Old media PINned In by new technologies

ForArgyll tweeted from the Scottish Local Newspaper Summit on Friday (12th February) at Glasgow’s Atlantic Quay, using a Blackberry Curve with 3G internet connection and a Bluetooth Freedom Keyboard.

Had there been a wireless network, we would have twittered using either Safari on a MacBook Pro or a Sony Vaio using Google’s Chrome Browser. Three OS’s, four devices, one outcome.

This is the media landscape we are now working in — we can author articles on a variety of devices using a variety of networks and create lasting value.

We do not necessarily need a print output — we can have it, but at the expense of our reader’s cartridges, not that of our publishing company.

And we don’t really encourage printing either, if only because the more paper and ink that is used the larger our carbon footprint.

Virtual Overheads

Our tweeting also highlights the other great advantage producers of news have now, no overheads other than 3G connection, wireless broadband and … well, household utility bills.

Frankly to do the job we are now doing twenty years ago would have been financially impossible. ForArgyll is a topographically disunited virtual office of homeworkers (I’m writing this on foresaid netbook directly into the backend of WordPress at my kitchen table waiting for the potatoes to boil ready for lunch).

It means we have no Bob Murdoch breathing down out necks, no imperative to a daily or weekly issue – but a constant drive to keep news, information and features coming and an ongoing and thorough commitment to our readership.

We don’t have presses to stop or distribution networks to maintain – only a monthly hosting bill, which is negligible, given our reach.

When we began and for some time afterwards, the issue of whether we should have premises was a live one. Three points swung the decision against:

• cost – having to earn to cover overheads before we were free to do anything else
• fidelity to the reality of online operations of this kind – the big issue being freedom from a core location
• the nature of Argyll:  de-centred – multicentred – and far flung. Every possible location would exclude.

So we exist in cyberspace. Our core team, our editors and contributors work from where they are. Some we’ve not yet physically met – except through email. We are a thorough-going online operation.

And the evidence for the rightness of the decision? No one has yet asked ‘where’ we are. We’re here. Anyone can reach us here, now and free.

Responsiveness, interactivity, social responsibility and a new journalism

And of course, another of the new media advantages, as we outlined in our article on Friday on the Local Newspaper Summit, we can be more responsive to our reader’s feedback.

• We look at search terms being used to reach us.
• We look at which stories are popular and make sure we follow threads that are being viewed.
• We can follow more sporadically topics which we can see immediately turn users off.
• We can persist with topics which have a social, historical or political value, even though they may attract small audiences. This gives us a series of niche audiences for whom, in some cases, we are the only source of continuing information and debate. This strategy of inclusion enables a very real educational function.
• We have seen our stories become issue-based forums in their own right, some developing a life of their own, many adding significantly to the body of information available.
• We came to understand quite quickly that this energetic take up of the Comment facility by our audiences liberated us to explore a new journalism. If, say, a public sector action or decision is clearly wrongheaded, we don’t need to take time and space to harvest and publish feeble defences of the indefensible. We can say it like it is – and we do. Anyone with evidence and opinions to the contrary is free to add these in response. (We have only ever blocked two responses in moderation of submitted comments – one was racist and one a viciously unpleasant personal attack on a third party.)
• And we certainly take note when the Google Adverts we are running give us big revenue hikes — though whether we do anything about it is another matter. We are very sensitive to the real and apparent compromise of accepting – and coming to rely upon – advertising from quarters whose operations we will at times need to subject to stout scrutiny.

Never before have the two sides of the journalistic equation, writers and readers, had so many ways to interact with each other, nor been closer to one another.

The consequences of the democratic enabling of participation from all quarters has been – is – a revelation. It raises all sorts of issues around political evolution.

It also creates an active ‘ownership’ of our service. Many contributors through the Comment facility have become known in their own right and their input is awaited – and sought – with an much enthusiasm as the formal provision.

Open Attitude

The consumption of news is now more diverse than ever: we have 3G phones, including colloquially termed ‘Crackberries’ and the hugely appetising iPhone. We have Kindles, iPads and Tablets. We have netbooks, laptops, desktops and TVs.

On all of these we can read, view and interact with the news, with journalism, with photography and with video. This panoply of devices might seem a challenge to cater for. It might be had we, like so many of the larger and more slow-moving traditional media outlets, chosen to use proprietary software developed by an expensive contractor.

