The Rise of Mobile Media - and why it matters
Graduate Liberal Studies project, Duke University, May 2011
The Internet age arrived for me at my daughter’s birthday party. She was just years old that day in 2005, and I was hardly worried about the web, mobile media and the future of journalism as kids toddled around our yard one cool Saturday afternoon in October.
But fall afternoons mean football, and there were games in stadiums across North Carolina. My next-door neighbor was a graduate of Wake Forest University, and I wondered aloud how the Deacons were doing that day.
Let’s see, he said, as he pulled out his mobile phone. He clicked over to ESPN.com and then told me the in-game score.
I was dumbfounded.
I had worked at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., since 1982, and by 2005 I was an assigning editor in charge of most of our college coverage. But it never occurred to me that a fan would want information right then, and not be waiting for scores on television that night or in the paper the next day.
But I got it. I realized what had just happened. I knew right then the world was changing and many of us in the established media were desperately unprepared. I ran to my basement, clicked on our old computer and checked The News & Observer’s bare-bones website. There were no updates from the local games that day, let alone a school two hours away like Wake Forest.
First thing Monday morning, I went to see the managing editor, John Drescher. I said we were behind on the web and we had to act with urgency. I thought we had to dedicate a sports reporter to the web and establish ourselves there before a competitor claimed that space. I made the same argument with the Sports Editor, Sherry Johnson, when she arrived later that day.
She agreed. We acted, but it was never enough to keep pace with all the changes that were happening. The News & Observer would continue to make incremental moves on the web, but never the bold strokes required to claim that space.
Meanwhile, Capitol Broadcasting Co. Inc. in Raleigh pushed hard on the web and claimed a dominant position with its website, WRAL.com. By 2007, I was working for Capitol Broadcasting myself, managing sports and moving a television-only staff into a multi-media operation. While the WRAL News operation had embraced the multi-media age, the Sports department had not. It was, like at The News & Observer, a long, hard push to move a veteran department that direction.
But while established media companies were trying to change, technology was changing even faster. We arrive in 2011 dazzled by iPads and the sudden rise of tablets and mobile technology. News consumers who once awoke to coffee and the newspaper now scroll over their RSS feeds in bed in the morning.
As Apple boasted when the iPad arrived, “This changes everything.” Perhaps not everything, but news consumers now have unprecedented mobility and immediate access to information.
The arrival of mobile media on such an accessible scale is a change that ranks with other seismic shifts in news consumption – the arrival of radio, of broadcast television, of cable television and of the Internet. Those changes would alter old habits and create new ones.
The newspaper industry survived the advance of radio, broadcast TV and cable TV but found its knees buckling when the Internet – with its ability to move text so quickly – undermined the morning newspaper. What is consistent across the news industry, whether broadcast or print, is many media companies have been slow to embrace change, and are forfeiting market share – and revenues – to emerging media.
Some recent start-ups have roared to powers that were unthinkable in their early days. ESPN is more valuable than its parent, ABC, a reality unthinkable when ESPN was began operation in a muddy field near Bristol, Conn., in 1979 and many wondered if people would really consume news all day long. In November of 2010, The Daily Beast website effectively acquired Newsweek magazine, a stunning coup for a new media company.
Some new media outlets, born in the digital era, are free of expensive infrastructure and unburdened by heavy debt. They are also uninhibited by traditional approaches and more willing to embrace the rhythms of web. While traditional media outlets must shift to remain viable, the established companies run the risk of being like the Blockbuster stores that once dotted America – too entrenched in one way of business to change with consumer tastes.
The winners in the days ahead will focus on niches and appeal to mobile audiences. That’s a difficult change for news organizations that have relied on mass and their legacy products, which are not mobile devices. News organizations are not the only companies that struggle with change, as I will detail in the first chapter. And through the use of three in-depth case studies, we will look at one newspaper that fell behind in the digital space, one dominant television brand that embraced the new era, and one start-up website that found a profitable niche.
This paper will argue that while some pillars of the current media landscape will survive, they have inherent disadvantages. In fact, the news organizations that thrive in the coming environment may be the ones, existing now and yet to come, that were born digital.
CHAPTER 1: A business dilemma
The fact that established businesses have crumbled under the weight of technological changes is not new. The eight-track tapes and vinyl records that once had a proud place in American dens are now just gathering dust in attics – if they are even kept in attics at all. Americans have X-Boxes, not iceboxes., and cars, not horse carriages.
The companies at the forefront of a particular market segment are not the ones driving innovation, and often become doomed because of that oversight. Clyde M. Christensen of the Harvard Business School captured this phenomena in his book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Christensen tracked the failures of market leaders to retain their advantage and defined two types of change – sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies.
The sustaining technologies are those that “foster improved product performance,” according to Christensen. Page XVIII
Established companies handle this brilliantly, finding ways to improve market share and profitability. But disruptive technologies are a different matter.
“Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value,” Christensen wrote. PAGE XVIII
One can easily see the automobile as an example of a disruptive technology, with the noisy and smoky first cars scaring horses on the roads. But more recent examples abound. IBM, enamored with its main-frame computer business, missed the rise of personal computers. Sears didn’t see the emergence of low-cost retailers like Wal-Mart and Target until their market share was in danger.
One might expect news organizations, which by nature are searching for and reporting on trends, would be at the cutting edge of transformations. But that was not the case when newsrooms were confronted with the disruptive technology that is the Internet. Newsrooms were unprepared for the rapid erosion of their audience as people turned to news on the web en masse and news executives were slow to commit resources to the web even though their own legacy products shrank in size. The concern they had was profitability.
This is unstated, but understood, in a fascinating McClatchy Newspapers Inc. report on fourth quarter earnings from 2006. Earlier that year, McClatchy had boldly bought Knight-Ridder Inc. and its 32 daily newspapers. McClatchy could boast of $673.6 million in fourth-quarter revenues across its company, and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt spoke of a three-pronged strategy with the third prong being “we operate the leading local Internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.”
In an interesting line in the financial report, McClatchy’s online earnings were not reported.
“Online only revenues are not shown as the amounts are not comparable,” the statement said. And as we shall see, McClatchy did not, in fact, operate the leading Internet business in its markets.
