Vanity Fair: Has the Washington Post Lost Its Way?

[LongTimeListener]

I don't know if it's shooting the messenger so much as it is pointing out that the messenger doesn't know what the heck his message is or what he's talking about.

Bleacher Report is not paying half-decent wages unless you are limiting it to the qualifier of "to tide over people who have no living costs because they are still living with their parents."

Every outlet that's making money has this trait in common: They are all secondary businesses of a much larger company. Whether that's TV or fantasy sports, that's the fact. That operation subsidizes the newsgathering.

Now, try and find me one company that is making money online with newsgathering as its primary function.

And as for Google ... yes. Engineers at Google are making a lot of money. For any reporter with an engineering background, I would highly recommend that path. Oy.

 

[jaredk]

"Now, try and find me one company that is making money online with newsgathering as its primary function."

Agreed, there is none.
Still, it's impossible to believe that news has no monetary value.
Question is -- for a doctoral thesis, maybe -- when did news give away that value by prostituting itself to advertising?

 

[geddymurphy]

I don't know if it's shooting the messenger so much as it is pointing out that the messenger doesn't know what the heck his message is or what he's talking about.

No, you're misunderstand my message despite several reiterations. The message is that you can simply say, "Oh, just focus on print -- we'll be fine." And that's especially true of the Washington Post, where circulation and revenue have been battered senseless.

Again, that's the message.

Got that? OK.

I should stop there so you won't just take some part of the rest you don't like and respond, but still, on matters tangentially related to that primary point ...

Bleacher Report is not paying half-decent wages unless you are limiting it to the qualifier of "to tide over people who have no living costs because they are still living with their parents."

I hate Bleacher Report with a passion, but that's simply not true. Yes, a lot of their "writers" are freebies. They have editors with experience elsewhere who are making actual money. You can keep calling me a liar over and over, but that doesn't change the truth.

Remember King Kaufman? See what's he's doing:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/08/bleacher-report-ups-its-game-by-taking-contributors-to-school/

Bethlehem Shoals? Say hello: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1094122-wild-wild-nba-west-lakers-and-spurs-try-to-fight-off-the-young-guns

He was part of a big hiring swing in 2011: http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Issues/2011/08/23/Media/Bleacher-Report.aspx

I certainly hope Bleacher Report isn't the future. But if you ask who's making money, there's one response. Here's one video on the matter (apologies for the long pre-roll ad, though that also underscores a point): http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000077527

Every outlet that's making money has this trait in common: They are all secondary businesses of a much larger company. Whether that's TV or fantasy sports, that's the fact. That operation subsidizes the newsgathering.

Yes. In all media -- print, TV, etc. (OK, maybe not Consumer Reports. But the Sunday paper is subsidized by the inserts and used to be subsidized by a vast volume of classifieds.)

Now, try and find me one company that is making money online with newsgathering as its primary function.

Do you mean that the company is "making money online" or is an ONLINE-ONLY company making money?

"Making money online" -- that would be many. I worked for one that was turning a profit in 2000 with a large staff of online-only employees. Today, the "print" and "online" staffs have converged, and they're both smaller. So if you broke out online expenses vs. online revenue, then it's probably still making money. But classifying "online expenses" is difficult. Suppose you have a story in print with an extra sidebar online? How do you break that down?

Online-only companies? Again, hard to say, because the expenses get muddled. Yahoo's still making a profit, but I have no idea what their sports department spends or makes. At one time, they were also trying to make a splash in news.

I'd point to Motley Fool, though they also have newsletters and other products.

WebMD is up and down, mostly up.

But for most companies, the online product is simply an important part of the operation as a whole. Would SixToe tell CNN to "focus on TV" when it has a dominant website? Of course not. How about weather.com? The Weather Channel itself has turned to morning gabfests and tornado survival stories -- the "news" is on the site.

And as for Google ... yes. Engineers at Google are making a lot of money. For any reporter with an engineering background, I would highly recommend that path. Oy.

Look, I mentioned Google simply to point out that online advertising can work. You keep insisting I'm talking about reporters. I'm not.

If you want to argue with what I'm saying here and not the straw man you're constructing that has all the answers and thinks reporters should go into software development at Google, please let me know. But it seems like you're going to extremes to avoid facing the truth here.