We didn’t because we realised while we are good at news, mouthing off and generally being vocal, we’re not good at developing hugely complex multi-device software applications (Oh, and we didn’t have the budget).

So, like the New York Times, we decided to go open source and use WordPress. We therefore display well on IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera as well as mobile (log onto our site with a 3G phone and you’ll find it’s all there, looking lovely but very different).

We feed into Twitter, Facebook and Flickr- seamlessly, while also having the ability to display any media from any source anywhere on the net.

The beauty of this is that we don’t need to think about writing more code to add more capability — the open source community is out there thinking ahead for us, writing the software, testing it and then releasing it to us — and for free too.

How can the traditional print industry compete with this? Well, if they’re anything like the New York Times, by joining the Open Source user community.

But do they? Well, largely no. An honourable local exception here is the Dunoon Observer which has taken the plunge with an installation of the open source CMS Joomla, unlike The Oban Times who have gone with a proprietary system.

OMGs and LOMMs

Against this background, where a small part-time (joke) team can create a useful (we hope), timely (ie really fresh) and free-to-air news resource, it is no wonder the Old Media Giants (OMGs) and Local Old Media Minnows (LOMMs) are starting to get worried.

Not only are they tied to the ongoing momentum of cost (and therefore debt) that the printing presses and distribution networks necessitate, they are looking at rivals who, while competent, have not the news-gathering breadth and yet are still winning both readership and advertising revenue from their bigger, ostensibly more capable rivals who invest more money in news-gathering itself.

The OMGs are caught at the cusp of a huge change, one that, in a decade, will see the virtual demise of daily print media, and (probably) the side-lining of magazines.

This is a huge opportunity, and one which, like Music Industry members before them, they are unable to grasp because they are so financially committed to the physical media world. (That’s unable, not [eventually] unwilling).

The LOMMs however may be able to move more quickly – and tend to, given the local media response. However in these cases, print still leads the effort.

Steve Jobs will Save the Day, won’t he?

iTunes has been the triumph of the new paid for world for audio and it’s certain Steve Jobs will try to corral news media into his iBooks outlet as much as he is able.

This is where the OMG’s are pinning their hopes. This is wishful, if not prayerful, thinking.

Jobs may be the pin-up boy for the tech corner. He may be viewed with reverence by his fan-boys (and there are some illustrious names among that fraternity). He may create beautiful pieces of tech, but he can’t possibly take 70%+ of the written news market.

Most of it is already beyond his reach because it’s already accessible.

What he will get though are the OMGs who are still wedded to fixed, graphically precise page renderings, to this old MO, to the old production process, to offices filled to brimming with journalists, lay-out artists, sub-editors, copy-editors and all the other staff.

This will be a big coup, but it still won’t save the OMGs, not in Scotland at least.

No. To navigate successfully into more stable financial waters and to ensure the longevity of their brand, these news outlets will have to significantly re-organise, re-invest and find a way to service their crippling debts by making money online.

In our view this is the crucial movement that we saw stoutly resisted at the Local News Summit on Friday. Because of this resistance born of dependence on the old ways of working and making money, there is a new breed of surivors and pioneers who will take the markets.

They are the local, more nimble print providers, the new online-only outfits, and the journalist-only based enterprises. These have the best chance, in the next ten years or so, of solving the financial conundrum presently brought into sharp relief by the PINs debate in Scotland and the failure of so many papers down south. (Here one could draw a direct correlation between broadband penetration and print-media readership fall off).

Only these will be able to concentrate on delivering the core service, the audience-driver — you know, the News.

No Middle Ground

In this analysis we are looking at losing the regional papers, even the Scottish national papers and being left with a vibrant local news, amalgamated by RSS or curated online by a savvy set of enterprise-led editors.

There will be:

• those occupying the middle ground and providing regional-level stories
• three or four UK-national dailies who will have weathered the storm by serving increasingly varied media types, and moving into the space presently being carved out by the BBC – the Guardian and the Times Online immediately spring to mind as good examples of this.

For the rest, the financial drag effect caused by distribution and print will prove fatal and the news-gathering expertise will migrate into freelance microcells providing copy for a wide-range of of niche and local text-media providers.

The printers will be occupied with the movement toward print-on-demand for books, photo albums and the like.

Only the owners and management will be left twiddling their thumbs, thinking about what might have been if they had jumped on the idea of a national local news curation service, as we have suggested. Hmm…

Charles Dixon-Spain, Director and Internet Services Director