Meanwhile, born-digital sites like The Huffington Post, The Drudge Report, TechCrunch and The Daily Koz and niche publications like InsideCarolina.com, which focuses on the revenue sports at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took off. None of this would surprise Harvard’s Christensen, who wrote that established companies “find it very difficult to invest adequate resources in disruptive technologies – lower-margin opportunities that their customers don’t want – until their customers want them. And by then it is too late.” PAGE xxiii
The web is a perfect example of this exact point by Christensen. News organizations have long bemoaned the fact that their websites made little money compared to their print or broadcast operations. Given the discrepancy, it was easy for publishers and broadcasters to put off investment in the web while focusing on short-term revenues. Many news organizations found their customers didn’t want news on the web – until too late.
“Many large companies adopt a strategy of waiting until new markets are ‘large enough to be interesting.’ But the evidence … shows why this is not often a successful strategy,” Christensen wrote. PAGE XXV
Sometimes companies are afraid of “cannibalizing” their established product, which was certainly the case in news. Many editors and news directors wondered if they should publish information on their websites, or “tease” the information on the site and drive their audience to their established product.
The problem with that approach is that the audience didn’t want to wait, and so competitors that did publish right away had an advantage. While news organizations are fumbling through how they should approach the web, from what content to put on it to how to monetize it, another disruptive technology has arrived – mobile media.
But what lessons can be learned from enormous changes that came with the web? I will explore that question through three case studies:
• The first is The N&O, which went from being a national leader on the web to being crushed in its home market by Capitol Broadcasting.
• The second is ESPN, a cable giant that used its television dominance to create a powerful online brand.
• The third is InsideCarolina.com, a website that found a niche audience, established lines of recurring revenue and mastered the art of engaging an audience, which is so important in the web era.
Those three case studies highlight some recurring themes. A consistent strategy coupled with consistent leadership is vital. Plunging into the market early and establishing a dominant position is essential. And buy-in across the board, from senior leaders to the staff in the field, is critical to success.
CHAPTER 2: Mobile news and its implications
Crabtree Valley Mall is the largest mall in Raleigh, N.C., and touted itself as the largest mall between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta when it opened in 1972. Nearly 40 years later, it remains an important part of, and symbol of, the bustling community that is the state’s capital city.
On a Wednesday in March of 2011, a shopper entering the main entrance on the second floor would see to the left a North Face store, a place where teenagers and college kids go to find cool clothes, and a Starbucks on the right, a place where shoppers turn to for an experience that happens to center around coffee. In other words, the entrance to the mall exuded modern and cool.
Once you got further into the mall, one part of it exuded something else. There, to the left, was a booth for the local newspaper, The News & Observer. A white-haired man sat behind the booth with a stack of papers to sell for 50 cents each. It was yesterday’s news, still on sale at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. No one stopped. There was little to let you know the paper had changed over time. There was a reference to its website, newsobserver.com. But there was no glitzy display of what it had on the web, no mention that the paper now had an iPhone app. To someone passing by and glancing at the product, might as well have been 1972 all over again.
But it is not. On that same day, Apple introduced the iPad2. Just down the mall, the Apple store was bustling, as always, as Apple employees in bright blue shirts showed them iPhones and MacBook Pros and iPads.
That simple moment on a Wednesday in Raleigh captured why many traditional media outlets have struggled to remain relevant and profitable as consumers flow to new media. It’s as if the traditional media remain determined to give their audiences news in the way the media want to deliver it, not in the way audiences want it.
But the profound nature of change was clear in a Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media Report issued in March of 2011. For the first time, the report said, more Americans received news from online than from newspapers. Nearly half of Americans also got some news from a mobile device.
And yet many news organizations still debate whether to put resources into the web, arguing that there is no direct return, yet, on investment. I had a conversation with a senior editor at a newspaper on this exact subject as recent as February of 2011. The concern he had, with a limited staff, was how whether an emphasis on new media would yield more advertising. And yet the newspaper’s company, Media General, had reported a 19 percent increase in fourth quarter 2010 revenues for its newspaper and broadcast websites, compared to an 8.4 percent decrease in publishing revenues.
Even when a news organization puts heavy emphasis on the web, the staff can bemoan the loss of quality in the traditional product. The emphasis is often on trying to salvage the legacy product and hoping, perhaps, that a better economy will bring back the successes of the past. This paper will argue those days of traditional approaches are gone. The changes in news consumption are entrenched and accelerating, especially as tablet sales rise. Apple sold 7.3 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2010 alone.
According to Gartner Inc., tablet sales are projected to hit 154 million units by 2013, a staggering number which huge implications for news.
Those in the newspaper business should have no illusions about how ruthless the market can treat their product. As recently as 2006, McClatchy Newspapers Inc. was so confident in the future of print that it paid $4.5 billion for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. Gregory Favre, a former top McClatchy editor who was at the Poynter Institute at the time, confidently wrote on March 15, 2006, “My old company has done it again.” Favre said that McClatchy had scooped up Knight Ridder “at a time when so many folks are standing in line to blog the newspaper industry’s obituary.”
But Favre was wrong, and the bloggers were right. Significant shifts in communications behavior were well under way. By 2011, the ability of citizens to communicate freely and quickly would lead to the ouster of an established dictator in Egypt. Certainly, societal changes that could sweep aside governments could knock down established media outlets. While what happened in Egypt has only ancillary lessons for media, there is one that is significant – the Egyptians wanted to participate. They wanted a say in their government, and they wanted it to listen to them. And at heart, that’s a fundament difference between the roles of the traditional media and where news communication is headed at a rapid rate.
As Brian McNair of Strathclyde University in the United Kingdom wrote, “That model is now fragmenting entirely, as we move further into a 21st century media environment which is to an unprecedented degree networked, globalized and participatory.”
Networked and participatory are critical changes, and that’s a fundamental change from what has been called the “paternalistic” view of media. Just think about the titans of journalism lore. Edward R. Murrow reported from the flames of London during World War II and Ernie Pyle followed the GIs across Europe and told their stories. Walter Lippmann shared his views with the nation in his column “Today and Tomorrow.” Walter Cronkite at CBS helped shape the national agenda. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post epitomized the mythology of journalists having a societal obligation to ferret out the truth and keep government honest.
