Proposed: A Stock-Table Newspaper Tax

Those of us who wish a long and stable future for strong journalism of significant civic value have to bring about change in the news business. Necessary transformation is not coming from newsroom management. Therefore it is time to force their hands.

So I propose to levy a new tax on newspapers that continue to publish daily stock tables.

First, let’s agree that it’s wasteful and foolish to publish yesterday’s closing price of individual stocks on pressed pulp and petroleum-based inks.

No?

In the Internet publishing world we think a lot about “use cases.” This means imagining individual readers and how they use a product. Now try to imagine a user well served by the printed publication of these prices. I can’t either.

Any trader who trades on daily price uses the Internet to conduct the trade or gather information to call (or e-mail) a broker. Anybody who has traded a stock online knows about the tools that provide significant advantages: real-time quotes during a trading day; alerts that tell you when a particular stock moves above or below a certain price; stock-price widgets on your desktop; related market and industry news; increasingly fast, cheap and friction-free trades; etc.

So: The user served by print publication of these figures would be (1) an active trader of individual stocks whose trades are based on daily closing prices who (2) is not a regular user of the Internet.

Anybody out there? Show of hands?. . .Ah, yes, one pensioner in the back there. Thanks for coming. Anybody else. . .?

There really isn’t a use case to justify continuing to publish daily stock tables. Many newspapers know this and have sharply reduced listings or simply stopped the practice. Often this has been done only with a gun to the head: Cut the tables or cut staff. Many operations have decided the listings should go after a few rounds of layoffs. Cutting employees before cutting stock tables is. . .well, let’s say any paper that continues to publish stock tables yet has laid off reporters has some explaining to do.

There should be three exemptions from the new Stock Table Tax.

A daily page of financial market data–broad indices for stock and bond markets, individual winners, losers, movers, key sectors, big mutual funds, most active, stocks in the news.

Any coverage of local stocks.

An extra page of tables on Sunday. Yes, it’s a bigger print run so it costs more, but a once-weekly deeper round-up for a larger audience arguably has value.

Any other daily newspaper that publishes daily closing prices of individual stocks should pay a tax equal to one-half the cost of the newsprint required to publish them. (I’m told this cost can range from $500 to $5,000 per page per day, depending on size of print run, page, stock used and other factors.)

This new tax will have two salutary effects:

It will provide newsroom management with incentive to quit a counterproductive old habit. Nothing else seems to be working. Each paper that has done buyouts or layoffs before cutting stock tables should be ashamed of itself. It needs a financial gun to the head–and a moment when they have to make the case to the newsroom staff for continuing a counterproductive practice at the expense of headcount.

It will make some money available to the paper for newer kinds of dynamic, multimedia, user-centered business coverage that may drive revenue for the website and other distribution platforms.

Papers that refuse to make the change will pay the new tax to a non-profit entity that supports independent new-media journalism projects. I’d recommend the Knight Foundation, which supports excellence in digital journalism of civic importance, but that’s just one of several options.

Essentially this tax will transfer income from those who are doing damage to the future of journalism to those who are moving it forward.

I have heard reasons for continuing to publish stock listings. They usually boil down to (1) the fear the paper would lose subscribers; (2) results of a focus group that found people liked the stock tables; (3) our publisher/editor emeritus/board of directors/influential stockholders insist we keep them.

No. 1: You’re hemmoraging readers anyway. The thought that a business decision with profound impact on the future bottom line should be driven by a couple of hundred indignant (let’s be plain) older readers who over-represent themselves with phone calls and (written!) letters to the publisher and top editors is. . . just plain bad business. Sure, you’ll get 200 calls. Accept them politely and forget them immediately. Like Odysseus, have your staff lash you to the mast, have them wax their own ears and sail past the sirens. Soon they will be silent and the ship will remain on course–toward a future built around new news consumers and rising media habits, not the old ones.

No. 2: Focus groups do not have to deal with zero-sum budgets. Focus groups like lots of stuff you can’t afford to keep. In fact, unless you give them a roster of features and tell them they have to lose half of them, you’re not gathering meaningful data. Secondly, doing focus groups with current readers isn’t a good idea anyway. Find potential future users of your news products online and in print. That’s who you have to re-build your business around.

No. 3: They are sentimental, retrograde, self-satisfied, isolated from reality or not paying attention. Do your best to make the case that the choice is another 10 percent staff cut or losing the stock tables. If they don’t buy that argument, do your best to subvert, ignore and marginalize them without getting fired.

Or just let your company pay the tax, layoff employees and allow important innovations in the future of journalism to occur elsewhere.

And tell them the TV-listing tax is coming in 2009.

Welcome to the world of Churnalism

Is journalism getting worse as reporters churn out more work faster to feed the hungry baby of the web?

Nick Davies believes the answer is yes, and has the documents to prove it.

In a recent column in the British newspaper the Guardian, Davies describes a study he had commissioned to investigate the issue. He writes:

I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things.

First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure.

The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry.

Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.

His coinage to describe this kind of journalism: Churnalism.

In an interview with Heidi Dawley of Media Life, Davies elaborates: “Churnalism is the most important single example of the way in which commercialization has invaded and undermined newsrooms. . . .We had taken away from us our most precious working asset as a journalist, time.”

