JD Lasica Archives: January 2001
Layoffs.com: A Report on the Internet News Industry
J.D. Lasica is a new media columnist for the Online Journalism Review, a Web-based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He recently published a four-part story on the state of online publishing. He welcomes your comments at JD@well.com.
The following are his responses to questions asked by The Online NewsHour.
| Two years ago, you said the Internet was becoming the place people turned to in order to get a richer news experience. Is that still the case? | |
| Not long ago I read a study that found the typical user spends a total of seven seconds on any given Web page. Seven seconds! So online journalists need to understand that underlying truth about the medium: To many people, the Web is Short Attention Span Theater. You need to grab the reader by the collar with news that’s summarized quickly and cleanly, stripped of anecdotal leads or clever, prosaic approaches more suitable to another medium and another era.
Now, that doesn’t mean that Web journalism begins and ends with snappy headlines and terse writing. Today, headline news sites are a dime a dozen. Some, like Yahoo News, do a great job of rounding up the top stories from credible sources and transporting users to news sites with the best coverage. Other headline news services draw no distinctions between trustworthy news providers, tabloid stories, and thinly disguised PR material masquerading as journalism. Online news outfits need to offer more than headline roundups of breaking news, or shovelware [recycled news] from this morning’s print edition. They need to commit editors and writers to reporting news that’s breaking in their community during the day. And they need to provide depth, context and perspective to the news by digging beneath the surface to explore not just what happened but how and why, and to report their findings through text, photos, audio, video, informational graphics and scanned source documents. Major news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USAToday and others understand this, and that’s why the public turns to them during big stories like the presidential election aftermath. Unfortunately, we’re now beginning to see cutbacks in online news staffs — the Miami Herald, for example, just laid off its only Web reporter.
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Also in 1999, you said many online news organizations hadn’t gotten a good grasp on the concept of interactivity. Is that still the case? What kind of interactivity seems to appeal to visitors most? |
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| Last year I wrote a 52-week series for the parenting site BabyCenter about the birth and development of our first child, and the resulting interactivity with the readers each week was staggering: hundreds and hundreds of e-mails and forum postings from expectant mothers and new fathers, offering advice about feeding and weaning, sharing their own heartfelt experiences, and basically just wanting to have their voices heard. More than a few were surprised and grateful when I took the time to respond to their comments, as if it were somehow remarkable for a journalist to deign to climb down from Mount Olympus and interact with ordinary mortals.
That’s the challenge our profession faces: Too often we give in to the institutional ivory-tower conceit that says: We’re the expert news gatherers who decide what’s important, you’re the passive recipients — end of discussion. That’s pure arrogance, and it’s antithetical to the Internet’s core ethos. I think the folks working in news organizations’ new media units understand this, but they’re still a small minority — and that’s the problem. Everybody in most news organizations, from the interns to the executive editor, ought to be online and plugged into a two-way dialogue with the public, not just a designated handful. But interactivity still scares the daylights out of old-school journalists. Still, some points of light have begun to pierce the darkness. Last week I spoke with the editor in charge of interactive media at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who said, “More and more of the newsroom’s reporters are asking to have their e-mail addresses printed in the paper because they love the feedback.” Other papers are also trying to change the newsroom culture. Reporters and columnists who spend a lot of time online invariably say they get their best story ideas, and the most rewarding feedback, directly from readers over the Internet.
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| What do you think is in the cards for Internet-only publications in today’s Web climate? | |
| I hope they can hang on. With online advertising shrinking and Wall Street putting the squeeze on content sites, Net publications are sailing in rough seas. The grandiose visions of a few years ago — city guides brimming with rich content, product-comparison sites steeped in consumer journalism, ad-supported finance and sports startups — are giving way to the realization that producing high-quality content is both really expensive and really hard to pull off. Some Web-based publications with questionable business models, like the crime news site APBNews.com, won’t be around for long.
I’m more hopeful that Salon, Slate and the entertainment-news site Inside.com will make a go of it. They won’t be profitable this year but they’re savvy enough to weather the storm. America Online, of course, is another online publication that reports the news, and they’re going to be with us for a very long time.
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| Is Internet news doomed by its nature to be a profitless venture? Are there any business models that seem to be working? | |
| The challenge facing online news organizations is: How do you make money in a medium where information is ubiquitous? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The Star Tribune‘s operation is profitable because the tech staff builds Web sites for local businesses. WSJ.com is close to profitability because users value the breadth and depth of their financial coverage. Other papers may find similar niches by becoming the paper of record for newsworthy activities and events in their back yards.
