The Scotsman is dying. So is The Herald. Here are some notes towards a plan to save them – and all newspapers. I’d like to see a consortium to put this into practice and save Scotland’s native, quality, national press for the nation. This isn’t born out of delusion but rather a few discussions I’ve had with like-minded senior journalists who believe that the money can be raised and that this is last chance to save these two titles.

A merger of sorts

Nobody likes this option but nearly everyone agrees it’s the way forward. In its most commonly described form, this is not the solution, however, merely a way of buying a little time for both publications. As things currently stand, if one title took over the other it would pick up so few readers and advertisers as to render the exercise pointless.

However, there is a cleverer way: merge the businesses but keep the titles largely separate. This would involve cutting costs by streamlining the “backroom” functions of both organisations: sales, IT, printing, etc.

Scotland has in it enough talented journalists to make one world-class newsroom strong enough to send the tartanised English editions hameward to think again. With this in mind, some parts of the papers themselves could be “merged” in the sense that the same content for these sections would appear in both papers. The aim here would not be to cut costs but to increase quality. While The Herald and Scotsman have distinct voices when it comes to Scottish news, politics, business, opinion and maybe sport but UK news, foreign news, TV listings and features could be shared between them, if it meant the coverage of these areas was better.

However, this will only work if the economic model behind the papers changes.

A matter of trust

There is no point in someone buying The Scotsman and/or Herald and trying to run them at Johnston Press/Gannett profit levels. The days of screwing 20-35% profit margins out of papers are dead for ever.

Similarly, there is not much point in the papers being bought by a billionaire with an agenda. The Scotsman has already been through that with the Barclays and Andrew Neil. What is required is a set-up that guarantees editorial independence, sustainable returns and reinvestment for the long-term health of the business. This means a trust, along the lines of the ones that own the Irish Times and The Guardian.

Web first

The first thing both papers need to sort out is the online dimension. The Herald site has always been an embarrassment (though it’s classifieds brands, especially S1jobs, are strong). And  scotsman.com was a tremendous property until Johnston Press got involved.

There is still a lot of potential for substantial online revenue, if the sites are managed correctly. Despite the best efforts of JP, scotsman.com is still visited by some two million unique users a month, the Herald by 500,000.

Design: Obviously the sites need to look and work a whole lot better. They should be tag-based sites that offer related articles (naturally), rating, sharing, “most read”, “latest comments”, trackbacks and basically all the functionality we associate with Wordpress and other blogging software.

Archives: Every single article possible from the past should be published online. This will drive online revenue from existing editorial assets.

Online first: Stories should be published online first. We want to avoid telling people things that they’ve already known for 18 hours. Reader reaction can then inform what appears in print the next day and help move stories forward. A lot of effort should be put into online only features which drive content to older material. Lists, guides and galleries are wonderful tools for doing this.

Comment: In one year, scotsman.com received 700,000 reader comments, the vast majority of which added a great deal to the value of the site – and its revenue. Comment is a vital tool for any serious online publisher. What scotsman.com lacked and what the Herald’s 9-5 moderators fail to provide is proper moderation. A system will need to be devised to encourage lively debate but keep the “green inkies” at bay.

User generated content: The best way to get people to buy a paper is to put their names in it. And the best way to make them feel valued and involved is to tell their stories. This is not some web2-fanboy suggestion for a reader-written paper. (The skills of writing grammatically, spelling properly, identifying interesting information and presenting it clearly are restricted to a tiny proportion of the population – and not enough journalists.) It is a recognition that we need to get closer to the readers by using their words and pictures. We experimented with this at scotsman.com and it worked very well.

Learn from traffic: scotsman.com was one of Google News’s top 30 sites worldwide. We acheived this by seeing what worked and doing more of it. I’m not suggesting that the Scottish papers of the future should only write stories about sex and kittens but they should take a more analytical approach to what they commission.

Getting clever about online revenue

Many of the new models for journalism being touted (for instance, by Jeff Jarvis) don’t take into account the fact that professional journalists actually want to make a living.

The reason for this is that there is a key problem for online content. For a site to be successful it needs to have unique content, quality content, lots of content and content that does not cost more than the revenue it generates. This is an impossible square to circle. However, The Scotsman and Herald have opportunities to round off the edges a bit.

Get the basics right: First of all, they should be able to properly monetise their existing properties. Certainly, scotsman.com has not been backed up by a sophisticated online advertising team.

Maximise sponsorship: The beauty of a tag-based site is that every keyword becomes a sponsorship opportunity, with the option for each tag’s landing page to be associated with an advertiser. Other properties, such as RSS feeds and email newsletters, are rich sources of ad revenue.

US market: At its height, scotsman.com was attracting 4 million unique users a month (ABCe audited figures). Unsurprisingly, most of that traffic did not come from Scotland but the vast majority of advertising effort went into UK advertising.  A concerted attempt to reach the more lucrative US market with imaginative products should yield very healthy ad revenue.

