Saving the news industry by design

I’m not the only one who thinks passion and creativity can turn things around for the news business. Check this out:

More about newspapers and creativity

 Reader Richard Boothroyd has this to say about yesterday’s post:

“I think that is a pretty naive opinion that newspapers are failing because of a lack of passion and creativity. Newspapers/print media are failing because of technology (theirs is old) staffing (too much) overhead, (bloggers have little) and competition.

“The model of the newsprint town crier is not even a good one anymore since the medium is not “Green”. This is a business problem not a passion problem and NO…”when people want something they will pay for it” is just not true. You are looking at the demise of Northern Ohio Live as we speak.”

Well, Mr. Boothroyd, perhaps I didn’t explain myself adequately.

First, I’m not talking simply about newspapers, but about the news industry as a whole. Newspapers are in the deepest and, I fear, most lasting trouble, but none of the media are doing all that well at the moment because of the economy-related plunge in paid advertising and the steady decline in subscriptions. Those industry-wide revenue losses have indeed started killing off publications, the Rocky Mountain News and Northern Ohio Live included.

But even though some of the industry’s financial problems are – like yours and mine – due to world banking problems beyond its control, the root cause of print news’ collapse is most certainly a lack of creativity. Here’s what I mean: People in the newspaper business sensed about 30 years ago that computer communication was the way of the future. They knew they were failing to attract younger readers and that their faithful subscribers were going to die off. But instead of putting those two facts together and working hard to come up with a whole new creative news medium, they made two huge mistakes – they didn’t get serious soon enough about using the Internet and they all threw their energies into the same doomed strategy of trying to jazz up their paper pages with what they hoped was bright, hip, short-attention-span-friendly content that teens and twentysomethings would like.

Ignoring the Internet was catastrophically unimaginative, especially with the cost of newsprint soaring. So was the youth-ifying of their pages, because even though it seemed creative on the surface, it wasn’t - each newspaper basically just copied what the others were trying, including Friday entertainment tabloids, high-school sections, women’s sections (back to the future!!), endless collections of U.S.A. Today-style news briefs and huge photos and illustrations. And to what end? Young people stayed glued to their TVs and Sony Walkmen and VCRs and PCs and iPods.

I’ve worked for five different newspapers over those same 30 years and observed a lot of others and almost no news management in that time demonstrated the foresight and innovative spirit to commit real resources and effort to developing digital news content. Publishers and editors kept saying they couldn’t figure out how to make it pay - and then one day, they woke up and discovered that the electronic toys all the kids liked to play with were, in fact, going to be the new information media for the whole planet and, worse, all their advertising, their lifeblood, had gone over to the Web.   

That was absolutely a failure of passion and creativity, a failure of daring. You can’t sit still in any business, you can’t cover your eyes – if you don’t have the zeal and the imagination to look ahead and change constantly, you’ll find you’ve been left behind. That’s what happened to newspapers and that’s what happened to Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo and a host of other cities in the Midwest where I live. We can see the results of getting too complacent – and then too scared – to change, all around us here.

With apologies to “When Harry Met Sally,” newspapers are the steel of the early 2000s. Like Big Steel, print on paper will pass away, except for small, boutique publishers of specialty books and magazines, and the news industry will spend the next 30 years trying to leapfrog into a future it could have anticipated and been ready for if it had just had the courage to experiment.  

I have worked in too many newsrooms not to have seen what the political realities were. Real risk-taking - the initiative to create something unique to that paper and that community, something deeply rooted in content of substance and excellence – was discouraged. Managements wanted to try only what seemed to be working someplace else.

So newpapers and magazines and TV and radio stations have become corporatized clones of one another. And like clones of living creatures, they are weak, shortlived versions of the real thing. It’s just worse for the print side of the industry because it has dully clung to an outmoded medium.

Journalistic creativity isn’t just about the writing and the pictures and the design, Mr. Boothroyd. It’s about the business, too.

