O tamanho do buraco dos jornais

Se eu fosse jornalista eu teria MUITO medo.

Newspapers get 3x too many ad dollars, says study

Even though newspapers have lost nearly half of their ad revenues in the last five years, some analysts believe they still are getting three times more advertising than their readership deserves.

This good news/bad news for publishers comes from eMarketer, a research firm specializing in digital marketing trends. I’ll tell you in a moment why this is both good and bad news. First, the story:

In a report released last week, eMarketer compared the amount of time consumers spend accessing various types of media with the percentage of advertising dollars spent on each format.

Television, for example, represents about 43% of the time Americans spend consuming media and broadcasters collect about 43% of the advertising dollars, according to the study. So, that sounds about right.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are pocketing three times more ad dollars than their mindshare would seem to justify. Even though consumers spend barely 5% of their time reading newspapers, eMarketer found that publishers are getting 17% of the ad spend. As you can see from the table below, the situation is the same for magazines.

Because the allocation of ad-market share is a zero-sum game, print has to be benefitting at someone’s expense. And two notable victims, in this case, are Internet and mobile advertising.

In the most egregious mismatch discovered by the study, only 0.5% of advertising goes to mobile phones even though people spend more than 8% of their media time using them. With 25% of media mindshare devoted to the Internet and barely 19% of ad dollars going to the web, it is being shortchanged, too.

This is good news for newspaper publishers because it proves that they have done an excellent job to date of convincing marketers of the value of their medium. As such, they have been able to corner a disproportionate share of advertising in comparison to other media.

It also is bad news for publishers, because it represents a formidable threat: What would happen if advertisers began to wonder why they are spending so much on newspapers when they can use cheaper and more targetable advertising to reach the growing audiences on the web, mobile and social media?

In reality, of course, the answer is known. Newspaper sales fell from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $25.8 billion in 2010. Despite a modest economic recovery that has increased ad sales for most other media, publishers anecdotally report that sales in the first quarter of this year were softer than they were a year ago.

If publishers can’t catch up to their digital competitors, the staggering erosion in newspaper advertising in the last five years could be the prelude to something worse.

Via Reflections of a Newsosaur

A novidade velha

Tiago Dória escreveu um post interessante, como de costume, sobre um livro de Nick Bilton, um dos líderes da guinada do NYT. Lá pelo meio do post tem esse trecho interessantíssimo:

Citando o cientista político Benedict Anderson, o pesquisador do NYTimes lembra que a mídia impressa sempre teve uma capacidade de ser “social”. Por utilizar uma linguagem comum, tem a competência de criar “comunidades imaginárias” e um senso de nação.

Com esse raciocínio, Bilton aponta para um detalhe histórico importante. Alguns dos primeiros jornais na Inglaterra vinham com uma folha em branco para que o leitor pudesse escrever algo quando passasse o jornal para frente, para outra pessoa ler.

Ou seja, os jornais vinham com “espaço para comentários”, já havia um senso de conversação e interatividade na mídia impressa.

Para fechar, um trecho interessante sobre storytelling:

Para mim, o livro tem dois pontos altos. Um deles, quando o autor deixa claro que um dos principais desafios da mídia não é mudar de plataforma ou dispositivo (antes papel, agora digital/antes carta dos leitores, agora página no Facebook), mas trabalhar com novas narrativas, conseguir se manter atraente em meio a tantas opções. O desafio é narrativo.

“Media Inventor”

Fun­da­men­tally, I think, a media inven­tor is some­one who isn’t sat­is­fied with the suite of for­mats that have been handed down to him by his cul­ture (and econ­omy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, sin­gle; RPG, RTS, FPS–a media inven­tor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inven­tor feels com­pelled to make the con­tent and the container.

Robin Sloan, via Noah Brier, que por sua vezs mostra uma interface foda do NYT sobre documentos da crise financeira.

Números deveras interessantes sobre jornais

The global newspaper market generates 57% of revenue from advertising, the OECD said, although that figure is far higher in many developed countries, most notably in the US, where newspapers are reliant on advertising for 87% of their income.

The figure is 50% in the UK, according to the OECD, and lowest in Japan (35%), which has some of the world’s bestselling newspapers and the highest levels of newspaper penetration.

Online advertising revenues accounted for a “minuscule” proportion of total newspaper revenues – just 4% in 2009.

Minha visão dessa queda livre dos jornais é temerosa. Uma sociedade sem jornais traz tanbém muitos riscos:

“Given the central role of news for democratic societies, the evolution of news creation and distribution are a matter of public interest”, the report’s authors say.

“The question is whether and how the production of high-quality and pluralistic news content can be left to market forces alone”.

The report concludes that “no business and/or revenue sharing models have been found to finance in-depth independent news production. This raises questions as to the supply of high-quality journalism in the longer term.”

Não significa que o governo deve financiar empresários que não souberam se adaptar aos novos tempos, mas sim a conscientização que o papel exercido pelos jornais deve sert mantido, seja lá em qual plataforma.

Via The Guardian

“We´re not here to make money”

Esta é uma frase muito comum na internet, e são grandes as chances do autor ser algum jornalista em sua luta inglória para bolar uma matemática financeira que salve os jornais. Mas, acredite, esta frase começou a ser dita muito antes. Este vídeo, por exemplo, é de 1981!