In all those cases, the audience was a passive receiver of the information, and rarely an active participant in the flow of information. But a change began with the arrival of widespread use of the Internet. Normal people began to share and collaborate, a change that became dramatically evident in the case of major breaking news. The tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 to the subway bombings in London in July of 2005 gave stark relief to the ability of amateurs to record incredible events and share them with the wider world before major news organizations were on the scene. Those events underscored the capabilities of mobile devices in the same way Americans learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor through radio, experienced the Vietnam War through television, and followed the Gulf War on the fledgling cable news network CNN.
The next catastrophic event could well be experienced through iPads. Even more significant, though, than the transmission of information from one place to another was the development of interactive lines of communication. The web arrived with a different rhythm than the old media, one that was both more personal and connected.
And as early as 2004, astute observers were seeing that mobile media would bring about profound changes in the way people interacted. The Annenberg Research Network on International Communication, in a paper delivered at the University of Southern California in October of 2004, made a prescient point about mobile media: Mobile communication has greatly enhanced the chances, opportunities, and reach of interpersonal sociability and shared practices. People, particularly young people but not only, build their own networks of relationship, usually on the basis of their face-to-face experience, interests, and projects, and then keep them constantly open by using wireless communication, more often than the fixed-line Internet. Thus, peer groups become reinforced in this hybrid space of physical, on-line, and wireless communication interaction. But the technology also allows for a rapidly changing network, adding individuals to or deleting individuals from the network, according to the changing projects and moods of each individual in the network. In other words, by 2004 there were already people who saw the value o the web in how it connected and engaged its audience, a point that was largely being missed by the media.
This paper was delivered less than a year after Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard University, and yet it perfectly captured the essence of the coming connectivity of mobile media. And yet, seven years and more than a billion dollars of market share in Facebook later, many media companies lag when it comes to investing time and money in mobile devices.
In a visceral way, the Internet and how people consume and share information conflicts with the traditional model of news organizations. Journalists are accustomed to moving up the ladder through dogged reporting that can lead to coveted positions as columnists or anchors. In many newsrooms, only certain staffers are allowed to write columns, which marks their opinions as distinct and of higher value.
But the web rewards a plethora of information and opinions in a fluid and unfettered environment.
“The Internet offers itself as a vehicle for news not just in the form of network technologies, or as a storehouse of information, or as a means of diverse forms of communication, but also as a cultural space with its own rituals and norms. It presents itself with a diversity of cultural practices and values inscribed into it. The strongest of those practices and values resist the kind of paternalistic, top-down communication that has defined the professional culture of journalism.”
The New York Times’ motto, “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” summarizes this view perfectly. Who decides what’s fit to print and what is not worthy? The editors of The Times, of course.
Clay Shirky attacks this general mentality in his book, “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky examines the trend of how everyone can be a publisher and reflects on how this affects the role of journalists. “Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for becoming a surgeon or a pilot. But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society … the professionals can be relied on to care more about self-defense than about progress. What was once a service has become a bottleneck.”
Shirky’s point is striking in light of the University of Southern California report from 2004. The web, that report noted, rewarded participation, but traditional news outlets actually work against that – that is, the editor and reporter are the ones who decide what is news and what is not. What’s amazing is how quickly audience behavior has moved away from traditional forms.
This change was clear in a Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media Report issued in March of 2011. Not only did the report state that more Americans received news from online than from newspapers as this move “continued to gather speed,” also said nearly half of Americans also got some news from a mobile device.
A new survey released with this year’s report, produced with Pew Internet and American Life Project in association with the Knight Foundation, finds that nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device. What they turn to most there is news that serves immediate needs – weather, information about restaurants and other local businesses, and traffic.
And the move to mobile is only likely to grow. By January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet. That was nearly double the number just four months earlier.
The migration to the web also continued to gather speed. In 2010 every news platform saw audiences either stall or decline — except for the web.
Cable news, one of the growth sectors of the last decade, is now shrinking, too. For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels. For the first time, too, more people said they got news from the web than newspapers. The Internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing.
Financially the tipping point also has come. When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.
What’s important about this is how widespread the move to the web has become, a move that is affecting all news outlets. The web had moved past newspapers as Americans’ primary source for news, and the web was closing in on television. The implications of this change are important and only beginning to be understood. A web audience, for example, is different than a print or broadcast audience, and a tablet audience will be different as well. Rather than resisting these trends, smart news organizations should embrace them and understand their implications.
For example, cell phone use is higher among younger readers. For a news organization, this means it may want to play high school sports news higher on its mobile application than on its website.
Also interesting is that wireless rates are especially high for users under the age of 30. For adults of the ages 18-29, 81 percent access the Internet wirelessly, compared to 63 percent in the 30-49 age group and 34 percent above 50.
Will the mainstream media keep hanging on to past ways, or finally get this transformation? There are signs of hope. The Washington Post now has a brilliant advertisement for its iPad edition. The commercial features star reporter Bob Woodward, perplexed by the staff’s fascination with the iPad, storming into the office of Ben Bradlee, only to see Bradlee getting reading the paper on his iPad, too.
Case Study 1: The Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer loses an online lead
When a statue of Josephus Daniels was erected in Raleigh’s Nash Square a decade ago, it personified the enduring power of the newspaper he once owned and edited, The News & Observer. Daniels was portrayed with his right arm out, extending toward the paper’s headquarters across McDowell Street as if he were giving it a jaunty salute.
Now, it feels like Daniels is just waving goodbye.
The newspaper building itself has grown old and dirty. Half of a staff that once reached 1,200 people is gone because of layoffs. The sense that this is a mighty operation with an influence across the state is dwindling.
Instead, the building almost feels like a relic. It is a stark contrast to the manicured lawns and clean, open feel of the Capitol Broadcasting campus about two miles away. In many ways, The News & Observer is an excellent case study for the move to digital media. The company was once a national leader but lagged in its own market after a competitor claimed dominance in the digital space. So by tracing what happened with the paper, one can see clearly how a company can make important missteps along the path to digital news.
The lessons from The N&O’s troubles are clear and profound as traditional media look for ways to thrive in the digital era:
• The paper failed to develop a clear digital strategy. Its online leaders often changed, which meant a revolving strategy and no coherent long-term plan.
• It invested minimal amounts in new technologies, preferring the immediate profits of its print edition, which allowed a competitor to claim a huge market share in the digital space.
• It struggled, especially initially, to find niche strategies that would fit the splintering market, instead, staying with an attempt to reach a mass audience that stretched across the Triangle region of North Carolina
• It had a staff that was slow to embrace the emergence of the web, and too much time was spent discussing what to do, and how to do it, rather than acting decisively. The experience of its staff, so vital for the credibility of a strong paper, worked against it in the quicker, more nimble digital era.