Numbers won’t save newspapers

I’ve just read a discussion posted on the RJI News Collaboratory about how to make news gathering and publishing a profitable industry again. The cacophony of opinions was depressing, to say the least. Ironically, though, it simplified the whole issue for me. It also clarified my own strategy.

Here’s what I got: Nobody knows the answer, so you have to go with your gut.    

Not that the Collaboratory isn’t doing journalism a favor by trying to help the news industry get a fresh grip on itself. A project of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, the Collaboratory was set up at the start of 2009 to encourage us web-based journalist-entrepreneurs in our efforts to innovate (and possibly save) the news business.

The profitability discussion is contained in Mark Poepsel’s blog coverage (go to the Collaboratory main page  and scroll down to the two RJI Liveblog postings. Read the bottom one first) of RJI’s May 18 Talkfest, at which news-biz experts – editorial people, financial people, marketing people, academics – went on about all kinds of brain-numbing stuff such as ad revenue, profit margins, business models and market reach.

I’m all for the scientific approach when it comes to analysis, but not so much when it comes to conclusions. My feeling is, fine, read all the stats and focus-group findings and then shut off the computations and stretch out with your feelings, Luke. News people aren’t  bean-counters – our strength lies in talking directly to enormous numbers of people and getting a sense, not just of the facts, but of the truth. We work at finding out about people, understanding them and fairly representing their stories.  

We are in many ways the community’s eyes, ears, voice and sense of itself. So now that the news business is in trouble, we’re going to discard  all that earned wisdom and rely on charts to tell us what to do?

Oh, hell no. The reason newspapers are dying today is because their leaders had already started relying on charts – and focus groups and number-crunchers – instead of on their own deeply experienced staffs, the ones in direct touch with the communities they serve. Newspapers went corporate. The heart and soul went out of them. Their execs listened to stockholders with a passion for money instead of reporters and editors with a passion for finding out what’s going on. And they ignored most of the great new tools available for telling those stories until their audiences and advertising evaporated.

It’s true in any business and especially in this one – the people who succeed will be the ones who listen to their own instincts and convictions, stay creative and flexible at all times and turn out an uncompromisingly great product that wows the public in a way it would never have thought to ask for in a market survey.

Because people can’t ask for what they can’t think up themselves. It’s up to any industry’s most creative people to imagine the future, make it happen and then blow consumers’ minds with it.  Passion and excellence sell. The same old stuff bores.

Newspapers got boring. And shortsighted.

Now the only way out is to do what we do best – tell important and fascinating stories – and do it even better than before by using every new technological advantage available to us. We may have to do it as individuals or small concerns. But when we once again make something we deeply and enthusiastically believe in, we can make people want it.

And when people want something, they’ll pay for it.

Getting a Big Bang out of creativity

This is great timing:  In the wake of the May 15 release of the new Tom Hanks movie, Angels & Demons - whose wildly imaginative plot  (based on the book by Dan The Da Vinci Code Brown) involves CERN, a real-life, European particle-physics laboratory featuring the Large Hadron Collider – the New York Times has a story about the National Ignition Facility .

No, it doesn’t mass-manufacture car start parts. This NIF place is … well, it sounds even more like Technicolor science fiction than Brown’s fantasy version of CERN. It’s a football-stadium-sized building filled with mirrors and crystals and dedicated to figuring out fusion.

Fusion is the Holy Grail of energy production. Some 20 years ago, a couple of scientists claimed they had created “cold fusion” in a bottle, which might as well have been cold tea in a bottle for all the fusion it actually represented, and after being discredited and generally reviled by their peers, they slunk away into obscurity and are probably selling miracle wrinkle creams somewhere today. 

But on goes the quest to fuse simple atoms into more complex atoms and release astral amounts of clean energy. (Does clean mean no radioactivity or just no carbon? Someone should ask, don’t you think?)   So over the last 12 years or so, about 10,000 people out in Livermore, Calif., have spent $3.5 billion creating this huge House of Lasers in hopes of smashing some hydrogen atoms together, making helium and thus allowing us to keep all the lights blazing in our houses and our thermostats set on a comfy 72 for all eternity. 

