Like the newspaper industry itself, its two principal professional organizations cut their way through a dismal 2009 and head to their respective conventions next week still standing but very much changed.
Here is how bad it got for the Newspaper Association of America last year. Three major companies — MediaNews, Cox and Lee — quietly quit paying dues and dropped out. Dean Singleton of MediaNews and Jay Smith of Cox had been NAA chairmen just a few years earlier.
All three companies are back now, but NAA got the message that it was living way large given industry changes. President and CEO John Sturm told me in a phone interview that staffing at NAA and its foundation are down to 32 positions from a high of 135. Members are typically paying roughly half the dues this year that they did previously, and NAA’s dues revenue is down 70 percent over two years. (Since the dues structure is pegged to circulation numbers, some of that reduction comes from newspapers and companies moving down a level or two as their circulation falls).
“On the positive side,” Sturm said, “our board had just done a review of our mission, so we have been able to have a laser-like focus on three (remaining) priorities.” Those are public policy and lobbying, communications and promotions, and research focused on business development.
The American Society of News Editors was never as big as NAA, but it has changed dramatically too. First it traded out the “N” for “Newspapers” in its name to “N” for “News,” hoping to attract a broader pool of participating editors. When longtime executive director Scott Bosley retired, he was replaced by Richard Karpel, whose background is in professional association management rather than newspapers.
ASNE’s conference Sunday through Wednesday, retitled “NewsNow Ideas Summit,” is in Washington D.C., as it most often is. But the lead speakers are Google’s Eric Schmidt and author Dave Eggers, with a program almost entirely about new media topics, rather than schmoozing sessions with politicians. A single luncheon slot, Karpel told me, is being held open for a speaker from the Obama administration.
“It used to be that [membership] was of editors at the pinnacle of their careers, who didn’t need much about how to do your job better,” Karpel said, “but there has been so much convulsion, that’s all changed… and we need to do something a lot different from what we’ve done in the past.”
ASNE had decided last year to refocus its annual convention on professional challenges and innovation but was forced to cancel the 2009 conference in Chicago for lack of attendance. Karpel expects about 300 people next week, down from the glory years when 700 or 800 was common, but respectable.
NAA’s meeting, scheduled at exactly the same time in Orlando (inconveniently for those of us with high interest in both the editorial and business sides) will have a different flavor too. Dubbed MediaXchange, it combines what used to be three meetings — an annual marketing conference, a trade show for vendors and a publisher’s convention.
The program has a forward spin with the kickoff speaker Rishad Tobaccowala, an Internet marketing futurist quoted frequently in Jeff Jarvis’s book, “What Would Google Do?” Amy Webb, a digital trend spotter, will present (and at ASNE’s meeting too).
Gone from both conferences are concurrent sessions sponsored by the Associated Press, which decided to hold a separate annual meeting in New York on April 29.
While the convention programs will be all about mobile, tablets, the paid online debate and digital opportunities, short-term advertising prospects are on every publisher’s mind (and a lively concern now for editors too).
On that score, the tidings are only modestly cheering. Carat, one of the two most prominent advertising agency forecasters, issued a revised prediction this week that total advertising spending in the United States will grow a tiny 0.2 percent in 2010. With at least some share continuing to shift away from newspapers, the industry’s ad revenues would remain in negative territory this year if Carat is right.
Sturm said that NAA’s most recent internal forecast is also for a modest decrease for the year, though he added that in recent weeks newspaper advertising has been “trending in the right direction” at a better-than-expected pace.
So neither expansion or certain prospects of business improvement later are in place yet. Still, compared to the frightening advertising free fall 18 months or a year ago, newspaper execs can be forgiven if down-a-little looks like the new up.