The current diminished state of the paper seemed unfathomable two decades ago. The newspaper, owned by Daniels’ descendants, dominated coverage in the state’s capital city and in the center of North Carolina. Former editor Claude Sitton won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for commentary, and the paper won a Pulitzer for its 1995 series on the dangers of hog waste in Eastern North Carolina.
The paper also straddles an affluent market packed with college-educated consumers, a perfect target for a newspaper. The paper was blessed with experienced, talented reporters and talented senior leaders.
But that print dominance was only part of the equation. The paper looked beyond print and pushed hard into the digital space long before others realized the web had news potential. This was the early 1990s, when The News & Observer created “NandO” as its online brand and had a separate staff unraveling the technology complications before the web was ubiquitous.
Frank Daniels III, the son of publisher Frank Daniels Jr., was directly involved and passionate about the web, giving the effort significant clout in the company. The NandO Times, the online version of the paper, created around-the-clock updates on the web as early as 1994. In other words, the regional News & Observer – while small in national stature – beat the bigger newspapers by years when it came to investment in and commitment to the digital environment.
The N&O gave its online product to schools, so kids would get accustomed to seeing the web at school and would urge their parents to get it. The paper also provided e-mail addresses before many people had e-mail addresses. George Schlukbier, who was a key Nando employee at the time, said news organizations around the country studied what The News & Observer was doing.
“We were rock stars in the community,” he said. “Back then, there was no real ISP [Internet Service Provider] in the area. We were the largest ISP in the Southeast. … If newspapers would have followed model, they would have been in control of access to the Internet in their community. How that would have changed the relationship with newspapers today? That’s the biggest thing they missed about it.”
Nando sent its technicians to people’s homes to help them fix their modems. Schlukbier said classrooms erupted in cheers when the Nando technicians went into schools to fix the Internet there.
“We were doing something they thought was miraculous,” he said.
Nando was one of the first websites to produce continuous news, and it saw its numbers skyrocket during the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995. But a stunning decision later in 1995 would chance the course of the newspaper forever. The Daniels family had owned the newspaper since Josephus Daniels bought it at a bankruptcy auction in 1894 and built into the most formidable news organization in the state. But the Daniels sensed the days of print dominance might be ending, and Frank Daniels III in particular was enamored with the potential of the web.
In May of 1995, News & Observer employees were shocked to learn the family had sold the company to California-based McClatchy Newspapers Inc. McClatchy made Raleigh its online headquarters.
But McClatchy’s online commitment never matched what the Daniels had invested in that emerging technology, and The N&O’s online presence faded. By the mid-2000s, the paper’s online product had been surpassed by Capitol Broadcasting’s WRAL.com, a rising force that would hit 100 million page views for the month of January, 2010. The N&O’s early dominance on the web may have worked against it in an unexpected way.
Innovative Capitol Broadcasting, led by President Jim Goodmon, saw what the Daniels had been doing and seized the chance to build its brand on the web. WRAL also hired a key N&O editor, Rick Smith. Capitol Broadcasting pushed resources in that direction. Goodmon’s son, Jimmy, loved the web and became Vice President of CBC New Media division. As had been the case at The N&O, when Frank Daniels III was involved in new media, the presence of the owner’s son gave the division credibility and access to resources so it could grow.
Meanwhile, The News & Observer struggled. McClatchy’s heavy debt – brought on by the $4.5 billion purchase of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain in 2006 - and the declining interest of consumers in print proved to be crushing for The N&O. While the paper tried to respond to WRAL.com, a dwindling head count made that more difficult. According to statistics provided by the web traffic site Alexa.com on Feb. 15, 2011, WRAL.com ranked No. 19 for website traffic in the Raleigh-Durham market for the three previous months, while newsobserver.com ranked No. 53.
WRAL.com had a bounce rate – that is, percentage of readers who read just one page – of 40 percent, while newsobserver.com had a bounce rate of 62 percent. In other words, far more than half The N&O’s web readers read just one story, rather than combing through content on the site.
The paper’s advantages would work against it in the crucial years after 2000, when companies began to claim digital space. The hefty revenues from print dwarfed the monies from online, so investing in online was not a company priority. A top advertising executive at the time noted that online sales only accounted for 5 percent of revenues. What he did not say, and did not realize, was that number would soon grow to 10 percent and beyond. The Newsroom made some online efforts, but never made a concerted, across-the-board push to win online.
Two News & Observer editors at the center of its online efforts, former Metro Editor Van Denton and former Continuous News Editor Jane Ruffin, remembered how difficult it was to get the newsroom, which peaked at around 250 positions in the mid-2000s, to make headway on the web.
Denton and Ruffin said a key problem was many reporters did not see the value in online, and felt their efforts were better served working on stories that might make the front page or the Sunday newspaper. They had their doubts even though Capitol Broadcasting Co. Inc. was building a dominant website through its television brand, WRAL.com.
“The thing I did as a response to WRAL was set up the Continuous News team,” Denton said in an interview Feb. 9, 2011. “I thought the challenge for The N&O was to keep the quality of the print product high and also developing news online.”
WRAL.com would post news releases and add some information to it as a way to get fresh information on the site. The WRAL.com stories lacked the depth of The N&O’s report, but they were immediate and newsy. And WRAL had staffed for the web.
“They had someone who could that,” Denton said.
In some ways, a television station had an advantage. WRAL, in the late 2000s, had a newsroom of about 120 people, and producing a television story usually required a reporter and a photographer. So WRAL effectively had half the newsroom staff of The N&O around 2007. However, because television relied on headlines and quick information and breaking news, its process worked beautifully for the web, which rewarded urgency and shorter bits of information.
On the web, one person reading a 1,400-word newspaper story gives you the same amount of page views – one – as someone reading a four-paragraph brief. Of course, advertising rates depend on page views and unique visitors, so the more content, the better.
WRAL had another enormous advantage – weather. Television stations make a living off their weather coverage, and WRAL-TV featured a respected weatherman in Greg Fishel. So that provided a natural draw for readers to the website. People looking for weather updates came to WRAL.com and saw fresh information consistently posted.
While The N&O debated when, and what, to post, WRAL continued to relentlessly update its site.
