The Guardian's decision over when to kill the cash cow

It was fascinating to read Picard's "Cash cows or entrecote" article the same week I read all about Newsweek killing its print edition and The Guardian being rumored to do so. The Guardian, it seems, is very publicly dealing with the exact same decision that Picard writes about in his article -- at what point do they "kill the cash cow" and drop print altogether? As this paidContent article explains, the Guardian's executives have determined that they're going to have to go digital-only at some point, and probably sooner than they initially expected.

But print is still generating the vast majority of its revenue, so that time hasn't come yet. Basically, it's trying to  rapidly ramp up its digital revenues to the point where it could turn off its print revenues and survive. It seems they're operating from a similar mindset as Picard: You can't kill print and hope you can then generate enough digital revenue to survive. You have to bring up the digital revenue first, and then kill print when you've reached that point and you're ready for the transition. Newsweek seems to be doing the previous strategy, which is being widely mocked as an instant loser. The Guardian is approaching things much smarter.

I think Picard's rule of waiting to switch until the whole operation (rather than just print) is losing money is a bit too conservative. But I do like the wisdom of his patient approach. It seems like a natural response to the foolish eagerness some executives might have after reading Bower & Christensen's article -- "This technology is disruptive! Quick, let's jump on it!" Instead, Picard is saying, "Sure, go ahead and pursue it, but don't drop your old technology until you've fully harnessed that new one." It's a needed bit of levity in the midst of the panic in the news industry over digital disruption.

Along those same lines, this is a good explanation from this week by Nicholas Carr of why more publishers don't drop their print editions. It covers some of the same points as Picard, but in more casual, non-academic terms.

Are traditional media and online media different? Let's do a research!

Here's the cite:

Michael A. Cacciatore,  Ashley A. Anderson,  Doo-Hun Choi,  Dominique Brossard,  Dietram A. Scheufele,  Xuan Liang, Peter J. Ladwig,  Michael Xenos,  and Anthony Dudo
Coverage of emerging technologies: A comparison between print and online media
New Media & Society September 2012 14: 1039-1059, first published on March 21, 2012 doi:10.1177/1461444812439061

And a link to it.

First of all, how do I get on the ninth author train? Seems like a good way to get around. How many ninth authorships does it take to equal one solo authorship? And what do you do as ninth author? Write the subheads and table captions?

Second of all, a summary of findings:

• U.S. print media cover less nanotechnology news than blogs in general do (using google blogs search)
• Blogs in general use more varied themes in their coverage of nanotechnology (think frames: environment and nanotechnology, health and nanotechnology, etc.) than U.S. print media do.

Third, stuff like this should be caught by a reviewer:

This suggests that print news media and Google News share similar issue-attention cycles for emerging technologies, perhaps because Google News aggregates online news articles from print news outlets.

Perhaps? More like, precisely because of that fact. Sometimes I wonder if people really treat Google News like the aggregator it is.

Also:

These contradictory findings imply that it is not the type of media – either the internet or traditional news media – that matters for the establishment of a public sphere. 

Then why is that what you're studying?

So my main problem is how the research is framed. They have set up the main question of the paper to be whether there's a difference between print and online media sources. And the answer to that is a resounding, "DUH." This would only be significant if there were NO difference between the two, I think. I mean, you can look at them and see that they're different, you don't need research to tell you precisely how. In my opinion it would be more useful in the long run to study what attributes of each medium contribute to the differences in the way they cover things and in their subject selection, or to study actual effects on readers (knowledge, importance and range of topics, etc.) rather than projecting these effects in the discussion section.

Research critique

1. What am I missing here?

• Immigrant acculturation -> studying international students' college adjustments?
• The study starts off by saying that intercultural communication is important especially for understanding how immigrants acculturate to foreign socities, but instead of studying immigrants or acculturation, it studies international students' college adjustments... 

2. U&G-related issues

• "Old wine in new bottle?"
• "To find out what's going on" -> "To find out what's going on in China"
• "To make friends" -> "To make Korean friends"
• "To learn about current issues" -> "To learn about current issues in Korea"

• "What's the contribution?" (e.g., Any reason to believe these would be different among international students when it comes to Internet use?)
• "To pass the time when bored"
• "To be entertained"
• "To find information related to class assignments"

3. Discussion points from the paper: 

• "The internet does not uniformly facilitate or impede international students' adaptation, but rather serve as an additional means by which they can pursue different goals that may or may not contribute to a smoother transition" 
• "Apparently, when international students' media use is heavily gravitated toward their home country, it hinders their adaptation to the new environment, posing greater emotional challenges"
• "Online communication with existing friends (through IM) improved adolescents' subjective well-being, while talk with strangers (through chat in a public chat room) had no significant effect"

Proper(?) reaction:

What Journalist Could Learn From Advertisers

Yes, we have so much information thrown at us, that our attention is limited. Now, this seems like a terrible thing, most notably for advertising. But as an advertising creative, I think attention economy challenges us on that level to really go past the 'ok' zone to the 'wow' zone. Here at UT, our portfolio professors tell us all the time 'Fail Big.' Instead of purely informational ads, we push smarter concepts to try to engage the consumer. We catch attention with more non-traditional campaigns.