Hyperlocal ads: Closer to home, not enough effort has been made to make cheap adverts work for small businesses online. There needs to be a realisation that “no ad is too small”.

Reinventing print

Print will never die: The internet does not mean the death of print. It does not mean the death of newspapers. What it means is a reinvention of how print fits into the economic model. Aside from its permanence and intrinsic romance, there will always be a demand for a print product of some kind. Print has advantages over new media in some areas, especially when it comes to consuming longer articles and complex information. However, some things need to change.

More meat, less filler: I heartily recommend Drew Curtis’s “It’s not news, it’s Fark – how mainstream media tries to pass crap off as news” as an exercise in learning what’s wrong with our industry. The days of recycling PA and agency copy to fill space are dead. News agencies big and small frequently post their news stories online so those stories are “out there” hours before their retreaded versions appear on the newspaper stands.

Digests, depth and your paper:

The newspaper of the (very near) future will offer summaries of the stories that people can find elsewhere. It will serve as a resource to point readers towards interesting nuggets in the vast landslide of information they are faced with.

The paper should then offer in-depth coverage of its own exclusives (remember them?) and a couple of major issues of the day. By in-depth, I mean lavish, luscious coverage designed to inform, entertain and amaze – outdoing the tartan editions of the London press.

In terms of sales, the Scottish press needs to learn from the Metro. Cheap news that has been regurgitated from PA is judged to have no value by the market. It is given away free. It is therefore no longer reasonable to ask people to pay for products filled with this kind of material.

However, valuable lessons can be learned from the Metro phenomenon. There is a place for free print products. But these should be thought of mainly as a promotional tool for the main revenue generators: the website and the main printed product.

A key lesson of the collapse in newspaper sales is that tens of thousands of people are no longer willing to spend about a £1 a day for news.

However, I believe there is a market for print as a prestige purchase. Readers like to identify themselves as Scotsman or Herald readers – despite the decline in quality of these titles. There is value here – if a product can be created that feels like it is in the premium bracket. Thanks to advances if print technology papers can now offer personalised editions. Rather than have to buy the “shotgun” mix of stories and sections, readers can be given “their” version of the paper. In my case that would be all the news sections, sport and opinion. (I have no need of re-Heated celeb features.) If that paper was delivered to my home I would be prepared to pay extra for it.

Such personalisation would be carried out online at the moment that the user subscribed to the paper. It is important to note that, despite the stubbornness of UK papers, home delivery is the only way to lock in readers. We have to lower the barriers to them buying the product and that means making it as convenient as possible.

Conclusion

So there’s my plan. Chuck rocks at it. Mock it. But remember that no matter how far-fetched or unreasonable it seems it still makes far more sense than trying to save your business by making the product weaker.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

As one who believes in high-quality niche content, I’ve long been a fan of of the video game comic/commentary/community Penny Arcade. (In fact, I keep trying to slip John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory into presentations to clients curious about user interaction.)

I was therefore heartened and impressed by this post from the aforementioned Gabe about their attitude to advertising on the Penny Arcade (apologies for the lengthy quote, it’s worth it):

Other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That’s fine but that’s not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why..

No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won’t run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time.

When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn’t very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.

We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn’t turn out as good as we hoped.

How great is that? How sensible is that? They regard ads as part of the content of their site and they vet products before they carry ads for them. If they then carry negative reviews, the games companies just have to suck it up. And why do these powerful organisations suck it up? They suck it up because ads on Penny Arcade out-perform ads on other sites. And why does that happen? Because Penny Arcade’s users trust what they see on the site. And they trust the ads precisely because the products are vetted and honestly reviewed.

Penny Arcade’s been around a long time and is a huge success. They really know what they’re doing. In that one post, Gabe and Tycho demonstrate far more commercial nous than many advertising people I’ve encountered.

Imagine similar conversations at a newspaper: “You want a full-colour wraparound advertising your ‘crack cocaine for kids’ casino open day? You want it to look like it’s the real front page of our paper? You want to spend £200? No way, we’re a respectable family publication. Oh, you said £2,000. Hey, sure, no problem. We’ll throw in the editor’s mum posing nude with a donkey as well.”

Let’s focus on Gabe’s key phrase: “Our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills.” Maybe if newspapers had the spine to adopt that attitude their sales wouldn’t be going down the toilet.

When I’m on the move I read content through my Nokia E61 (left), which has a 320 x 240 pixel screen. It is certainly easier to read text on it than on a standard mobile phone but given the choice I’d still rather read paper. And this is what I think users will find with the Kindle. Yes, it’s more portable than a computer. Yes, it’s more readable than a phone or PDA. But it’s still not as convenient or pleasant to read as a book.