Eventually, as news sites’ online work intersects with the print and broadcast operations of their corporate siblings, we may stop thinking about Internet news as a separate entity. This month CNN and the News Corp., owner of FoxNews.com and FoxSports.com, scuttled their Internet divisions and merged their online staffs into their broadcast divisions. The Tribune Co., one of the smarter media companies around, has a long-term strategy of combining their print, broadcast and Internet assets all under one roof. Online news sites may or may not become profitable, but the Web is only one medium. Farther out on the horizon, digital news ventures are likely to make money from wireless applications, interactive TV services, broadband, portable tablet-like devices, and personalized newspapers that come rolling out of a printer in the home.
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| How do you see wireless technology and digital television playing into the future of news on the Web? | |
| We’ve already begun to see Internet startups show off the latest gizmos: handheld wireless units connected to the Net that call up not just stock quotes and sports scores but headlines, stories and news alerts. The McClatchy Co., publisher of the Sacramento Bee, is working with a partner on a venture where you’d be able to get tailored news updates when you drive to work — on your timetable, not the radio station’s. The technology’s getting there, now it’s just a matter of forming the right partnerships and finding out just how much real-time news consumers actually want. Early indications suggest there may not be as much demand for wireless news as originally thought and what people really want is to send and receive short text messages on cell phones.
Digital television could become a huge deal. Not the wide-screen, high-definition TV, which faces a lot of technical obstacles, but the kinds of services we’re already seeing with Tivo, Microsoft’s Ultimate TV and other digital video recorders and set-top boxes. Last election night, a partnership between the NewsHour and WebTV allowed thousands of viewers to get a more personalized election experience by letting them click on candidates’ victory and concession speeches and follow local returns. That only scratches the surface. We’ll see more of this, on a much larger scale, on all the major networks before the decade is out.
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| After this new media reorganization is over, will there be a resurgence of Internet news or will the consolidation of the past few months continue? | |
| We’re likely to see more online news layoffs and cutbacks in the months ahead, but the worst is probably behind us. The downturn should be over by fall, and next year we’ll likely see small incremental growth rather than big expansion plans. It may not be until 2003 that online news ventures take off again in a significant way, though we won’t see a return to the spasmodic expansions of the past two years. Analysts say traditional retailers should start advertising on the Web in a big way starting late this year. I hope that’s true. It’s amazing how much journalism is still at the mercy of market forces outside our control. |
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High anxiety, new realities at LA Times Online
Staffers are having a hard time adjusting to new marching orders from the Tribune Co.
This column appeared Jan. 25, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.
In this package:
• Soul-searching time for online news units
• Essay: Gut check time for new media
• High anxiety, new realities at LA Times Online
• Dot-com content sites try some new tricks
By J.D. Lasica
What a difference a merger makes.
A year ago the 100-person online staff at the Los Angeles Times was riding high in the digital saddle. New media director Leah Gentry, widely admired in online news circles, called her team “the hardest working band in show business.” On one occasion, she brought in bottles of champagne and toasted her staff when the site blasted through another traffic milestone.
The partying stopped on March 13, when the Tribune Co. acquired Times Mirror Co. for $8 billion. The takeover became official in June.
At first, the Times’ online staffers, like their print counterparts, gave the benefit of the doubt to their new corporate stepparents after being assured that the takeover would result in no job cuts.
But detente gave way to cynicism less than seven months later when the Tribune Co. announced that 34 employees in its Internet division — including 20 staffers at latimes.com — were being laid off “to realize operating efficiencies from its merger with Times Mirror Co. and accelerate its progress toward profitability,” Tribune Co. spokesman John Lyday said at the time.
The Times’ online division is currently under a mandate to turn in a $5 million profit during the current calendar year, according to two sources. The internal goal is to hit $21 million in ad revenue, one said.
The Times’ online division is currently under a mandate to turn in a $5 million profit during the current calendar year, according to two sources. The internal goal is to hit $21 million in ad revenue, one said. While ambitious, the goal of profitability may be within reach because capital costs were removed from the Times’ books and are now assigned to Chicago.
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Gut-check time for new media
Gleaning lessons from the shakeout, as hard cash replaces high concept
This column appeared Jan. 25, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.