This is not to scoff.  Most people never thought they’d be able to have person-to-person conversations through a black box on the wall or see live people moving around in a studio  - or on the moon! – through another, bigger box in the living room. Or  have the power to annihilate a whole city with a single bomb.  Maybe the darned NIF thing could work … just not like The Bomb, let’s hope.  

Angels & Demons endowed the collision of matter and antimatter with bomblike properties that the CERN folks have been quick to pooh-pooh for the public’s peace of mind.  If we can believe them – and, presumably, we can, because France and Switzerland, whose mutual border CERN straddles, have not exploded – we can probably believe the NIF.

So while we’re waiting for Livermore, Calif. to ignite  - in a good way! – let’s amuse ourselves by finding out the difference between CERN’s real science and the Hollywood drama of A&D’s spectacularly ruptured heavens. First question: Does antimatter produce an anticlimax?

A truly fair opportunity to excel at creativity

Where does a 14-year-old get the creativity and and aptitude to prove the co-evolutionary relationship between two different species? 

From nature and her own brain, of course – but good teachers help, says Michele Glidden,  director of science education programs for the Society for Science and the Public, which co-presents the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The 2009 fair, which was held May 10 through last Friday in Reno, Nev., drew 1,500 high-school science students from over 50 nations.

The 14-year-old in question, Tara Adiseshan from Charlottesville, Va., was one of three $50,000 grand-prize winners at this year’s fair. But about one-third of all the participants took home awards for projects demonstrating independence of thought, independent research, creativity and innovation – qualities the society and the fair try to encourage, Glidden said.

The way the fair does that is not by steering students toward particular fields or topics, but through what Glidden calls “a great structure and system” of local school and community fairs supported by teachers who guide their students and help them find lab-study opportunities and summer research programs.

“We attempt to stay unbiased,” she said. Instead of influencing their project choices, ”We  provide the forum to recognize and celebrate their successes.”

But one area in which the society and fair would like to exercise some clout  is underserved communities, whose youngsters may not have access to well-trained teachers and fully equipped facilities. Glidden says the society has just begun a new fellowship program for teachers in reduced-lunch or Title IX schools. The society reached out to teachers in underserved communities last fall and, by January 2009, had about 200 applicants, between six and nine of whom have been named fellows.

They’ll receive scientific training and the resources they need to coach students through independent-study projects, Glidden says. “Teachers are really begging for that kind of resource and knowledge.”

The program may help give a more equal chance of success – at the fair and in their careers - to students who don’t come from cities abounding in scientific-research institutions and money. Yet the fair’s history shows that winners don’t always hail from obvious centers of scientific excellence such as Boston – last year, one top winner came from Mississippi, Glidden says.  

“Fair” is a word they take literally at the society: Judging winners on the quality of the project alone is one of their key principles. This year, the highest prizes were earned not only by 14-year-old Tara, but also by 16-year-old Olivia Schwob of – yes – Boston and by 17-year-old Li Boynton of Bellaire, Texas: all girls. And the 2009 event was not the first in which three young women – or three young men, or a mix - have made up the circle of grand-prize winners.

“My final group of judges, when I told them they had picked all women, they weren’t aware they had done it,” Glidden recalls. 

Many of these young people go on to become scientific thinkers and researchers, she says. In fact, the 60-year-old Intel Science Talent Search, the society’s and Intel’s annual science-research competition for high-school seniors, has seen seven of its participants go on to win Nobel Prizes.

But the real point of the fair and the talent search, Glidden says, is to benefit students educationally “no matter what they do”  with their lives.

Girl power,indeed: Three young women take top creative science awards

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair wrapped Sunday with the announcement of the three grand-prize winners – all Americans and all teenaged girls.

I’ll be posting an interview about the fair here soon, but in the meantime, here are some video highlights featuring winners  Tara Adiseshan (14, of Charlottesville, Va.), Li Boynton (17, of Houston) and Olivia Schwob (16,of Boston), as well as Intel Chairman Craig Barrett.