“The value online was accurate and fast,” Denton said. “That was insulting to a lot of reporters, to have to write a brief for online when they had so much experience. There was a real culture clash.”
Denton came up through the ranks as an N&O reporter, too, saw problems in the lack of a consistent strategy for the web. He remembered many different deputy managing editors for online, and each one would bring a different approach. Sacramento-based McClatchy had no one he knew of his guided overall strategy for online.
“If they have somebody really smart about that, I never met them,” Denton said.
Capitol Broadcasting, by comparison, was locally owned by Jim Goodmon, who pushed hard on the web. His son, Jimmy, was a champion of the online division and became the company’s Vice President of New Media. The fact that the owner’s son, and likely future president of the company, was in charge of online gave the website enormous credibility.
Ruffin, like Denton, was a longtime N&O employee who was considered a top assigning editor in the Newsroom. She had edited the popular “Q” section, a Sunday feature that evaluated key issues of the day, and had led the paper’s coverage of the 1999 Special Olympics World Summer Games in the Triangle. But even with her credibility, Ruffin said many of the reporters saw online as “just a nuisance.”
“There were some who got it, but generally it was a different mindset,” she said. “It always amazed me they didn’t think of newsobserver.com as The N&O. It was still the same product but a lot of people didn’t see the value in that. Even now, I don’t know if they are seeing it or not.”
In a bit of irony, Denton was interviewed on Feb. 8, 2011, the same day McClatchy announced fourth-quarter earnings for 2010. Net income per share for continuing operations was 18 cents, down from 38 cents the previous year. In addition, McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt said advertising revenues for January of 2011 were down 10 percent from the same month the previous year.
Perhaps one bright spot – online revenues had grown to 18.1 percent of all revenues in 2010. One of those online readers is Denton. Denton does not find himself looking back. He dropped the newspaper after his position was eliminated in 2008, a part of his effort to reduce personal costs. He found a job with Elon University in communications and is now the director of corporate communications at the North Carolina Education Lottery. He doesn’t take the print edition of the paper despite spending so many years of his life devoted to the product.
“I pretty much get all my news online, either through my iPhone or iPad or laptop,” Denton said, without a touch of irony.
Case study 2: ESPN transitions to multimedia
ESPN is located just outside of Bristol, Conn., which seems like an odd home for an international sports colossus. But if you know the history, it makes sense. Founder Bill Rasmussen wanted to start an all-Connecticut sports cable network, then decided for something grander – a national scope. He bought land on the outskirts of Bristol because it was cheap; he eventually got the funding he had to have thanks to the fact that he convinced Getty Oil to invest.
When ESPN started in 1979, the established networks hardly saw it as a rival. Now, it can rightly call itself the “worldwide leader” in sports, and it has maintained the ferocious growth of a start-up even as it has come to dominate sports.
ESPN built its dominance on its cable television operation and steadily expanded that into other platforms. ESPN now has multiple cable channels, including ESPN2 and ESPNU, which focuses on college sports. But it also has extended its dominant brand into other areas – such as ESPN The Magazine and the ultrasuccessful ESPN.com - and stands as a prime example of an established media company that made the transition to a multimedia success.
Unlike The News & Observer, ESPN developed an online strategy early in the game and stayed with it until it saw results. Senior managers became engaged in the online efforts, which hiked the morale of the online staff. The online success is reflected in some staggering numbers released by the company. In a Jan. 14, 2011 news release, the company said ESPN.com drew a record 43 million unique visitors for the month of January. While the company did not cite specific numbers for the year, it said the average number of monthly uniques was up 17 percent in 2010 and total minutes spent on the site were up 38 percent.
ESPN.com also continued to boom in two important areas, mobile and premium content. Traffic on ESPN Mobile was the 8th highest of all websites, ESPN reported, and averaged 12.4 million uniques per month, up 37 percent.
On premium content, which the company calls ESPN Insider, ESPN passed half a million subscribers for the first time, which it said was an increase of 23 percent over the year before. Those numbers reflect the continued growth and dominance of ESPN, a dominance you can feel when you see their home base in Bristol, Conn. ESPN’s headquarters is now a campus, and it’s no campus that resembles a small technical college. It feels like a sprawling Big Ten school, with more than a dozen buildings on 116 acres. The field of satellite dishes gives you the sense of power at the place, with information from this Connecticut outpost pumped out across the world.
ESPN was ahead of other media when it came to establishing itself in the cable universe. And it made a strong move into online at an early stage and quickly established itself there. It had the blessing of a great brand, but so did other established media companies that struggled online.
What made a difference for ESPN was a real commitment to the online product, from senior leaders on down, and a consistent commitment that was made clear across the company. Given the breadth of ESPN, and the difficulties of communicating that message across thousands of employees, that was a significant achievement.
“The idea was content didn’t matter which platform it was on,” said David S. Kraft, Senior Director of Digital Operations for ESPN Digital Media.
That idea is in action every day. When an ESPN reporter breaks a story, it goes straight to online and to its radio outlets and, of course, to television. ESPN’s television producers are synced into what is happening on the website, and messages are quickly shared across platforms so nothing is missed.
Because the organization is so vast, and the products are so many, the producers of morning radio shows can not assume the online editors or television producers are aware of their information. The flow of information begins in the morning with what is called the “global meeting,” and editors from all parts of the operation chime in.
But as the day evolves, the flow of information is constant as updates pop onto the screens of producers and editors around the operation.
This is a far cry from how ESPN operated when Kraft joined the online division in 1996. At that time, the online operation was based in Seattle and was a company Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen had founded.
“We were in partnership with ESPN,” Kraft said. “So we operated almost separately.”
Kraft was based in Seattle, and there was much less video on the site, in part because video was so slow to load back then. And there was much less integration of content than now. But Disney, ESPN’s parent company, bought Allen’s company in 1999 and the staff moved to Bristol.
Several significant moves followed. Rather than let online languish, ESPN’s senior managers got involved.
John Skipper, senior vice president of ESPN.com, gave the site strong and consistent direction. And John Walsh, the highly respected executive vice president of ESPN, moved his office to the online division in 2001 to make sure he understood the world of the web. Kraft had the office next to Walsh, and he remembers how many A-listers would call to talk to Walsh on a daily basis.
Walsh immersed himself in new media, even joining fantasy leagues so he would understand that realm of content.
