papers

The New York Times Company, which owns The Boston Globe, has threatening to stop the presses for good unless union workers agree to $20 million in cuts. The Globe, which has been printed for 137 years, has been saddled with reader flight and a drop in advertising — problems echoed in newsrooms across the country.

On Wednesday, Scot Lehigh, a Globe political columnist, asked readers if they would pay for the Globe online. Today, no one should be shocked, shocked to find that many readers said they’d pay for the Globe online. Lehigh should recognize the flawed result you get when conducting what is called in politics a “push poll.”

I read The Boston Globe every day and would love to save it, but that may be as hard to do as saving Out of Town News in Harvard Square. So, we need to ask: Can we save a great newspaper in the 21st Century, or should we be trying to save excellence in journalism?

I think our objective should be to save excellent journalism in Boston and I recently wrote about this in a post entitled “Death of newspapers or new era of online journalism?“

I also think charging visitors even a nickle to read content from the Globe online would be a strategic mistake. Circulation revenue doesn’t pay journalist’s salaries. At best, it is a break even proposition that covers the cost of home delivery and distributing newspapers to a shrinking number of newsstands. So, the real goal shouldn’t be boosting subscription revenue; it should be increasing traffic to Boston.com.

A similar thing happened in the late 19th Century, when the number of daily newspapers in the United States quadrupled. “Falling paper and production costs and the growth in advertising, along with improved transportation, enabled newspapers to cut their prices and extend their markets,” according to Paul Starr’s book, “The Creation of the Media.”

What was then called the “new journalism” also drove the growing popularity of newspapers. One news-generating innovation was the “banner headline.” Another was “the interview,” an American invention. Still others were the creation of sports pages and women’s sections in the 1880s as well as comic strips in the following decade.

What should the new “new journalism” of the 21st Century include?

Back in February, ReelSEO released a first-of-its-kind, in-depth report on the opportunity for U.S. newspaper companies to grow their audience and advertising base using video search optimization (Video SEO or VSEO). Written by Senior Analyst Grant Crowell, “Business Models for New Realities: The Newspapers Industry’s Video SEO Opportunity” is the culmination of more than 2 years of industry research, along with interviews with editors and publishers of newspaper companies nationwide.

I was one of the analysts who was interviewed for the report and was quoted in a press release when it was announced. I said, “If you do a SWOT analysis of newspapers, their strengths are in print, their weaknesses are online, but their opportunities are in online video, and their threats are legion. That’s why newspaper executives should read this report today, not tomorrow.”

After you attract and engage a sufficient quantity and quality of readers, then the next challenge will be finding a business model that charges advertisers a reasonable amount of money to reach this audience — in a global recession. That’s a tough proposition.

At SES New York 2009, I interviewed Beverly Thorne, the SVP of Century 21 Real Estate, who has made the decision to leave offline advertising and re-invest those dollars into online advertising. Bev said when Century 21 focused on what their business model’s opportunities were online, Century 21 was able to increase its leads by more than 237% with their spend in 2008. At the same time, cost per lead dropped 62%. She said it was emotionally difficult making the decision to migrate online, but Century 21’s consumers are online.

So, what can Boston.com do to boost its ad revenues? Well, Philly.com, which hosts online content from The Inquirer and the Daily News, has just joined a consortium of media companies partnering with Yahoo! to increase online advertising.

This is just an outline, but it’s a formula for saving excellence in Boston journalism: Don’t charge for online content, use video search engine optimization, and join the Yahoo! newspaper consortium.

Oh, and stop conducting push polls of readers. That’s no way to conduct market research.

Back in December 2007, I observed that “Blogs Are the New Trade Press.” Today, it appears that news blogs are becoming the new online newspapers, too.

According to “The State of the News Media 2009,” an annual report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.”

It adds, “Perhaps least noticed yet most important, the audience migration to the Internet is now accelerating. The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19% in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27%.”

In other words, people are still looking for news, “But audiences now consume news in new ways. They hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media,” reported the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A Pew Research Center Survey in December 2008, found the number of Americans who said they got “most of their national and international news” online increased 67% in the last four years. The presidential election was almost certainly a key factor in the growth. More than a third of Americans said they got most of their campaign news from the Internet in 2008 — triple the percentage in previous presidential election year.

Although the growth in online news consumption cut across age groups, the growth was fueled in particular by young people. Young voters and activists now rank the Internet as a news source of importance parallel to television, according to the Pew Research Center Survey.