 

[lcjjdnh]

"Now, try and find me one company that is making money online with newsgathering as its primary function."

Agreed, there is none.
Still, it's impossible to believe that news has no monetary value.
Question is -- for a doctoral thesis, maybe -- when did news give away that value by prostituting itself to advertising?

People paid for information--heavily subsidized by advertising--not news. Advertisers paid newspapers to use a delivery system over which newspapers had a monopoly. We should not be surprised that newspapers--which no longer have a monopoly--have struggled to adapt to the Internet.

 

[LongTimeListener]

No, it still seems like you have no idea what you are talking about. And you're showing that more with every post. Those guys at B/R, I don't believe they're making nearly as much as you believe they're making (and the link you cited was notably light on that info). But regardless, how much NEWSGATHERING do they do? You know, traveling and paying salary-and-benefits for a beat reporter and all that silly stuff? Those guys might be better writers than the slapdicks they replaced, but they're still ultimately just content aggregators. I just checked Bethlehem Shoals' blog. The first item is based on the words "met with reporters" (he got it off TV). The second is an item about Luol Deng's injury that includes the phrase "K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune reports:" This pattern repeats itself all the way down the blog. Do you understand that reporting, the kind of stuff a newspaper sells, costs actual money?

And if you are saying that because something was making money online in 2000, it's established that it can happen, you're even dumber than I thought. EVERYTHING online was making money in 2000. Pets.com. Webvan groceries. Everything. Then the bubble burst.

But as I said, if you have the secret of how to make money online, by all means, rush to the offices of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and every other newspaper forthwith. Better yet, start a publication from scratch because you know the secret that all those stupid forks don't. You'll be a billionaire. It's so easy, right?

 

[geddymurphy]

No, it still seems like you have no idea what you are talking about. And you're showing that more with every post. Those guys at B/R, I don't believe they're making nearly as much as you believe they're making (and the link you cited was notably light on that info). But regardless, how much NEWSGATHERING do they do? You know, traveling and paying salary-and-benefits for a beat reporter and all that silly stuff? Those guys might be better writers than the slapdicks they replaced, but they're still ultimately just content aggregators. I just checked Bethlehem Shoals' blog. The first item is based on the words "met with reporters" (he got it off TV). The second is an item about Luol Deng's injury that includes the phrase "K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune reports:" This pattern repeats itself all the way down the blog. Do you understand that reporting, the kind of stuff a newspaper sells, costs actual money?

And if you are saying that because something was making money online in 2000, it's established that it can happen, you're even dumber than I thought. EVERYTHING online was making money in 2000. Pets.com. Webvan groceries. Everything. Then the bubble burst.

But as I said, if you have the secret of how to make money online, by all means, rush to the offices of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and every other newspaper forthwith. Better yet, start a publication from scratch because you know the secret that all those stupid forks don't. You'll be a billionaire. It's so easy, right?

For a long-time listener, you certainly don't seem to listen.

1. I never said I had all the answers. SixToe implied he did.

2. Repeating my response to that: "The message is that you can simply say, 'Oh, just focus on print -- we'll be fine.' And that's especially true of the Washington Post, where circulation and revenue have been battered senseless."

3. Online revenue has gone up since 2000 (nearly quadrupled, in fact: https://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/pr-113011), and the staffing devoted exclusively to the "online" side of the operation I'm describing has gone way down. So no, I'm not that stupid.

4. Once again, you initially said "employees" -- after the fact, you switched to "news employees" and now finally "reporters" (which would exclude editors, photographers and other people -- last I checked, this was SportsJournalists.com, not SportsReporters.com).

But I'll close on common ground -- no, Bleacher Report isn't great at reporting. It does have people who go out and cover events, though some may still be unpaid and most are inexperienced. And trying to build a news organization of ANY kind -- print, online, TV -- in which the costly but essential service of reporting gets its just due is the challenge of the century.

 

[LongTimeListener]

You're too far gone to even understand how off base you are. I would recommend reading up on the business world at large. But you should know that the "online revenue" game is an old accounting trick.

Here's how it works: Company A wants to buy a full-page print ad for let's say $10,000. The newspaper tells them about this great new online option. Company A says, nah, I don't want it. The newspaper tells them, we'll give it to you for free! Then the newspaper calls it a $5,000 ad buy for print and $5,000 for online.