“That was a bit of a defining moment,” Kraft said. “John is a brilliant man. Smart, strategic thinker. John had credibility in the building. He helped open doors for us.”
Skipper and Walsh made sure online was included in strategic discussions and a part of ESPN’s overall goals.
“When they would sit down at their yearly strategy sessions and regular weekly or monthly meetings, the web was taken seriously by the early 2000s,” Kraft said. “ESPN is very good, and has been good, at setting priorities and goals. We have three to five company goals every year and every one of us gets a card with what they are. And ESPN.com was a priority for a couple of years.
“And a lot of it was legwork and relationship building and us deciding we were going to evangelize our product. And a lot of it was a lot of smart people on the TV side realizing this could benefit them as well.”
ESPN.com is now one of the dominant forces on the web, with big stories easily getting half a million page views. Street and Smith’s Sports Business Daily reported Dec. 20, 2010, that ESPN.com was second in the United States for average unique visitors per month for the first 11 months of 2010. The report said ESPN.com averaged 30,369 unique visitors per month, with Yahoo Sports leading at 41,009.
However, ESPN.com has a huge lead in the important average minutes spent per user category, which reflects the depth of a site. ESPN.coms’s average user spent 77.7 minutes per month on the site, and Yahoo Sports users averaged 49.0. ESPN.com has grown by paying close attention to how its audience responds to its product.
“We learned a lot of lessons,” Kraft said. “Your users tell you what they want. We know people like football. We know people like news. We know people like to be updated. How fast we deliver scores matters. We are quicker than everybody else.”
ESPN is well aware that mobile media matters, and is having a rising impact on consumer behavior. ESPN once developed its own mobile phone before dropping that idea.
“We realized our business was content,” Kraft said. “Mobile is growing quicker than anything else. It’s a different device. People want different things out of it. So we have a staff of people who monitor mobile vs. the web.”
Because the mobile experience is different, Kraft said ESPN varies the content depending on the device. A long piece by respected writer Bill Simmons, for example, might play well on a home computer but be difficult to read for a mobile user.
ESPN is aware that more changes are ahead, with iPad sales booming and more and more sports fans about to turn to tablets for news.
“We’re learning, along with everybody else. I don’t know where we will end up with them,” Kraft said. “At this point the tablet strikes me as much more like the web experience than the phone. We’ll see."
But the reasons for ESPN’s success on a multimedia level are clear. It had a sustained commitment from senior managers early on, it had a consistent approach when it came to its multimedia efforts, and it made its commitment clear to the staff and followed through on those strategic objectives. And unlike other media outlets, ESPN was consistently willing to invest in new technologies to prepare for changes in the way news was consumed.
Case study 3: InsideCarolina.com thrives in a niche
The numbers for InsideCarolina.com, commonly referred to as “Inside Carolina” or even “IC,” are staggering.
The website, owned by Buck Sanders, focuses on men’s basketball and football at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. It roared from being a startup operation to a major player when it comes to covering Tar Heel sports. UNC fans come to the site in stunning numbers despite heavy competition on the beat from traditional media outlets like The News & Observer, Durham Herald-Sun and WRAL.
From January 1 to February 16 of 2011, Sanders said, the site had 38,866,422 page views. To put that in perspective, Inside Carolina was on track to have more page views in two months than WRAL.com’s sports sites had for the entire year in 2009 (40 million).
Sanders, of course, watches page views and unique visitors closely, but he also monitors a line on the right side of the home page that tells how many fans are “online right now!”
“For many years, or a period of years, if that number approached 1,000 at any particular time, we thought, ‘Wow, must be a big news day,’” Sanders said in an interview on Feb. 16, 2011. “Then at a certain point, it stayed over 1,000. Pretty much any time you were on you could always see at least 1,000 people on, particularly between 9 [a.m.] and 5 [p.m.]. And just recently, over the last six months, over the last year, that number is comfortably staying over 2,000. …
“That has been a threshold for us that is an important threshold to reach. That gives us a feeling a security and stability.”
Security and stability are rare feelings for media companies in the current recession, but Inside Carolina is likely to bump its staff from five full-time employees to six this year. And it continues to pump up its content with a network of approximately 30 stringers, who give the site a rich amount of original content.
Inside Carolina is a perfect example of two trends for success in the current media age.
One, it defined a niche and put the resources into its product to dominate that niche. Second, it had the advantage of always being primarily a digital product, and thus avoided the painful process of moving into a digital era that slowed many traditional media outlets. For example, Inside Carolina grasped early on that engaging readers was essential in the digital world, and that led to ultra-successful message boards that bring Carolina fans to its site in big numbers.
Inside Carolina had modest beginnings. The website and an associated magazine, then owned by David Eckoff, debuted in 1994. Sanders, who was running a site called The Tar Pit on Carolina football, bought Inside Carolina in 2000 and merged it with UNCBasketball.com in 2001.
Web-savvy Carolina fan Ben Sherman had created UNCBasketball.com and had a tremendous intuition about web content. Sanders covered football, Sherman covered basketball and eventually Sanders began to run more of the business operation and Sherman took over as editor.
“Inside Carolina, its growth and development was so organic,” Sanders said. “It just had a life of its own and grew incrementally. We’ve always tried to keep an eye out on what we can we do to distinguish ourselves - what can we do to bring value for our subscribers?
“At some point I thought well this might be an interesting hobby and I might make a make a little money off it. I never thought it’d be my prime (income).”
Inside Carolina plowed ahead at a time major media outlets were only beginning to ponder life on the web. And rival sites on UNC, especially the popular GoHeels.com, would be dwarfed by Inside Carolina’s growth.
Inside Carolina built credibility, and thus market share, in two significant ways.
It identified a clear niche – UNC football and men’s basketball – that was of high value to its audience. It certainly helped that Carolina fans, overall, were well-educated and affluent, and thus of interest to advertisers. Inside Carolina focused on providing a product that was well-written and had real news.
Second, Inside Carolina found a way to profit on the web by finding what Sanders called a “sub-niche” in recruiting. Collegiate recruiting news is of enormous interest to some fans, who were willing to pay Inside Carolina for exclusive information.
And finally, the fact that Inside Carolina was “born digital” meant that it was attune to the rhythms of a web audience, and specifically it was willing to respond to its readers in a way other media outlets did not.
