A Year In Consumption

Posted by Jacob Harris Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:43:32 GMT

This year, as an experiment I started living in public. By this, I don’t mean I jumped into the online exhibitionist extreme that seems to be required for MySpace users, but I have started tracking my media consumption of books/movies/music online. So, as a short post to tide everyone over until I gird myself to continue the never-ending newspapers series, here’s a review of my year in media.

In the last year, I read approximately 63 books, of which the most notable were:

• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson
• The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers
• La Perdida, by Jessica Abel
• Maps of the Imagination, by Peter Turchi
• Rip It Up And Start Again, by Simon Reynolds

This last year I also saw approximately 67 movies and TV shows (new and rentals), of which the following 5 were the best, in no ranked order:

• The New World
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Aguirre, The Wrath of God
• Grizzly Man
• Veronica Mars, seasons 1&2

Finally, here were the top 10 bands I listened to last year, courtesy of last.fm

• Boards of Canada
• Xela
• Sigur Rós
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Ms. John Soda
• Thom Yorke
• The American Analog Set
• Ulrich Schnauss
• Aphex Twin
• Ladytron

Anyhow, there you have it; my life as a consumer for one year (but am I going to go see movies this weekend? Yes!) Anyhow, happy new year and see you all next year! If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more books to read.

Posted in Books, Music, Miscellaneous | 4 comments

My NYTIIH Score, Year Two

Posted by Jacob Harris Wed, 27 Dec 2006 20:05:00 GMT

It’s that time of the year again, when the air gets a certain crispness, snatches of holiday song fill the air, and everybody communes with their friends and family, joined in warmth by their shared commitment to one thing: figuring out their New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score. For those of you who missed this last year, I’ve started the personal tradition of reading through the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year In Ideas issue and tabulating how many of the collected phenomena I had known about beforehand. This is no mere game; a sufficiently high score is the only thing that allows me to still bask in the comfort of being “with it”, so please appreciate the seriousness of this moment.

I’ve been a bit late coming to the game this year (it’s been a really busy December), but now is the moment of truth and a big game day question: Now that I actually work at the Times, how will that affect my score? On the one hand, I am that much closer to the elitist, liberal, intellectual mindset the Times is so renowned for, so that should conceivably help my score. But – and I am painfully aware of the irony here – I find myself with so much less time to read the news these days now that I’m actually working for it, which might detract from my score.

If you’ve never read the Year in Ideas issue, give it a gander and see how much you recognize. I’m sure there will be some things you recognize a little, some you’ve known for years (as the picture shows, I’m very aware that shipping containers explain everything), and some things that will completely surprise you. And if you’re feeling competitive, tally up your score and see how intellectually hip you are. My results follow:

There you have it. A total score of 46 out of 74, for a NYTYIIH score of 55.4%! Given the wide-ranging scope of ideas, this might seem decent enough, except last year I scored an impressive 65.38%. Oh the humanity! I guess I’m now longer the idea hipster/coolhunter I thought I was. But can you do better?

Posted in Silly | Tags ideas, nytimes | no comments

Advertising The Future Newspaper

Posted by Jacob Harris Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:56:00 GMT

And now for the second post in this minor series All The News Fit To Serve wherein the blogger attempts to parlay a passing knowledge of the newspaper business into an exploration of how newspapers might change in the Web age. As it should go without saying, these are my opinions, and do not reflect any thinking at my employer or any actual strategy being taken there. Just needed to clear that up. That said, on with the show! This post’s theme: advertising, or how “old media” is not so much different than new media when it comes to bringing home the bacon.

Analyzing the newspaper business today is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, print circulation continues to decline and the recent drop suggested a more extreme decline may be in the future. Net wisdom decries newspapers as ailing dinosaurs doomed to extinction by 2014. On the other hand, papers still enjoy healthy profit margins and often monopoly status in local markets that gives them an advantage in covering a local area unmatched by anyone. Still, newspapers have seen some unsettling drops in readership and the decline in classifieds might be a troubling portent. On the other hand, newspapers are far from finsished and the warning signs have actually helped some papers to retrench and repair wasteful processes. In terms of readership, ewspapers still enjoy esteemed and privileged positions in their local markets that are still worth a lot, but Wall Street is alarmed whenever at the anemic growth or even retreat many papers are suffering. Putting it more simply:

1. The glass is half full
2. But the water level is dropping at an accelerating rate

And now every paper is trying to figure out how to refill the glass. But why is declining readership such a concern for newspapers? It helps to understand how the business operates.