In a more traditional form, advertising was a linear model from attention to interest to desire then action.  If you don't have someones attention, then they cannot complete the rest of the path to action. 

I believe that is the problem with web advertising, and is a problem with journalism as well. With web advertising, annoying pop ups and banner ads could irritate the consumer, and some can be so abundant, that the consumer doesn't even glance at them at all. In journalism, most of the big papers are writing the same story, so what's going to make them choose yours? Example: iPhone 5 reveal. The internet was over flowing with iPhone 5 stories, that all pretty much said the same thing. 

So what do advertisers do? They think bigger, and I think that is something that journalism is still trying to do. 

Example of non-traditional advertising

http://youtu.be/XNic4wf8AYg

It is not easy to miss the important information today

Information surplus seems having big effect to our daily life, people feel stressful by the countless information. Because there are so many information which tries to attract people’s attention, so everything on the media becomes bigger, faster, louder just like De Grandpre said in the book of Digitopia: The Look of the New Digital You.

However, as a user, I think audience can train themselves to ignore most of the information which they are not interesting. I use Facebook everyday for keeping in touch with my friends in Taiwan, however, I hardly pay attention to the advertisement on Facebook. People can develop the necessary skills to fit into the environment. And to ignore the useless information no matter how big, fast or loud it is, could be an important ability to people live in the age of information. Actually, it is not easy to neglect the important information for there are so many different types of media which communicate the same content. If people miss any important information in one media, they will receive that information in another media very soon.

Apple Daily is not only popular in Hong Kong, but also in Taiwan; it not only dominate Taiwan’s printing media, but also Taiwan’s television media. If there is any “important news” in Apple Daily, almost all of the news channels will report the same news from Apple Daily immediately, and sometimes TV stations just report the news without interviewing any key person or take any photography but cite the source from Apple Daily or NEXT MAGAZINE (both issued by NextMedia). 

Maybe we should not feel anxious for information surplus, for we don't have more information in the digital age, just repeated information.

Never "Undress," but rather "Dress Up"

According to the State of the News Media 2012, last year, most sectors of the news media managed to stop the audience losses they suffered a year earlier. First of all, news websites saw the greatest growth. Monthly unique audience to the top news sites was up 17%, and seventeen of those 25 continue to be legacy news outlets. Average evening news viewership across the three networks increased 4.5%, local TV news and cable TV news 1.0% respectively.  

Nevertheless, decline in overall news consumption may be incontestable fact in Web 2.0 era. So? What should news media do to stop the audience’s leaving and draw their attention? What is clear is that the model like Apple Daily – making audience sensory-saturated with alluring stimuli – should not and cannot be the answer. For product differentiation strategies, I think ‘absolute market-driven’ or ‘entertainment-driven’ journalism signs its own death warrant in the long run. The same is true of softer news, to my mind. For long-term attention management, I believe that news should not undress by myopic 'infotainment' and softer news, but rather dress up with news more significant and relevant to audience.

I agree on the following argument regarding how to make journalism’s storytelling interesting and relevant:

“... The infotainment strategy is faulty as a business plan because when you turn your news into entertainment, you are playing to the strengths of other media rather than your own
… The value and allure of news is different. It is based on relevance. The strategy of infotainment, though it may attract an audience in the short run and may be cheap to produce, will build a shallow audience because it is built on form, not substance. Such an audience will switch to the next “most exciting” thing because it was built on the spongy ground of excitement in the first place.”

Nieman Reports
(Excerpt from "The Elements of Journalism" by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, p. 195)

Rhetorical questions

I really like the juxtaposition of the two readings for tomorrow's lecture on attention economy. The coexistence of information surplus and attention deficit is indeed bad news for us on many levels -- from the possible development of inferiority complex among news junkies (e.g., "omg I can never keep up with all the news I want, what's wrong with me?") to information overload among news avoiders (e.g., "omg why am I bombarded by the news even on Facebook?!"), just to name a few.  The old and wise often say "moderation is the key to long-term peace and contentment, but whether we want it or not, and for better or worse, the Internet has long declared information moderation "overrated." 

While filters may help us screen out unimportant information (e.g., junk mails) in the attempt to save us time, another equally, if not more important problem that I see in the age of attention deficit is our inability to prioritize things in our lives. Especially in capitalist societies, we are taught at a young age to do whatever we can to meet the demands of school and work, and sometimes we, like Rob Lippincott, lose sight of what matters to us most in our daily struggle to tackle everything that requires our attention (which is, sadly, 99% work related for many of us).