Establishing credibility was essential to Sanders. In the early years, colleges like the University of North Carolina could be reluctant to credential reporters for websites. Sports arenas have only a finite number of seats for reporters and photographers, and competition for those spots, especially at conference games, is intense. Websites, especially in the early days, had a harder time gaining access than traditional media outlets.
But Inside Carolina had a magazine from the beginning, and that print product gave it credibility with the UNC Sports Information Department and thus credentials to games. Inside Carolina also made the decision early on to cover all UNC football and men’s basketball games, including distant road games, and the constant presence of an Inside Carolina reporter gave the site both original content and status.
“That’s a free part of our site. We don’t charge for that because it’s impossible to charge for that. You can’t sell seawater – there is too much of it,” Sanders said. “So we provide football and basketball coverage because we want to be a one-stop place for football and basketball fans of North Carolina. We don’t want people to have to go elsewhere to get stories on the games, photos of the game and views of the games.
“We want to give them reason to be on our website all the time.”
Covering games, and having high standards for the quality of the report, served another purpose as well. Sanders and Sherman wanted their product to be respected in the journalism community, and they wanted their reporters to file stories that would be worthy of being in the state’s top newspapers.
“Part of that was gaining credibility in the community and frankly, just for no other reason than our own sense of what we are and what we do. We wanted to gain acceptance with traditional media members. We didn’t want to be looked down on. We wanted to be recognized as a member of that group,” Sanders said. … “Early on there were a lot of people in the traditional media markets who frankly looked down their noses at us. They didn’t know what to think of us at the time any more than we didn’t know what to think of them. It was a totally new form of media.”
But Sanders and Inside Carolina knew good coverage of the basics, and acceptance from the traditional press, would not set the website apart.
But the game coverage and more traditional coverage was just one of three prongs of content that brought readers streaming to the website. The others were intense coverage of recruiting and forums.
The recruiting coverage, in particular, proved to be vital revenue stream. Those who do not follow collegiate sports might wonder why the college choices of 18-year-old kids would be so important. But recruiting successes have a direct correlation to success on the field, especially in basketball. And interest in recruiting has become a cottage industry, and one that Inside Carolina captured.
Inside Carolina has a full-time person covering basketball recruiting and a full-time person covering football recruiting. The website, which is affiliated with the Scout national network, includes updated charts that show you which players have committed or signed with North Carolina. Inside Carolina charges a premium for its recruiting coverage.
As Sanders pointed out, web advertising is “volatile.” Inside Carolina has some longtime advertisers who are critical to its success, but that subscriber base is an essential form of recurring revenue. Sanders would not say how many subscribers Inside Carolina has, but said the site lost about 5 percent of that base in the depth of the recession before bouncing back strongly. He said that number is now at an all-time high.
“At a certain level, a niche level, people will pay for a different level of access than the normal person,” Sanders said. “For general knowledge, general news reporting, it’s available in so many forms, you can get it anywhere.
“For people to want to pay for that kid of information is a hard sell. They can get it anyway. What they can’t get everywhere is that 9th grade superstar in the making.”
Inside Carolina covers that, as it relates to UNC, better than any outlet in the market. Newspapers traditionally covered recruiting by having their high school reporter handle it. But as interest in recruiting intensified, and newspaper staffs were cut, websites like Inside Carolina found they could build a base of subscribers on that type of information. It also helped the websites that the nature of basketball recruiting changed.
Twenty years ago, colleges recruited players through their high schools. Now, top athletes participate in elite summer programs and play around the country at high-profile camps. A web reporter can jump from one camp to the next, talking to athletes along the way and hoarding tons of information.
Fans, too, love surfing through the Inside Carolina message boards. The site was way ahead of others in this regard, establishing a place early on where fans could share their thoughts on the Tar Heels. One of the major shifts in media has been the move from one-way communication – newspaper gives a story to a reader, or television broadcasts its news to a listener – to an interactive formula.
The forums fit this trend beautifully. A Tar Heel fan who wants to vent about Larry Drew leaving the basketball team can do so on the Inside Carolina message board, and know that there are two thousand Carolina fans there with him in that online community. Not only that, but Inside Carolina editors and reporters monitor the boards and respond to fan questions.
“If I had a criticism of how traditional media approach message boards, it is that the people that write the articles, that do the reporting, the people that are involved in their traditional reporting are not at all involved on the message boards,” Sanders said. “You’re not going to see Caulton Tudor [sports columnist for The News & Observer] on a message board responding to what people said about his articles. “Whereas at Inside Carolina, I will be on there every day. [Beat reporter] Greg Barnes replies. [Basketball recruiting reporter] Don Callahan is there to answer questions people might have. There is much more interaction on IC message boards than you would find in traditional media message boards.
“I don’t know why that is. People certainly have time priorities. But that’s one of the reasons why there is more activity on message boards for Inside Carolina than traditional media like newspapers.”
Sanders and Sherman constantly monitor the boards and send links to fan questions or comments to Inside Carolina reporters so the reporter can respond. Sanders said the company does not have formal reviews, but the reporters know they are expected to interact with fans.
“It’s something they do and we constantly are in touch with them,” he said.
Having that interactivity as a part of the corporate DNA is one reason a site like Inside Carolina has some advantages over its traditional competitors. But another advantage, and one that played right into the site’s success, is Inside Carolina’s willingness to adapt as it saw the numbers from its readers.
“In some ways, there are huge advantages to being primarily a digital company. And the advantages are many. The mindset of companies like ours is that, ‘Hey, we’re making this up as we go,’” Sanders said. “We have the ability and the capability - and the technology gives us the capability - of judging what works and what doesn’t. If something is not going to work for us, we’ll find out pretty quickly.
“We know what works. We can find out what works. And if what we are doing is not working, we will find out by the number of page views. Whereas in the print world, we don’t really know what people are actually dying to read about.
“You don’t get that kind of immediate feedback through traditional media sources. Television may be a little better able to judge [because of overnight ratings], but on the Internet side, the ability to constantly get immediate feedback drives much of what you do.
“So I would say, yes it is a huge advantage over traditional media because particularly newspapers, it was not as easy to get feedback. They certainly didn’t grow up in that culture, that environment, where, ‘OK, let me get this out there and then get feedback from it and find out if people were crazy about this or not.’ I don’t think they ever looked at it that way, as in, ‘Let’s see what the response is.’’’