An arresting reality check for enthusiasts of “increased productivity” in newsrooms: What, precisely, is being produced?

SFGate: It’s 2005 all over again

When prognosticators ask which major newspaper is most likely to be the first to fold its print edition and go all-digital, the San Francisco Chronicle is often named first. It’s a weak paper owned by a still potent media conglomerate in a big market with a technologically sophisticated audience. Its journalism can be routine and, some days, scarce.

Which makes the unveiling of the renovated SFGate, the local portal published by the newspaper, all the more significant. And terribly disappointing.

The new page is not launched yet, so there’s just an annotated screen grab.

The page looks cleaner, largely by virtue of eliminating the wayback-machined left rail navigation (1999). Aside from that. . .frankly, I have a hard time finding much to say about it either way.

(Other than the fact that the redesign team appears to have utterly caved to the impulse to say “yes” to everybody who wanted something on the home page. It appears to be at least as long as the span from your fingertips to your elbow, maybe your armpit. Note to web editors: Editing means making tough decisions on your reader’s behalf. Which is to say, the new home page is largely unedited.)

The most significant omission, from where I sit, is the lack of social media features. Yes, there are blogs (2003). Story comments (2004). A “real time tracker” of favorite stories, most e-mailed, etc. (2005).

But as the success of USAToday.com, MSNBC.com, CNN.com have shown, people for worse or better want to get their hands dirty with news these days–rating and recommending content, forming groups of fellow travelers, uploading their own reports, adding stuff to Google maps, etc.

I’m the first to say that a lot of these features (and many particular implementations) are faddish garbage. But the move toward participatory media consumption generally is an irresistible and accelerating force. The fact that a digital redesign of a site run by a weak newspaper in a tech-savvy market appears blind this fundamental fact of new media is discouraging. This was a big opportunity for a major site to show it can get the two-way thing right–and use it to its economic advantage.

Now, maybe there’s more to come. Maybe when the site itself is launched the users will be invited to play.

Maybe there’s a whole suite of social media tools a-bornin’ on a whiteboard someplace.

Maybe Hearst, owner of SFGate and the Chron, will understand that a strategic investment in two-way user relations is a good idea now.

Or–who knows? Maybe they’ll just fold the newspaper.

Coolest New Political DataViz

Check out the LA Times’ dataviz that compares candidates’ delegate totals and which states the delegates were earned in. Cool as they come, and very informative about candidates’ geographic strengths. Below is just a picture of it; the live version on the site includes the cool interactivity.

Web Video Statistics: I Smell a Rat

The web metrics firm comScore has published a tally of of how many online videos were viewed during the month of December. That number is 10 billion. That’s “b,” as in “freakin’ billion.”

Like Mike Huckabee, I didn’t major in math. But as a journalist I do have an Associate’s Degree in Rat Sniffing. And I smell a big one.

By my primitive calculations, if comScore’s stats are correct, during the month of December 2007 2,237 person-years were spent watching online video. (That’s assuming each of those 10 billion videos was watched for :30.)

For comparison, 2,237 person years would be the equivalent of:

• one human watching online video  continuously, without bathroom break or time spent dying and being reborn, since the reign of Julius Caesar.
• 2,237 people spending one year, day and night without rest or time to stretch, planting the Great Plains with switchgrass.

And that’s just one month in 2007! In 2008, I’m sure enough person-years of video will be watched worldwide to rebuild the Great Pyramid of Giza by hand (20,000 men 20 years, according to recent estimates).

This is either a preposterous bit of stat-pumping or a terribly, terribly sad commentary. Or, probably, both.

Most-TV-Like Home Page. . .NYT?

It wasn’t Super Tuesday. It was Sad Sack Saturday, which is to say I was at the computer again after dark on a weekend. It happened to be the night Obama swept Washington, Louisiana and Nebraska (and the Virgin Islands, if that counts).

So I was poking around, avoiding my real work, looking for numbers–why were Washington’s GOP caucus results stuck at 37 percent? Will Huck pull it out and do a GOP sweep? I jumped from news site to news site looking for the most updated feeds.

And I noticed two things:

• If you’re using the web to find news info in real time, even the most successful news sites’ home pages aren’t particularly good at this sort of “broadcast” display. The Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC, FoxNews, AOL, Yahoo, even CNN–none had a real-time graphic leaderboard on their home pages. They published headlines and photos and, inside, one or two clicks deep, maps and charts with fresh-ish data.

• The most successful example of a news homepage broadcasting real-time election results in graphic form was. . .The New York Times. The Times alone had an updated, easy-to-follow data graphic on its home page displaying the election results as they came in.

I was surprised that CNN and USA Today–both veteran deviners of audience desire–whiffed on this easy pitch. (Both had links on their home pages that led to real time data inside).

If I’m programming a news home page on election night–a Saturday evening! With little else happening!–what “use case” am I anticipating? People out browsing for election results. Sticking the real-time results map on the front is sort of a no-brainer.

It’s striking to see that the New York Times appears to understand that on the web, even significant news should, when appropriate, be presented visually, quickly and accessibly.

There is time and a place for reasoned analysis and fuller explanation. It’s called tomorrow’s newspaper.

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