Tirei esse vídeo dessa apresentação.

Sobre vídeos online

Bom texto do Nieman Lab sobre vídeos online e seus desafios:

It’s no surprise that broadcasters have lots of moving pictures, but the “film” has not been easy to make readily accessible for web use and monetization. First off, there are formatting issues — TEM (Thought Equity Motion) does transcoding and digitization here. Then there are issues of knowing what’s in the video: Try finding video through search now, and it’s still far more limited than finding text. That’s a matter of tagging and metatagging, categorizing content to harvest the many keywords within. That takes some speech-to-text technology, a still-evolving art. Then you’ve got rights management and all the little things you have to do to make video commercially, contextually, and instantly available. All of that is what TEM calls “Managed Services.”

O NYT, como sempre, está a frente de seus concorrentes, já que é o primeiro veículo de mídia impressa cliente do TEM.

The New York Times. Video. Three years ago, that seemed like an oxymoron, save the Times’ occasional forays into TV experiments. Now, Times TV pops up in front of us on airplane TVs and news video has become an emerging feature of Times sites. As Apple and NYT staffers plot behind closed doors in the Times building, we can expect that Times video will be a key element of the iPad NYT launch.

Burn the boats!

Se tem uma coisa que eu gosto é uma bela provocação:

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”

O Marc ainda faz uma comparação foda, dizendo que as empresas da mídia tradicional são hoje, obrigatoriamente, empresas de tecnologia:

Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’s tackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.

O techcrunch encerra o post com outra boa provocação:

You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

i

Eu não digitei errado não, é assim mesmo. Letra i, e nada mais.

Trata-se de um novo jornal português que impressiona pelo belíssimo trabalho feito por seus profissionais e por números impressionantes. Em seis meses, os caras já venderam o que esperavam vender em um ano.

Acredito que a melhor definição para o jornal é “não estruturado”. Isso é, não tem seções de esporte, economia.

São 4 as divisões de conteúdo criadas pelo i.

1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion.

2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page.

3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. “We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams,” Figueiredo said.

4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people’s private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited

Segue trecho do manifesto i:

As an editor’s newspaper, “i” will need very strong editing of the news.

Editing must be one of the most important newsroom skills.

Editing means, first, to be selective.

Editing means, second, to write and rewrite to make the content better.

The new graphic model will be a perfect tool for this editing, editing, editing mantra.

E um comentário foda sobre os objetivos do jornal, que foca no que há de mais escasso: a atenção.

At the end of the day, our strength is not how many pages we print or how much information we deliver, but how much time our readers spend reading, not just looking or browsing.

Olha o naipe de uma página dupla que os caras fizeram para a eleição.

Pra fechar, um simpático vídeo mostrando um dia do jornal e lá embaixo uma foto da bonita redação.

Sobre jornais

Esse gráfico é assustador. Como bem disse o Sílvio Meira, “o emprego, nos jornais americanos, regrediu meio século, para menos da metade do seu auge na década de 80”.

para se ter uma idéia do futuro do jornalismo, e descartando a possibilidade de patrocínio, as contas do marketWatch apontam para uma renda média de US$0.02 por pageview, dos quais se acredita que 25% seja overhead. sem levar em conta os custos de infraestrutura para disseminação e conectividade, um jornalista que espere ter uma renda de US$40K por ano teria que ter 11.000 pageviews por dia de trabalho [ao redor de 250 por ano].

a conta não fecha nem em jornais de renome mundial como o new york times, segundo o marketWatch: o NYT teve 145M pageviews em novembro, o que dá menos de 4.000 pageviews por dia para cada um de seus 1.250 jornalistas. nos EUA, US$40K não é um grande salário; mesmo assim, se nem o pessoal do NYT chega perto de 11.000 pageviews por dia, lá, imagine aqui, onde nem banda pra isso temos, ainda.

É com dó que escrevo esse post. Se tem um maluco na faixa dos 20 anos que gosta de um jornal impresso, esse alguém sou eu.

Sobre jornalismo

E a opinião não é de qualquer um. É de Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Publisher do New York Times:

So, we asked New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at last night’s benefit for The News Literacy Project, what advice did he have for young people who want to go into journalism these days, you know, given the job market? “Why don’t we not go there?” he laughed. Then he went there anyway. “Um, what I would tell them is the industry is in the midst of a massive transition,” he said. “But the core of the fundamental job is critical. We have to re-create ourselves, but the heart of what we’re going to re-create is still journalism. The way people get information is changing, but the need for information will remain constant.”

He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

Okay, so let us get this straight. The publisher of the New York Times is saying that getting into print journalism is like getting on the Titanic?

“We are trying to convert shipping companies to airplane companies,” said Sulzberger. “Same business: transporting people safely across long distances. Different cost structure, different way of doing business, but the same core business. There is still a very vibrant business in shipping. It’s just not taking masses of people across the Atlantic. It’s now taking families around the Seychelles, or something like that. There will still be passenger ships, but they’re not going to be in the same business. So print will still be here, I believe, decades from now. But will it be the driving force? No.“