To me the problem extends from information economy to modern society, and is in dire need of our attention (no pun intended) as we spiral down the capitalist abyss that is unrealistically obsessed with growth and productivity. To paraphrase what one of my professors at Penn remarked a few years ago: The internet has fundamentally changed academia -- the expectation now is that we can work from anywhere and at anytime -- as long as we work all the time.

At what point will we learn to take a break from time to time to reassess priorities in our lives and adjust accordingly? For example, just because we can work from anywhere and at anytime doesn't mean we should work from everywhere and all the time... but we do. 

Some lessons are harder to learn than others, but hopefully this, the art of prioritization, is one we will all master sooner rather than later.

What are your priorities in (1) the age of information surplus and (2) life? 

How does an information surplus square with a resurgence in longform journalism?

While reading Davenport & Beck's and Iris' pieces on the attention economy and information surplus, I couldn't help but think about how those ideas squared with the resurgence of longform journalism online. On the surface, longform journalism's renaissance would seem to run completely counter to those concepts: If attention is becoming increasingly scarce and the amount of information exceeds what people could consume even at the price of zero, then long, deep, involved stories would be the worst kind of information to try to succeed with online.

Yet we're seeing the opposite of that -- we've seen example after example in the past few years of how thoughtful, long, time-consuming pieces are among the most popular in online information and journalism. Iris provides an example of Apple Daily's lowest-common-denominator style succeeding in an information surplus, but this seems to be the opposite. So what gives? Can the information surplus model explain this, too, or is it broken?

I think it can provide us some clues. Iris' model posits that at the information surplus level, there's more information than a consumer can possibly consume, even with all of it free and available. So at that point, quality in some cases may become more important to the consumer, not less, in determining whether to give some message their attention. If a consumer doesn't have time for anything, they may take conscious steps to limit their media consumption to only what they deem truly important, as opposed to frivolous content.

For me personally, consumption of frivolous, low-quality tends to go up as I have more attention free, not down. When I have to bear down and get projects done and limit my media intake, it's generally that low-quality content that will get cut out -- the pointless YouTube videos linked to my friends on Twitter, the endless blog-comment discussions, etc. What survives as my available attention dwindles is the good stuff, the stuff that takes more attention, not less. Not everyone's media consumption works this way, obviously, but it could help explain why we still have time for quality longform journalism during an information-surplus age.

Do we really want news on our fridge?

Here's an example of how sometimes "we can" doesn't have to mean "we should" or "we do."

This is the fridge in the graduate student lounge. It has the capability to get news, tweets and more once you connect it to the internet. Mercifully, nobody has taken the time to set it up.

On a slow day, I might spend 20 seconds at my fridge, but I'm looking at its contents, not its front. Is there really a crowd of people out there going, "Man, the front of my fridge is so boring. What it needs is a touch screen so I can read news on my fridge. That's right, a news fridge." (On the other hand, a fridge that plays music from Pandora is potentially useful because you don't have to stare at the tiny, elbow-height (on me) screen to enjoy it.)

When I was at my newspaper, I felt like new media initiatives were sometimes approached in this same way. Hey, could we have a live chat along with that news event? Even if it's not the sort of thing that people watch live and participate in? If the answer is "yes, we can," then the answer immediately became, "yes, we should." Flood the site with anything we can think of, and maybe something will work. Throw all the spaghetti against the wall, and see what sticks.

This was partly because it's the editorial department in charge of all our content. Any sort of marketing or audience research was directed at attracting advertisers, not readers. We were left on our own, and without time to conduct our own research, we were left to make guesses. And our guesses weren't that good. If we made those judgments based on what phone calls we got at the office, then everything would be about the TV listings and the Junior Miss Salem Rodeo Queen pageant.

All this to say, if we're going to try something new, perhaps existing newsrooms aren't the best incubator for it. If we leave it to the overworked journalists who are very married to their routines, we might get news fridges. It's new, it's news, but it's stupid.

Media Studies(1.0), dead and alive?

Without question, new media have clearly different characteristic from conventional medial. I think, however, the tools for new media studies should not be designed “to address an entirely different landscape” from conventional media. There seems to be a tendency to cut new media off from traditional media in many ways. As lots of new media studies argue that new media is replacing the previously powerful media industries, focusing on the creativity and power of previously marginalized people and groups, I am wondering they seem to overvalue the influence of new media on contemporary society.

Some authors view technological change regarding new media as "an incremental process, in which the latest innovations tend to be variations or elaborations of existing systems and infrastructures, rather than radical departures." There are also several new media research that refers to principles of mediamorphosis and diffusion of innovations to explain the emergence of the new media concentration within the communication discipline. Moreover, some scholars take note of “the increased control of new media content, ownership, and policy debates by conventional mass media industries.” If so, is media studies(1.0) really dead and alive?