a more straightforward customer and buy a small content package for less money. That will be something that we will be examining."

EW: Do you expect to increase prices after 2009 for US newspapers?

TB: "Unless something miraculous happens and turns things around, if newspapers get to where they need to go with much more success on the web, that is theoretically possible. But no, I don't see any rate increases in the foreseeable future."

EW: Why has the AP changed its tone in some AP copy? Some of AP's content is now quite opinionated, are you moving away from neutral ground?

TB: "It's an area that can be debated, but we are certainly not moving from a neutral position. We remain committedly neutral, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't have a voice, it's a more distinctive voice. It's a different voice to that which we may have had on some of our content in the past, but there is no leaving the neutral middle ground in terms of political leanings. We are providing value to the reader, we don't go to the consumer of course: we're a wholesaler. However, if we don't interest the reader, our customers aren't going to find that much value in our content. It's not a decision to be outrageous, or voicing off... it was an incremental change to be a little more distinctive in the market place."

EW: Does the AP have any new projects or innovations in the pipeline?

TB: "If we're not going to have all the revenue that we've had in the past from US newspapers and, more than likely, a few US broadcasters, we need to replace that revenue. We have several initiatives to help us do that, and they will be in content areas. Any more detail would be premature at this stage."

EW: Do you expect staff cuts at AP? If so, can you confirm that these will not happen in editorial?

TB: "Its clearly a company where the expense is largely people, if you're going to reduce expenses, you've got to look there. We need to be sure that the cuts are done very carefully because damaging the product and damaging the quality of the product starts a spiral that we clearly have no intention of starting.

"There is no decision on not cutting editorial, but depending on the levels of cuts that is required, its unlikely that you could do that entirely without looking at where the majority of our expenses lie, which is news staffing"

EW: What do you see in the future for newspapers? What do you think they need to do to their business models?

TB: "If I had the secret potion I would get very wealthy in a hurry. There are lots of good ideas floating round out there and they almost all revolve around targeting users with information, content and services, not expecting a single product - be it print or web - to be fully satisfying to everybody you want to reach in your market. A lot of customization and niche kinds of products are the things on most peoples minds."

See also:

Exploring the content sharing model: Is this the future of the US newspaper industry?
Opinion: Is the AP threatening its own future?
US: AP suspends rate hike
US: More newspapers to drop AP
US: Tribune Co. to drop AP

US newspapers have recently begun working together on content sharing deals on an unprecedented scale. There has been much speculation that the driving force behind these agreements is dissatisfaction with the recent changes at AP. The most recent announcement came from five papers in the Tri-State area of the US last week.  

Content sharing deals vary and although many are just starting, a group of three papers in Florida - the Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald - started content sharing about three months ago.  However, there is one group of five papers in New Hampshire who have had an agreement in place for the past 15 years.

In an effort to understand the inner workings of content sharing, how it will affect the future of newspapers and journalism, and if these deals are related to AP's actions, the Editors Weblog spoke with Dave Solomon, the vice president of The Telegraph of Nashua in New Hampshire, and Anders Gyllenhaal, senior vice president/executive editor of the Miami Herald.

The Florida Method

Three months ago the Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald began to share content. What is most striking about this deal is the complete shift in mentality that has accompanied it. These three papers have been fierce competitors for the past 100-years and now they find themselves posting each other's stories.  According to Gyllenhaal at the Miami Herald, the shift is not designed to change the competitive relationship between the three, but it has changed the way they work together.

What was the trigger for such a change after so many years? Gyllenhaal believes that the increasingly challenging newspaper market has necessitated a more mutually supportive relationship. For the Herald, it began on the business side, "with a distribution agreement. In the case of the Herald and the Sun Sentinel, the Sun was circulating the Herald in its prime territory, and we were circulating their paper." After this, "the newsrooms began to talk, and we have come up with the initial step, a way of trading routine content between the three papers."

The papers follow a strict guideline of what content they can and cannot use. Gyllenhaal believes that "websites are where the news competition exists" so in an effort to preserve this, "you cannot pick up a story from another website and put it on your website but you can put in the paper the next day." Gyllenhaal goes on to say, "It's a defined group of stories, which are events that happened in the last 24 hours or are about to happen, and as a rule we are picking up a couple of items a day from each others websites."

Gyllenhaal reports, "What we can't pick up are things that kind of define an individual paper - in the sense of their franchise elements, their personality elements, you can't pick up columnists, major investigative pieces the things that define, the more important pieces."  This aspect of the agreement maintains the competition, therefore Gyllenhaal does not see this changing anytime soon.

What next for the Florida method?