Media monopoly should not pass go anymore

My Friday post about the news business drew an interesting response from reader Richard Ingraham, who noted that huge media conglomerates are not just unwieldy and inflexible and thus unlikely to respond quickly enough to new societal and market conditions, but may also be the poster children for strengthened antitrust laws.  Ingraham wrote:  

“Lastly I would just say that we are reaping what we’ve sown. By not having any sort of public outcry while the FCC changed rules about how one organization can own more and more newspaper and other broadcasting organizations all in the same market we have allowed these huge media juggernauts to be created, who as you just admitted are too large to change fast enough to keep up with the times. Hmmmm… maybe if we had insisted on much smaller organizations and less consolidation of all our media, they would be quicker to adapt and we would all have been better off.”

I don’t think there’s much doubt that government enforcement of antitrust laws has been, shall we say, toothless in recent decades. The obscene binge of mergers and takeovers that characterized the Reagan years may have subsided, but the government’s mindset hasn’t seemed to change a lot – many markets remain dominated by organizations that have grown gargantuan from buying up their competitors, severely limiting the public’s choices and making it impossible for entrepreneurs to challenge them profitably. Clear Channel and Time Warner are just two that come to mind.

But the Zeitgeist is changing and it looks as if the Obama administration may try to restore the power of regulations meant to keep corporations from driving everyone else in their industries out of business or into their stables.

So what will this mean to news outlets? Well, it’s possible that if media conglomerates ended up having to divest themselves of all but one outlet in each market (so that in a particular city, they own either a newspaper or a broadcast station, but not both, which is how it used to be) they might not be able to find buyers for their least-profitable properties and would have to close them instead. Undoubtedly, some enfeebled newspapers would be among them.

If that proved to be the case, we’d probably end up in the short run with even fewer news outlets than we have now. But with the media giants reduced to normal-sized adversaries and community demand for news going unmet, the opportunity for entrepreneurs to step in and create new – maybe much better – small media companies would be both great and healthy.

I hope with all my heart that we don’t lose our grand old newspapers – we as a nation desperately need their news-gathering skills, integrity and reach. But the conglomerates that own many of them have already sacrificed some of the unique editorial voice, investigative drive and spirit of experimentation that made those papers grand in the first place. It’s time to loosen the big bullies’ hold on the media marketplace and give other initiatives and ideas a chance to thrive.

All the news that’s fittest

Newspapers aren’t publishing the news so much as making it these days.

With newspaper companies downsizing, going under or being threatened with closings all over the nation, and Senate subcommittee hearings being held to explore solutions to the newspaper industry’s problems, reporters and editors are suddenly facing the possibility that they and their employers will become the objects of the kind of complex federal policy initiative they’re used to covering from the sidelines. 

Not the position most journalists want to be in. But what are our options?

Disgreements about what the market will pay for are keeping industry experts arguing in circles:

If no one wants printed news anymore, why don’t all the papers just go totally online? Because no one’s sure they can make enough money from online ads to support their operations. So why don’t they sell subscriptions, as they did with the print versions? Because some people believe that Web users want their information for free, while some others believe that readers might pay for subscriptions if online news were somehow a better product than print news – which they think it isn’t. So forget that revenue stream. But if news is so vital to our democracy and people don’t want to pay for it directly, why don’t news companies become nonprofits like the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, which are paid for in part by us taxpayers through federal funding? Because that would make newspapers financially beholden to the very governments and politicians they need to cover objectively and rigorously, plus PBS and NPR get jerked around a lot by presidents and their minions who don’t like whatever slant they perceive those nonprofits to have. (See Bush Administration…). So papers need to earn their own money in order to stay editorially (more or less) independent. But no one will buy ads or subscriptions. …  

See how it goes? It’s like Frodo and his companions trapped in the Mines of Moria: “We cannot get out. We cannot get out. The end comes.”

