Working Title

I’m intrigued by GlobalPost, both from the perspective of this project of ours but also as a news junkie who is really hoping there’s still something to read in 2022. It’s characterized in the media as a project started by a guy who knew he’d never get another foreign assignment, as going places big media is retreating from.

To me, it seems like perhaps the media organization of the future. It’s cheap to run — he uses folks who are already living abroad, and pays them $1000 a month on the assumption they continue writing for other outlets — and diverse by its nature. It doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive — “We cannot cover every plane crash or be there for every press conference,” Sennott told the AP — but appears set to be a fascinating glimpse into what matters in many places around the world.

And, it has an interesting financial model.

From the AP story:

Journalists also will receive equity stakes in the privately held company, Global News Enterprises. Those shares vest over five years and collectively could give the journalists ownership of half of the stake that is not held by the company’s 14 original investors. Those investors, who have put up $8.2 million, include former Boston Globe Publisher Benjamin Taylor and Paul Sagan, chief executive of Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

I need to think more about what all that means, but one thing jumps out immediately: the company expects a loss for three years?! And that’s what they’re saying publicly; they must expect a worst-case that’s far longer. We’ll work on finding out more about the details of how they operate — stay tuned.

The launch of GlobalPost comes amid a slowdown in online advertising, the source of more than half of the company’s projected revenue. Its chief executive and co-founder, Philip Balboni, said the company expects to operate at a loss for three years as it develops two other key sources of income — sales to newspapers and a $199-a-year subscription for premium content, such as more detailed information on emerging markets.

Hearst announced that Seattle Post Intelligencer is up for sale and that if no buyer is found, it may shut down.

The paper’s rival, the Seattle Times, has a story saying that the number of daily newspaper’s in the U.S. fell by 174 between 1990 and 2006.

Nearly 200 dailies have expired since 1990. And, in almost every instance, their deaths have touched off civic mourning that suggests a shuttered newspaper is more than just another failed business.
— P-I’s closure in Seattle would reflect U.S. trend Seattle Times 11 Jan 2009

The declining and uncertain economy is bringing a day of reckoning for many newspapers. Cutting paper costs or trimming payroll may help some survive, but clearly the print news business will reorganize dramatically in this downturn. What comes out the other end will be much different. There will surely be less pulp and more web.

What we are working on is finding a business structure for papers that do survive or even one that will allow papers to survive.

I read the Maclean’s story late in the old year that called Canwest a “struggling penny stock.” But this story in the Georgia Straight gave me a chuckle. I’ll go for option 3: when a national newsmag writes about your stocks hitting rock bottom, expect them to soar. In any case, if they were indeed in trouble before the Maclean’s story, I doubt the recent near 100% rise in value (for the record they closed at 91 cents on the last day of trading) has gotten them out of hot water.

When I heard the morning and afternoon papers in Madison, Wisconsin operated under a joint operating agreement even though they were owned by different companies, I was stunned. Now I’m reading that it’s common across the US, after a bill in the 70s to let papers get around non-compete laws.

So a line in a story about the Las Vegas newspaper scene didn’t really surprise me: “The Sun in September 2005 stopped publishing its afternoon edition, producing as an alternative an 8-page paper inserted into the Las Vegas Review-Journal, its JOA partner.”

I need to know more about this, though. What was happening to papers in the 70s that spurred the government to take such an extraordinary measure to protect them?

The headlines about newsroom layoffs are grim. But the Las Vegas Sun has hired more than 40 staffers in the last year. Why? They decided to go big online.

“We launched the current version of our site Jan. 10, 2008, and before that it had been a pretty basic shovelware site maintained by our sister company Vegas.com,” Josh Williams, new media projects editor and operations manager, told Newspapers and Technology. “In 2007, the site felt very much like a college newspaper from 1997 or 1998; it felt dated, it had no rich media of any kind, nothing beyond the Sun’s 12 or 15 daily print articles.”

Part of the success, Williams told NewsAndTech, is that there’s a distinct purpose for the online and print editions. “What makes us stand out is that the print edition is crafted as a daily magazine about Las Vegas.”

That’s something I’ve read a fair bit about from George Sylvie and HI Chyi at University of Texas at Austin.

Not a surprise that Rob Curley is involved in this project.

This line from the article, though, is disapointing: Williams said site traffic has grown exponentially, although he declined to disclose specific figures.

Web shines brightly on Las Vegas Sun, Newspapers and Technology, Jan. 2009