However, Amazon are incentivising their product with some clever pricing. They’re selling Kindle versions of books cheaper than the printed products (Run by Ann Patchett is $6 cheaper). This is where the advantage of the Kindle lies. Without printing and distribution costs, ebooks can costs a lot less. The success of Amazon’s reader will depend on whether the diminished ease-of-reading offer by a screen versus a book is offset by the lower price.

All this gets interesting for journalists because, as well as 80,000+ books, the Amazon Kindle offers access to the following:

• Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
• Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times.
• More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post.

It is worth noting that all of these are paid for services – unlike the web versions of these publications.

This aspect of the Kindle is particularly interesting because many in journalism have predicted the coming of a convergence device that combined readability with portability and provide better revenue models than the web. One such expert is new media sage Vin Crosbie (now Adjunct Professor of Visual and Interactive Communications at Syracuse University) who was quoted thus in the Online Journalism Review in 2002:

Vin Crosbie … goes so far as to predict that Web publishing will be subsumed and overwhelmed by a third wave of electronic publishing. (The first wave of proprietary online services, brought to you by Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online in the 1980s and early ’90s, was followed by the Web’s second wave.)

And what will make up this killer third wave? “Pervasive portable media,” says Crosbie, a media consultant in Greenwich, Conn. “The Web will become the lesser online medium for commercial publications beginning in the second half of this decade.”

Next-generation portable devices — which are just now hitting store shelves — will have several built-in advantages over the Web as a publishing medium, he says. Chief among them:

* They’re push media. Third-wave online newspaper editions will be delivered to devices wirelessly and automatically each day (up to several times a day) instead of relying on the user to fetch the news one page at a time. Even the most successful online newspaper, The New York Times on the Web, sees the average user stop by only 3.6 days a month, according to the Times’ latest stats.

* Prospects for advertising are more favorable. On the Web, publishers face a bottomless advertising hole with ads that are noisy, distracting and ignored. On a mobile device, newspaper editions can be formatted in a graphical layout that locks in a limited amount of display ad space, commanding premium rates.

* For the most part, the Web requires us to be tethered to a PC or laptop. Not so online publishing for mobile devices. We’re a mobile society, and we’d like to take our digital news with us.

The coming mobile revolution will require newsrooms to undergo a sea change in strategic thinking.

“Eight years ago, when you talked about online publishing, the mission for online news publishers was to use any combination of software and online technologies to promulgate the newspaper’s mission,” Crosbie says in a phone interview. “Since then, those efforts have calcified so that online publishing now means Web publishing. Newspapers have got to stop the tunnel vision and go back to original concept: Online publishing is the Web plus many other things.”

Of course, things have moved on in the five years since that article was written. RSS feeds have made the point about push vs pull redundant. The rise of mobile phones with half decent screens and the arrival of handheld gaming devices with internet access both mean that accessing the web no longer requires anyone to be tethered to anything.

However, the point about advertising display and layout of content remains valid half a decade on. This is important because the big problem for newspapers is plugging the gap between falling offline revenues and much smaller – though growing – online revenues. Perhaps the Kindle is another faltering step towards a device that will square that particular circle.

That said, the model for newspapers on the Kindle is not the answer. I can get the New York Times free through my Nokia’s web browser. Why would I pay to read it on a slightly bigger screen?

Do you know why [newspapers are] screwed? It’s actually not the cost of paper, ink, trucks, printing plants, and other physical distribution expenses. Rather, it’s the cost of content creation.

Memo to hacks everywhere: when he says “cost of content creation”, he means “your salary”.

His calculations are solid and his assumptions valid. With very very few exceptions, online ad revenues generated by pieces of online content do not cover the cost of creating that content. That means when offline revenues fall (and fall they will), you’re – to use Blodget’s pithy phrase – “screwed”.

So what to do?

Hope current online ad revenues for news organistions increase enough to match offline ones? If you’re hoping like that, hope me a solid gold, eco-friendly Lamborghini Countach, the results will be the same.

Charge for content? In my experience this guarantees such a small audience that articles generate less revenue than if they were free and attracting ad revenue. Don’t just take my word for it. Ask the Noo Yoik Times.

Get a job stacking shelves and be a journalist part-time? To hear some people tell it, this is the future of journalism – amateur enthusiasts sleuthing through local issues, posting stories for prestige. There is a problem with this and not many people will thank me for pointing this out: the ability to collect information, sort it in a coherent way, present it an intelligent fashion that is entertaining, grammatical and spelled correctly is restricted to a very small segment of the population – and not enough journalists.

Amid all the (justified) excitement about blogging it is worth remembering that the vast majority of news-related blogs link to stories by professional journalists. So, after the economic meltdown of mass media, who will write the original stories for others to link to? Quis blogodiet ipsos blogodes?

The reader demand is clearly for quality journalism. Who will produce this if there are no longer professional reporters? The role of bloggers, citizen journalists and user-generated content is assured. But the current online economic models have no place for full-time experts who want to make a living out of content creation.