As for the future, Gyllenhaal confirmed plans for individual departments to start working with each other across the three titles for specific stories.  He gave the example of when a sports department cannot make it to a game; they will make arrangements to get the story from one of the other papers who would be at the game. 

When asked about the possibility of expanding partnerships statewide or across the nation, Gyllenhaal believes that it is possible, but complicated.  He notes that in order to grow such a partnership it would require a different system than they have put in place.  However, there are plans to extend the content-sharing deal to two papers north of Palm Beach, but he confirmed that it is probably as far as they will go for now.

The New Hampshire model

The Nashua Telegraph has been content sharing with five of their neighbor newspapers since 1993. The deal here is different to Flordia's method as the papers are not in direct competition with each other. However, their approach does provide some insight into how such a system can work for a sustained period of time.

 
According to Solomon at The Telegraph of Nashua the system started as a means, "to get feature stories and in-depth stories from the other papers for our then-new Sunday editions that we were struggling to fill state copy."

Unlike the Florida papers, "anything and everything is available for reuse," whether on the website or in the print edition, a routine story or an in-depth investigative piece as long as they credit the newspaper of origin.

The five papers involved in the deal extended the agreement to two other papers in the state that are not part of the full open-content sharing deal.  

As for their readers, Solomon believes that they, "appreciate the better reporting." He gave the example of a hypothetical airport accident in a near-by town, Concord.  If it were to happen, the "Concord Monitor is going to write a very thorough story. They are going to give it to AP and AP is going to flatten out the language, neutralize the tone and convert it to about eight inches. I think our readers are better served by the Concorde Monitor coverage."

Are these agreements a reaction to the changes at AP?

Such content sharing deals seem to be becoming increasingly popular just at a time when a growing chorus is criticising AP: are the two related?

Gyllenhaal said that the Miami Herald's agreement had, "nothing to do with AP. We are taking a different route than those other papers, so this is unrelated to that."

The Telegraph filed a termination notice with the AP in April, so between now and 2010 the Telegraph is looking for alternative vendors.  

Solomon explained that the Telegraph's reason for terminating their AP contract was monetary, it spends around $130,000 a year on AP copy. However, this expenditure does not correlate with the amount of syndicated material that they actually use since they are so, "intensely local."

In addition to the AP, the Telegraph spends another $30,000 on syndicated copy from Scripps Howard, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Soloman is, "convinced a newspaper our size should only be paying half of that or less given the amount of syndicated material we use.  So unless I see a package where we can get AP and combo of other syndicates for half as much as what we are currently paying, I don't see any alternative but to move forward.  I don't expect that by canceling AP we will have a net savings of 130k, but expect to come out of it spending about half as much."

For Solomon, the AP is a "great institution that does remarkable work." However, he believes that "there has been a deterioration in state report over the years. Through no fault of AP personel, but through the continued reductions in staffing at the state offices."  

Solomon believes that the AP has, "demonetized world and national news because they give it to the pure play sites like Google and Yahoo."  

Solomon also pointed out that the daily news reports from most AP bureaus are 50 percent member contribution and 50 percent AP staff generated. Solomon further highlighted that this "is certainly not the case in New England, I would estimate its 80 percent member generated and 20 percent AP staff generated."  So for the Telegraph, this is another reason why the AP is not a vital contributor to its news operation.

Where will these newspapers get additional content from?

Since the Telegraph has been content sharing for the last 15 years, it is nothing new to them; however, now that they have terminated their contract with the AP, things are going to change for them.  

Solomon emphasized his hope that the Washington Post and LA Times will "seize the opportunity and become more aggressive in realizing breaking news, where they are certainly not comparable to AP at this point.  But they have the capabilities to do it."

The Telegraph will also have to find sources for sports news, photos, world and nation coverage, Nielsen ratings, top ten movie releases and so forth.  In order to do so, Solomon said the Telegraph is looking into other options that can provide content for them and even expanding upon "the state-wide cooperative that has been in existence for so long."  

What can other newspapers learn from the Miami Herald the Telegraph?

The two models for content sharing demonstrate that anything is possible when it comes to expanding a newspaper's coverage capabilities.

For some newspapers the AP will continue to be an essential part of their operation, but for others this relationship will end or significantly change. According to Solomon, the AP must not see content sharing as a threat, but what happens if this system grows?

To compound to the woes at the AP, many have voiced opposition to its new "boldness" when reporting, with some headlines that stretch far from the AP's position as a "a neutral arbiter of the news".

Whether AP sees content sharing as a threat or not, it is certainly an innovative and positive step for newspapers in the US. These newspapers are demonstrating a willingness to break down old rivalries in pursuit of more comprehensive coverage; content sharing may well be a key step on the long and difficult road to restructuring the industry for the changing industry-wide and global economic climate.