They do the opposite with costs. Reporter A files an online column, it's re-purposed for the print edition, he blogs and he tweets. On the payroll, he is counted as 100 percent a print employee. The only people who are counted as "online" are the people who do nothing that remotely touches the print product.

So the print division is absorbing all of the costs and sharing the revenue. That's how, more than a decade after online first started "paying for itself," newspapers continue to flail away. I can't say for sure that these accounting tricks are still happening, but I know they were commonplace as recently as 3-4 years ago and I have seen nothing that makes me think they wouldn't be happening now.

Personally, if I were running a newspaper and looking to survive the next five years, I'd go offline too. If I had hundreds of thousands of willing takers of my product that I could profile fairly well and sell to advertisers, I'd cater to them and not care what some parasitic motherforker on the Internet thinks about me not providing him with the material he needs to masturbate on his blog. But that's just my opinion.

 

[geddymurphy]

Here's how it works: Company A wants to buy a full-page print ad for let's say $10,000. The newspaper tells them about this great new online option. Company A says, nah, I don't want it. The newspaper tells them, we'll give it to you for free! Then the newspaper calls it a $5,000 ad buy for print and $5,000 for online.

OK ... so that would explain the video ads? The Post having plenty of ads online and virtually none in its print section? Online-first and online-only sites that are still around after many years?

So all the numbers I've cited above are merely accounting tricks? As is the story of the Atlantic? https://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digital-first/

And advertisers are willing to support non-news sites on the Web that are now valued in the billions, but they balk at buying ads on news sites unless they also get them in print? And they continue to insist on that even as circulation plummets? And the newshole in print sections is shrinking because ... um ... OK, I'm having trouble working out how they get all these print ads in smaller sections.

Wow. I underestimated you.

(Is anyone reading this?)

 

[LongTimeListener]

Absent an example of a news gathering organization that is A) making money online and B) paying its employees decent wages, which was the initial twofer in my first post, I'm going to bow out. Good luck.

 

[britwrit]

I just cruised through the Post. Is that one banner ad per page really going to pay the freight for a whole big-city newspaper?

Just from a gut feeling, advertisers simply aren't going for the on-line versions of newspapers... even those with hundreds of thousands of viewers each month. Otherwise, wouldn't The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Mail websites be overflowing with ads?

 

[geddymurphy]

I just cruised through the Post. Is that one banner ad per page really going to pay the freight for a whole big-city newspaper?

Just from a gut feeling, advertisers simply aren't going for the on-line versions of newspapers... even those with hundreds of thousands of viewers each month. Otherwise, wouldn't The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Mail websites be overflowing with ads?

Do you have an ad-blocker on?

Checking here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/dc-united-looks-good-on-paper-but-hasnt-proven-anything/2012/03/09/gIQAHI601R_story.html ... I see:

- Banner for Next Day Blinds
- Giant poster ad for RAV4
- House ad for Post's ticket-sales program
- Five "Featured Advertiser" links
- Three sponsored links
- A call to the Post's real estate rental listings
- Three more sponsored links at the bottom

Absent an example of a news gathering organization that is A) making money online and B) paying its employees decent wages, which was the initial twofer in my first post, I'm going to bow out. Good luck.

I've named a few and could easily come up with more. But it's not worth it because ...

A. That wasn't the point. The point was that print revenue is being whittled to a tiny fraction of what it used to be, and that's a reality we have to deal with.

B. You'll just move the goal posts, anyway. I'll find places that are profitable and paying plenty of $40K-plus jobs, and you'll say they also make money on something else, or $40K isn't a living wage (twice what I made at my first paper, albeit 20 years ago), or they just don't exist, nyah nyah nyah nyah. Whatever.

I'm frankly less bearish on print than many people. I don't think it's going to die. Even The Onion maintains a print edition. Glossy photo-heavy mags may do OK with a focus (pardon the pun) on print. But if you think your local paper is going to get by without a good website, search traffic, diverse ad offerings and so forth, I just don't know what to tell you other than to remind you to look at the charts again.

 

[britwrit]

Do I have an ad blocker on?

Ah, yes, I do. Ok, without a doubt, I'm an idiot.