The State of the News Media 2009 added, “And the video site YouTube also became a major delivery system for people to get news posted and recommended by friends and associates, and often from political campaigns. The Obama camp reported more than a billion minutes of campaign-produced material was downloaded from YouTube. And Youtube reported that the Obama campaign’s 1800 web videos were viewed 100 million times in total.”

According to Pew Research Center data, as of August 2008 the percentage of Americans who went online regularly for news (at least three times a week) was up 19% from two years earlier to nearly four in ten Americans (37%). No other medium was growing as quickly. Most saw audiences flat or declining.

The new numbers put the Web ahead of several other platforms for the first time. In the same August survey, 29% of Americans said they “regularly” watched network nightly news, 22% watched network morning shows and 13% Sunday morning shows.

The percentage of Americans, who relied on the Internet regularly, according to this data, was now roughly similar to that who regularly watched cable television for news (39%). More people still read a newspaper “yesterday” (34%) or listened to news radio (35%) than had viewed news online “yesterday” (29%). But the gap was narrowing.

Although the shift in audiences from print newspapers to online newspapers is “old news,” Newsknife, which rates the top news sites at Google News, has just reported some “new news” that indicates of source gathering the news is also shifting.

According to an article posted yesterday, Newsknife noticed changes at Google News at the beginning of March that could affect traffic to news sites.

It appears to Newsknife that Google News has significantly increased its listing of blogs. “Compared with our previous findings there’s now a real blogstorm,” it reported.

Newsknife found 150 blog sites at Google News during March. “The growing number of blogs appearing at Google News seems to offer a simple success formula to news site owners: start blogs for your site and increase your chances of being listed at Google News,” it advised.

Many news site owners started doing this a year ago. For example, Newsknife reported on March 1, 2008, a that blogs from the Washington Post, New York Times, Baltimore Sun, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times were starting to appear in Google News.

The topic of news business models for publishers in these changing times was addressed at SES New York last week. I moderated a panel that included (in aphapbetical order): Mark M. Edmiston, Managing Director of AdMedia Partners; Murray Gaylord, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Insights at NYTimes.com; Erik Matlick, CEO of Madison Logic; and Gill Torren, Associate Publisher of SC Magazine at Haymarket Media.

Following the session, Byron Gordon of SEO-PR interviewed Gaylord about the changing media landscape. Gaylord says The New York Times was aware of social media’s impact back in the 1990’s and has taken steps to integrate such developments into its brand making it the largest news site on the Web.

Gaylord added that NYTimes.com has more than 55 blogs and is integrating thousands of videos and related digital media into to its website, making the NY Times the most shared site on the Web. He went on to highlight a particular New York Times collaboration with Facebook, in advance of President Obama’s inauguration.

S. Murray Gaylord, VP Marketing, New York Times, on social media’s impact on publishing

What does this mean to readers of this Search Engine Marketing News Blog, which is also one of the more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide that have their headlines aggregated by Google News?

It means news search SEO is larger than press release optimization. It’s larger than news article optimization. It includes blog post optimization.

And based on the latest Newsknife findings, it appears that news bloggers may be better at optimizaing their posts than traditional newspaper reporters. And this was happenening even before the economy collapsed.

What are the implications? The news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought. And it has to do this at a time when economists are trying to draw the line between a recession and a depression.

In the meantime, marketers need to focus on the news blogs that are becoming the news online newspapers.

If you didn’t think Google had enough dominance in search, try this on for size: the search engine giant has started a venture capitalist fund. The areas they seek to invest are:

Google says more industries could be added in the future as their interest determines. Google says it will follow the best practices of “top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms” and place Googlers at the center of the effort.

Will Google be successful? I’m sure a lot of you have opinions on the matter. Let ‘em rip in the comments.

Related Reading:
Google Beats Wall Street Estimates for Q4 2008, Despite Profit Drop
Google’s Schmidt Talks Yahoo, Newspapers, ‘Don’t Be Evil’, and iPhone

If top NYC public relations firms are smart, they’ll give PR jobs or paid internships to The City College of New York (CCNY) students that I met last week. Why? Because most of these kids know something that most of us don’t and it is crucial to our survival as an industry.

Let me explain.

I played reverse hooky last Wednesday afternoon. I attended school when I didn’t have to.

Professor Philip Ryan invited me to visit his Introduction to Public Relations class at CCNY. He was covering Chapter 13 of Public Relations Strategies and Tactics, (9th Edition) by Dennis L. Wilcox of San Jose State University and Glen T. Cameron of University of Missouri. Published by Allyn & Bacon in February 2008, Chapter 13 is entitled, “New Technologies in Public Relations.”