So why don’t news operations find some other revenue stream in addition to ads, subscriptions or grants?

Ah. Why indeed? Now we can detect a little light starting to glow from the staff of Gandalf. Another revenue stream might just be the answer and some of us are working on that – new goods and new services to go with the ads and subscriptions. But most newspapers of any size can’t just suddenly branch into selling flavored popcorn or virtual greeting cards - they’re big companies owned by huge corporations. Though they might have the resources to develop and market new products, they can’t easily or quickly retool their complex operations and they’ll need all kinds of time for multilevel approvals and focus groups and other corporate protocols before they can consider launching anything. In the meantime, their business is shriveling.

It may be that only small companies will have the creativity and the flexibility to adapt quickly enough to save themselves and so grow into a new species of news outlet. It could be that the big papers really are doomed, like the dinosaurs that couldn’t survive in a radically changed environment.

I’m prepared for that, intellectually at least. But I don’t believe most people really want to live without regularly updated, factually reliable news about everything in the world - and if the big news organizations die, reliable news will go away not just from doorsteps and drop boxes, but also from TV, radio and the internet. Who do you think supplies news content to those electronic outlets?

I’m also not convinced that ads and subscriptions are dead for all eternity. News does have value – people have simply forgotten that because the good-quality stuff is currently available for free in so many ways. But let the supply of news dry up and people may discover all of a sudden that they’re very happy to pay 75 cents or a dollar a day to find out what their elected officials and power companies and school districts and financial leaders are really doing.

This is an unhappy time for many of us who value good journalism and fear the loss of our best protection against dangerous ignorance and the tyranny to which it might give rise. I hope that “many of us” actually includes everyone in the world. But while all of us in the news business wait and worry, those of us who can also need to experiment, because only the fittest will survive. The trick is figuring out what being “fittest” involves – and fast.

Let the redefining and the new revenue streams begin.

Art imitating tech

At the 2009 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair going on this week in Reno, at least a few of the scientifically gifted students participating will have some robots to show off. So I have to ask, who’s more creative - people who can make robots behave like humans or people inspired by robots to behave like machines?

‘Angels’ and CERN scientists: Creativity smackdown

Ever read the book Angels & Demons ? It’s author Dan Brown’s first thriller featuring the character of Robert Langdon, the religion scholar who solves the mystery in Brown’s more famous later work, The Da Vinci Code. 

Angels & Demons  has all of Da Vinci Code’s  vast conspiracies, arcane lore, lurid and/or mind-blowing secrets, high-level criminal creeps and full-out-flashy, H-bomb-explosion-sized climaxes – only more so.  The end of the story is so grossly and hilariously over the top that I could hardly make myself turn the pages: Brown writes it as if he were the kid in Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, heaping up ever-wilder and more ridiculous fantasies until you just want to throw the book out the window or smack him or both.

A&D has been made into a movie – like Da Vinci, starring Tom Hanks as Langdon – that opens Friday and I can’t wait to see if it makes all of Brown’s literary hyperventilating  more believable, or even less so.  But, to get to the point, the film release got me thinking about CERN, the particle-physics laboratory that figures in the A&D plot.

It sounds like SMERSH or THRUSH or some other James Bond-type evil organization. In fact, it’s a world-renowned scientific organization started in the mid-1950s by many European nations that still collaborate on the running of CERN and its enormous facility on the Franco-Swiss border, where some of the world’s best minds study the nature of subatomic  particles and forces with the help of the newly repaired and gargantuan Large Hadron Collider. 

What those minds do there may not read quite as melodramatically as Brown’s novel, but  is a creative adventure of  far greater significance: They are literally trying to figure out how the Universe works. In the process, they’ve come up with other things, too – for instance, the World Wide Web was invented there, as a means for scientists to share information.  

The CERN site contains as many pages and layers of fascinating information as Angels & Demons has plot twists. One of the things I like best about it is the quote from Albert Einstein that amounts to their company motto: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

I guess Dan Brown took that to heart.

The story

The science