Sanders has come to understand there is still value in “scoops,” but that has changed. In the digital environment, a scoop is quickly matched by competitors, so the time frame to enjoy it is limited.
“In a funny way, in order for the digital publications like ourselves to succeed and do well, having the scoop is great – having a higher level of detail is better. And having better quality of writing it better,” he said. “You want was much detail as you can get, like original quotes. You want pictures, other details like that. So there is more demand on the digital side for drilling down into the details and the quality of what you are producing than there is in the print world.
“On the print world, there is a strong premium for the craft and style and the things that made us want to read George Will. There’s a higher value placed on that in the print world.”
The reasons for Inside Carolina’s success, in hindsight, are clear, and provide valuable lessons for media companies trying to capture market share in the digital age. They identified a niche. They built credibility in that culture and stuffed their product with strong original information. They built communities around that niche and interacted with their constituents in a way that made the readers a part of the overall product.
“The No. 1 rule is content is king,” Sanders said. “And again, you can’t sell seawater. You have got to be able to be different and provide content that is original. It has to be fresh. If somebody goes to your webpage two or three day sin a row and they are seeing the same thing over and over again, they are not coming back. …
“And the second thing is I would say is ‘build a community.’ Build a community of people who are going to come to your website, and find different and creative ways to make that happen. There are lots of social networking tools out there that are designed to do that. You can’t wait for it to happen on its own. You have to encourage that and be an active participant in it as a company. Make people feel like they are a part of what you are doing.”
All that is good enough for an amazing 38 million page views in less than two months of 2011. But Inside Carolina understands that the digital world it inhabits will be shifting as its audience gravitates to tablets and other mobile devices. Sanders, already, is gauging how the iPad world will affect his business. Inside Carolina is in the process of rolling out apps for iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys and working on an iPad platform as well.
In particular, Sanders sees the tablets as an opportunity to incorporate more video into the site, since consumers can watch that video on a wider screen.
“Each application that comes out offers different opportunities to do the things that make you successful and involve more people in your community,” Sanders said.
Conclusion
The Internet was a “disruptive technology,” to use the phrase from Harvard’s Christensen, when it crashed into the news business in the 1990s. Some companies, like The News & Observer, saw their business erode.
The News & Observer, according to its own figures, had a daily circulation of 176,000 as late as March of 2008, but that figure had dropped to 137,000 by the spring of 2010.
Some, like ESPN, managed to make the transition to a multimedia company that integrated its web operations with its established platforms. And some companies, like InsideCarolina.com, rose to success in the new digital era. But overall, news organizations overall, and newspapers in particular, have a spotty record when it comes to transitioning to multimedia.
One person who believes a new “disruptive technology” has arrived has a unique perspective on what happened with the arrival of the web. George Schlukbier led The News & Observer’s foray into online media in the early 1990s, well before other news organizations are getting into the game. Schlukbier saw what was coming on the web, and The N&O only forfeited its enormous advantage after the Daniels family sold the newspaper to McClatchy Newspapers Inc. His LinkedIn profile is a reminder of those days, trumpeting him as an “Internet pioneer.”
Much of what Nando.net sought to establish at its inception came to pass, and others capitalized on the new environment.
“Right now I am seeing it all over again with mobile,” Schlukbier said. What he means by “it” is new patterns of news consumption as people look to mobile phones and tablets for information.
So far, many news companies appear to be more eager to embrace the mobile media. News organizations from The New York Times to WRAL to The Newport News, Va., Daily Press have iPhone apps. Many, like The Washington Post, have iPad apps or are building them.
Significant questions remain. Many news organizations, for example, built websites and posted their stories to the sites, but failed to create organizations that gave their audience the around-the-clock coverage they wanted. Those early sites were merely a recap of what was in the paper that morning or on television the night before. In other words, the sites were just a library of information and not a moving, dynamic product. They failed to capture the fact that the audience wanted to know what was happening today, not yesterday.
The question now is whether news organizations will capture audiences on mobile devices.
I attended a news meeting at the Newport News, Va., Daily Press in March of 2011 and, for the first time, saw a representative of the company’s mobile division in the news meeting. The Daily Press is pushing hard to make the transition to a multimedia company, and the editors reviewed the numbers from online and mobile. It gave the editors a real snapshot of what was happening in those spaces each day.
But the fact is, many in the media business, from pioneers like Schlukbier to top people at savvy companies like Kraft at ESPN and entrepreneurs like Sanders at InsideCarolina.com, are still wondering what the impact of tablets and mobile media will mean.
Mobile devices will have their own unique rhythm and demands. It seems clear that short, quick bits of news are important on mobile, but one newspaper has noticed that obits are important on mobile devices as well.
Many expect video to be huge on tablet devices, especially once the video is clear and does not buffer.
But will the current news companies invest in these new technologies? Or will they wait until other companies have mastered these issues, and then try to get into the game?
The lessons for success on the web are clear.
First, a company has to have a clear and consistent strategy.
Second, a news organization has to establish dominance early. InsideCarolina.com is thriving because no other site can get into that niche and compete with what it has established.
And third, a company has to be willing to invest early on and sustain that investment with a confidence that there will be a payoff after an audience has been built.
A new frontier for news has now arrived. Traditional media outlets appear to be embracing mobile technology with more exuberance than they did for the web, perhaps because the lessons from those years were so brutal. Especially for newspapers, readers abandoned print for online versions of news and migrated to places where they could get it.
Broadcast companies were not hit as deeply by the conversion to online as newspapers. But the coming mobile age could change that as Americans began to reconsider how they use technology with screens for news.
For example, a television station with an FCC license had an enormous advantage before the onslaught of cable television. In the coming years, news junkies could easily find themselves gravitating to tablets and mobile phones for constantly updated newscasts.
It’s possible that could render the 6 p.m. local television news show obsolete. And radio stations, which also benefit from broadcast licenses, will face new challenges as listeners tune to online stations in their cars, on their computers and on their mobile devices.
New competitors will arise, often doing the work more cheaply than established companies. One wave of disruptive technology hit news organizations in the past two decades; another is arriving now. Given the industry’s poor response to the web, more changes, which could be sudden and dramatic, may be in store as the rise of mobile devices re-organizes what news Americans get – and how they get it.
Works Cited
Allen, Joseph. “ESPN Makes Disney Look Cheap.” The Motley Fool. 29 June 2009. 1 April 2011.
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