There was a lot to absorb and to like in Poynter's two-day conference last week on "Who Will Pay for the News?" But my personal highlight reel begins with a micro-example from a small site.
Mike Orren, publisher of
Pegasus News in Dallas, related that he was stunned not long ago when a wine shop paid him $1,000 to send 100 e-mails inviting selected readers to a promotional event.
That "ridiculous" price, Orren said, has everything to do with Pegasus' system of identifying interests of those users who let the site monitor their reading habits in exchange for customization. (Listen to the audio clip at the end of this article to hear Orren describe Pegasus News' approach.) Hence, it wasn't too hard to pick out wine enthusiasts on the same side of town as the store. I would also bet that the shop has made plenty more than $1,000 selling its wares to those who came to the tasting and to their wine-loving friends.
A curious little thing, to be sure, but... There's a huge issue at stake for newspaper organizations. Can they better target ads in a variety of digital formats to justify charging multiples more than the current soft rates for generic online space? That will be key to finding their way to a new business model that can sustain ambitious newsgathering.
Earlier in the conference Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president of Hearst's newspaper division, had sketched the ambitions of a partnership between Yahoo and 700 newspapers, which aims to accelerate the stalled banner ad business by providing both more placements and higher rates. Millstein and Art Howe, CEO of Verve Wireless, also spoke of the potential of the nascent business of serving news summaries and advertising to mobile devices, whose monthly traffic numbers are headed up like a space shot.
It is no sure thing that what works at a startup boutique will scale up to the newspaper industry, which has billions in ongoing revenue losses to plug. However as I listened to Orren, whom I met by phone a few months ago,
Minnpost.com's Joel Kramer, whom I've known for more than 40 years, and Paul Steiger, whose leadership of
The Wall Street Journal and now
ProPublica commands respect, I was impressed not just by their smarts and and the boldness of their ventures. They also seem to be learning very quickly.
For instance, after just a year, Kramer said, he has found that readers of a regional site are more interested in national and international news than he had imagined, and that blogs and an informal writing style (with attitude) draw the big traffic. And he has found his way to a $30,000 site-within-a-site sponsorship, a boost to MinnPost's modest advertising base. (Kramer discusses his business strategy in an audio clip below.)
Orren and Kramer separately discovered that high-quality video, originally part of their content mix, has proven prohibitively expensive and doesn't generate as much viewership as hoped. (I hear enough of the same from editors of mainstream newspaper sites to wonder whether there is a firm sense emerging yet of what works and what doesn't in posted videos.)
Online is less central to Steiger's venture, but I got from him too a strong sense of learn-as-you-go. ProPublica is striking relationships, story by story, with newspaper and television partners. The organization also is trying to ensure that each piece is followed up so that these investigative stories don't fade away. (Steiger discusses ProPublica's niche in the audio clip below.)
I would attribute the fast learning curve to several factors. Online traffic measures provide a feedback loop lots faster and more exact than, say, trying to see how readers respond to a print redesign. In each of these three startups, the chief executive is right on top of every detail. And (like a number of other new and not-even-launched ventures represented at the conference), the principals are plunging ahead with what futurist John Naisbitt used to call "partially-baked ideas," letting refinements follow later.
Is there something internal still holding many back? Could the likes of Pegasus, MinnPost and ProPublica happen "inside the box" of a traditional organization? Do layers of administration and multiple departments still slow the learning loop, at a time when it obviously must be quickened?
Thanks for the clarification, Mike, and a reminder to me...