But, as one of the students in Professor Ryan’s class pointed out, “There’s nothing in our textbook about SEO PR.”

So, I asked for a show of hands. “How many of you use Facebook?” Virturally everyone did. “How many of you use YouTube?” Nearly everyone did. “How many of you use Twitter?” Almost everyone did.

So, I observed, “Well, SEO-PR was founded 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. So, just because these new technologies aren’t covered in your textbook doesn’t mean they aren’t fundamentally changing public relations as we know it. I’m speaking at Search Engine Strategies New York this week and these new technologies are all on the agenda along with social media and blogging.”

Another student observed, “When I Googled the term ‘SEO’ you weren’t ranked #1.”

I replied, “Well, that’s not one of my target terms. Now, if you Google the term ‘SEO PR’, you’ll see my firm is ranked #1.”

The student countered, “But that’s the name of your company.”

And I responded, “The term ‘SEO PR’ gets about 320 searches a month. Not bad for a keyword that didn’t exist in 2003. But, if you Google ‘blog outreach’, you’ll also see my firm is currently ranked #1. How many of you think blog outreach is an important part of media relations services, especially with 900,000 blog posts every day?”

Then, I added, “Besides, what I really want you to do is conduct a query at Google News for the term ‘Online Marketing Summit’ and find the optimized press release that we distributed yesterday for ClickZ.”

I think that’s when they started cutting me a little slack.

Then, Professor Ryan asked, “How is contextual marketing changing public relations as we know it?”

I explained, “Contextual advertising is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content. This means there is the opportunity to create editorial content targeted at the contextual advertising that you want to attract to your news blog or YouTube channel.”

Yes, these were tough questions from sophisticated students and their professor.

Which means these CCNY students are exactly the kind of people that NYC public relations firms need to hire if they are going to survive short-term or thrive long-term.

Yes, they are still acquiring the skill of writing a press release. But they already understand that an optimized press release can get a high ranking in news search engines.

Yes, they are still becoming acquainted with the fundamentals of persuasion and communications theory. But they have already mastered how to make friends on Facebook.

Yes, they are still beginning to recognize how PR relates to other fields of marketing. But they’re already familiar with how to upload YouTube videos.

Yes, they are still learning the key ethical issues affecting the practice of PR. But they’ve developed an appreciation for the acceptable use ofand unacceptable abuse of Twitter.

Unfortunately, most NYC public relations firms won’t give PR jobs or even paid internships to these CCNY students?

Why? Short term, the recession is the primary excuse. But even if there is an opening, most of the job descriptions in the public relations industry were written back in the 20th Century. So, these square pegs won’t fit into the round holes.

For example, is your HR department trying to hire an entry level public relations specialist? Does the job description read: “Prepares and disseminates information regarding an organization through newspapers, periodicals, television and radio and other forms of media. May require a bachelor’s degree in a related area and 0-2 years of experience in the field or in a related area. Has knowledge of commonly-used concepts, practices, and procedures within a particular field. Relies on instructions and pre-established guidelines to perform the functions of the job. Primary job functions do not typically require exercising independent judgment. Works under immediate supervision; typically reports to a supervisor or manager.”

So, don’t blame your HR department if they aren’t looking for someone who can prepare and optimize information regarding an organization through news search engines, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

And who is at fault if someone who doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree gets filtered out during the screening process even through they could have brought knowledge of new concepts, practices and procedures to the table?

And ask yourself, honestly, do you want someone who relies on instructions and pre-established guidelines to perform the ever-changing fuctions of the job? Or do you really need someone who doesn’t typically exercise independent judgment in an emerging field that didn’t exist when you went to college?

In other words, are you giving PR jobs to the people you will need in 2009 and the decade after this? Or, is your HR department rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Now, if I were you, I’d find a way to play reverse hooky at CCNY.

Other “guests” to Professor Ryan’s class have included Garrett Glaser, a corporate communications consultant and former reporter for CNBC, and Rena L. Lewis, the Director of Brand Management, Industries & Marketing, at KPMG, and will include David Grant, President of LVM Group.

And television journalism icon Dan Rather will deliver the Spring 2009 Samuel Rudin Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture at The City College of New York on Thursday, April 2. Mr. Rather, who was anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005, will speak about “Democracy and the 24-Hour News Cycle.”

This kind of “higher education” doesn’t fit on the normal resume.

That’s why it’s time to overhaul the job screening process at most NYC public relations firms to ensure that you’re giving PR jobs to CCNY students and others like them who are crucial to the survival of the public relations industry.

But, hey, what do I know? I’m not even mentioned in the college textbooks.