In this package:
• Soul-searching time for online news units
• Essay: Gut check time for new media
• High anxiety, new realities at LA Times Online
• Dot-com content sites try some new tricks
By J.D. Lasica
All the rumblings on the new media landscape over the past few weeks have made online journalists and Internet executives understandably skittish. Layoffs at CNN.com, New York Times Digital, Salon, KnightRidder.com, latimes.com, NBC and elsewhere have raised the specter of a massive retreat from new media.
A closer look suggests that external factors played a role in most of these decisions: the News Corp., for example, needs cash to make a play for DirecTV; CNN’s cutbacks were dictated by the merger of America Online and Time Warner.
To be sure, there are trends to be found amid the rubble. While traditional media companies are not lowering the flag on their Web operations, they are consolidating operations, tightening budgets and pulling their Internet units closer into the fold. The response makes sense in the wake of Wall Street’s continued pummeling of all things Internet-related.
For mainstream media companies, then, the focus has shifted from high concept to hard cash. Community portals (Koz), knowledge networks (Abuzz), city guides (nytoday.com) may flourish one day, but that day has not yet arrived. For better or worse, Show me the money is the new mantra heard in corporate corridors.
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Soul-searching time for online news units
Dot-com downturn leads to
rethinking of strategies, investments
This column appeared Jan. 25, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.
In this package:
• Soul-searching time for online news units
• Essay: Gut check time for new media
• High anxiety, new realities at LA Times Online
• Dot-com content sites try some new tricks
By J.D. Lasica
Madeline Baro was thrilled last April when she became the first online reporter dedicated to the Miami Herald’s Web site. The experiment proved short-lived. Eight months later she was among the casualties when KnightRidder.com scaled back its online operations, laying off 68 people.
Patricia Marroquin, fresh off a new media fellowship from the Newspaper Association of America, was startled to learn she was one of three online editors let go at latimes.com last October. Within days she was offered her old job back as copy editor on the newspaper’s business desk, but she and her husband, an executive news editor at the Times, decided to make a fresh start of things on the print side of the Dallas Morning News.
“It’s disturbing,” she says. “Online operations are really important corollaries to the newspaper. But I don’t know if I want to go back to online now. As excited and pumped up as I was to work on the online side, I’ve kind of soured on it now. It’s too unstable.” (See related story on latimes.com.)
A young staffer who was one of the 69 casualties at New York Times Digital on Jan. 7 says that staffers were disappointed the company couldn’t find a way to prevent layoffs but few were truly surprised, given the downturn in the Internet industry.
A young staffer who was one of the 69 casualties at New York Times Digital on Jan. 7 says that staffers were disappointed the company couldn’t find a way to prevent layoffs but few were truly surprised, given the downturn in the Internet industry.
As nearly every week brings word of a new round of layoffs and cutbacks in new media, current and former online staffers, executives and industry analysts are surveying the wreckage and wondering whether the reluctant, often testy romance between media companies and the Internet has come to an end. My God, was it all … just … a meaningless fling?
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CNN Memo to Staff
CNN Newsgathering President Eason Jordan’s memo to CNN staff:
To: CNN colleagues
From: Eason Jordan
The CNN News Group will undergo a radical transformation in the weeks ahead as we strive to make our great news organization better than ever, heightening CNN’s competitive edge.
I am an outspoken advocate of revolutionary change within CNN and am the architect of many of the initiatives we are implementing across the News Group, especially in Newsgathering. In this note I provide details of the coming Newsgathering changes and explain why I believe these innovations are not only desirable but essential.
First, the hard part: this process initially will be painful for us because approximately 400 of our colleagues — our friends — will be leaving CNN due to these changes. In virtually every case their jobs are being eliminated not because they failed in their work but because an exhaustive examination of CNN’s staffing needs determined the re-engineered CNN needs 3,950 employees, not 4,350. We are losing good people, many of them long-time colleagues. I know all of us staying at CNN will be thoughtful and caring in helping our departing colleagues through this difficult time. The leaders of CNN intend to handle these departures in as sensitive and supportive a way as possible. Those whose jobs are being eliminated will be told by their managers the week of January 22. Several dozen people whose jobs are eliminated will be offered a position elsewhere in CNN. Colleagues whose jobs are eliminated and have no opportunity to stay with CNN in an equivalent position in the same city at the same pay will be offered a severance package based on tenure and salary that is more than twice as generous as the Company’s standard severance package. The Company also will offer those leaving CNN counseling and outplacement services and, for a time, continued access to their CNN e-mail account/address. Everything possible will be done to minimize the pain for everyone directly or indirectly involved in this process.
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