You might assume that papers are supported largely by subscription fees and the decline in print readership is troubling because of decline in that revenue. But for many papers, subscriptions only offset delivery and printing costs; indeed, it is possible for some small urban papers to even make a business giving away their product for free! Rather, subscriptions have the unusual property in that they are meaningless as money, but essential as a quantity. Because the real value of circulation is to set the advertising rates.

Like many Web sites, the dominant driver of revenue for newspapers is advertising. Of course, there are sometimes a few other minor revenue streams (licensing, royalties, books), but advertising is such a dominant revenue source that you can directly gauge the health of a paper by the advertising rates it can charge. And since the value of an advertising in a paper is largely determined by the size of the audience it reaches, advertising rates (and advertising profits) are directly influenced by the circulation of the paper. Advertising has been exceedingly good for newspapers – the total ad market for papers is estimated at $45 billion – but the writing is on the wall. Classifieds (another form of advertising) have already precipitously declined, and it’s only a matter of time before commercial advertisers follow suit. The party is over; this is why the papers are getting scared.

There is some good news on the horizon though. Internet readership of papers has been climbing steadily and ad rates are expected to continue increasing at a phenomenal rate – next year, internet advertising is expected to increase by 29% while traditional media advertising will increase only an anemic 1-2% – and some papers like the New York Times have built online web sites that reach a global audience and dwarf the readership of their printed versions. A lot of geeks read these trends and argue that papers should save themselves today by discarding the printed product and surviving off websites only, but such a move would only be suicide for any paper foolish enough to try it today.

The catch is for all its promise, Internet advertising is nowhere near the profitability of print advertising – optimistic estimates suggest it might be there in 10 years. This gap is simply stunning to casual pundits like me who think the Web is a ready equivalent to anything in traditional media. Why is this disparity so great? I think it has to do with a few different factors. One possibility is that Internet advertising is not attractive enough to traditional print advertisers yet, perhaps because of its perceived limitations (you just can’t buy a flashy three-page spread in the first few pages of the Magazine online). In addition, unlike print advertising, no single entity has a monopoly in a local ad market on the Internet. Which belies another difference between the two ad markets: the print version is local, the web version is global. I think it will take a while for some advertisers to want to reach the latter.

All is not bad for for Web advertising however. As stated before, web ads are able to reach sheer numbers of people inconceivable for any print publication today and at all times of the day and night, so some profits might be made in volume. Newspapers could also conceivably farm out web advertising to outside sources too who might have a better chance selling to Internet-savvy advertisers (Google is certainly hoping for this). The main advantage of online advertising in the long run will prove to be demographics however, and how intelligently newspapers are able to target them. The audience for a print ad can only be considered as an aggregate average, since the same ad goes to every subscriber, be they rich or poor, urban or suburban, dog owners and/or video game players and/or coffee drinkers. But the beauty of Internet advertising is that you can target the ads to the consumers more likely to respond to them – I am still talking about marketing to aggregate groups and not individuals (that gets a little too much into privacy), but the groups are much smaller here. This might make Internet advertising rates eventually exceed those of print ads. Newspapers would be foolish to ignore this opportunity. Which is why every newspaper at this point seems to require users to register. As an anonymous reader, you’re worth so very little to advertisers; as a 27-year old female from the Midwest, you (as part of an advertising group) might be worth much more. More readers and better marketing might help to make up for the decline in print readership.

But the real kicker is that for many newspapers, the website will never be able to close the gap.

Online readership growth for any paper must eventually reach a stable plateau where it starts to level off. How do you increase readership to greater levels beyond that? One possibility is to increase the paper’s website to be more than the news. The New York Times has followed this idea and unveiled sites for interactive applications like movies, travel, and home finance. Another possibility it acquiring outside media sites like About.com (NY Times) and Slate (Washington Post). This helps to some degree, but it can also seem like developing portals in an age where portals are no longer relevant. Personally, I think the opposite approach might be the wave of the future. Stop expecting your readers to live their online lives at your websites and distribute your content to them all over the web. But that’s a topic for the next post.

Posted in Web, Newspapers | Tags advertising, newspapers | 1 comment