Reinventing local news final3

Center on Communication Leadership & Policy

Research Series: August 2010

Reinventing Local News: 2010

by Adam Clayton Powell III

© 2010 University of Southern California

About the Author

Adam Clayton Powell III is vice provost for globalization at the University of Southern California anda senior fellow of the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy at the USC Annenberg Schoolfor Communication & Journalism. In September 2010, he will become USC’s director of Washingtonpolicy initiatives, working on communication policy, health, transportation, housing, homelandsecurity, and other issues including the University’s strategic initiatives on Africa and India. Previously,he directed USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center, the National Science Foundation’s EngineeringResearch Center for multimedia research.

Prior to joining the USC faculty, he was general manager of WHUT-TV in Washington, D.C., thenation’s first African-American-owned public television station, adding several hours per week of localprime-time programming. He also was the founding general manager of KMTP-TV in San Francisco,the nation’s second African-American-owned public television station, which he helped put on the airin 1991 featuring local news and public affairs.

Powell has served as executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment, where he produced JesseJackson’s weekly television series and developed nonfiction television projects; vice president for newsand information programming at National Public Radio; manager of network radio and television newsfor CBS News; and news director of all-news WINS in New York. He supervised the Internet andcomputer media technology programs at the Freedom Forum, with educational programs on fivecontinents.

Adam Clayton Powell III

Reinventing Local News: 2010

by Adam Clayton Powell III

F our years have elapsed since the first editionof Reinventing Local News, four years that

have seen the 20th-century mass media businessmodel eroded by accelerating efficiencies ofdigital production and distribution technologiesand, more recently, crushed by the recession’scollapse of advertising revenue.

At the same time, even the largest newsorganizations, including The New York Times andTheWashington Post, have aggressively moved intosuch previously niche media as blogs, following thebrand-extension logic that has served companiesfrom Procter & Gamble to, in its heyday, GeneralMotors. And the blogosphere has attracted itsown journalism tools, from established measures ofblogs as news media, such as Pew’s New MediaIndex,1 to new blog evaluation tools, such asSwift River.2

Meanwhile, the growth of new digitalplatforms has attracted news and informationproviders large and small. Cell phones wereoriginally designed to supplement and thenreplace landline telephones. But now, numbering5 billion (up 25 percent in the past year3), mobiletelephones have emerged as a medium in them-selves, for news, entertainment and advertising.Andas each has a unique number, they are ideal formicro-local service at the most granular level –the individual.

Their small screens may at first have beenconsidered a disadvantage to those accustomed totelevision or desktop screens, but cell phones arejust the right size for abbreviated messages,notably Twitter, which have proven crucial to relaynews of street protests in Teheran or earthquakesin Haiti and Chile. And as mobile devices havebecome a primary medium, cell phone photos and

video have become a staple of news organizationsfrom the micro-local to the global.

Facebook and other social networks also havebecome a mass medium, with hundreds ofmillions of users. A quick look at the websites ofthe largest news organizations will reveal thatthey are inviting users to join their Facebookpages or to register for news over mobile phones.And once they sign up, users are invited to jointhe conversation.

But as has been the trend for at least twodecades, the barrier to entry is so low – anyonecan start a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account– that millions of individuals worldwide now areproviding their own micro-local news andinformation. And it’s not just about the policeblotter or the local school board. Do you want toknow all about twin toddlers in a town inMichigan? Dachshunds in Virginia? Used vinylLP records in NewMexico? There are informationproviders to serve any interest, however narrow.

So it is an interesting time to revisit thequestions raised in 2006, to ask them once againbut more urgently, and to examine the emergenceof new technology-enabled tools and businessmodels for local news, information and publicservice.

What is now undeniable is that thepractice of journalism itself is changing.

My former CBS News colleague PeterHerford, who now teaches journalism in China,has written that the craft of journalism, almostalone among the professions, has remainedpractically unchanged for 200 years, and is nowbeing forced to evolve.Many place the start of theera now ending even earlier, when movable typewas introduced.

“Printing and books replaced handwritingand scrolls,” writes Guy Rundle, “and thus

Reinventing Local News: 2010 1

monasteries, popes and feudalism gave way touniversities, the Enlightenment and capitalism.”4

Rundle says an even longer view can be argued,writing that news and information may haveundergone an even more fundamental shift 5,000years ago, when Mesopotamian cuneiform writingmeant that “meaning, intent, communicationcould be separated and transmitted without aperson there to present it.”5 The Internet thusbecomes the latest embodiment of disembodiedinformation.

Newspaper readership and televisionnews viewership are falling.

Newspaper circulation is declining in almostevery U.S. city. Local television newscasts also arelosing viewers. One metric of the larger trend:Newspaper company stocks declined 83 percentin 2008, among the worst performing businesses,according to the Pew Research Center.6 Here’sanother: The “CBS Evening News” has lostthree-quarters of its audience since WalterCronkite retired in 1981.7

This trend is having an enormous impact onreporting and gathering information: One-tenthof newspaper newsroom positions disappeared in2008, accelerating a trend. NPR cut 7 percent ofits staff and two hours of daily news broadcasts.In local television news across the United States,“layoffs were accelerating.”8 And ABC Newsexecuted the largest layoff in network newshistory, pink-slipping more than 300 journalists –a quarter of the news division.9

The outlook for local broadcast news is notbright, because local advertising sales that pay thebills are dropping rapidly. Local televisionrevenues fell almost 30 percent from 2008 to2009,10 but there are signs the decline has beenreversed mainly by the growth of politicaladvertising for the 2010 and 2012 election

campaigns.11

In print, newspaper revenues in the UnitedStates also are off sharply, down 23 percent in thepast two years, which the “2009 State of the NewsMedia Report” describes as “perilously close tofree fall.”12The Baltimore Sun dismissed a third ofits newsroom in spring 2010, and the Boston Globebarely escaped being closed by its parent NewYork Times Company.

Despite much smaller audiences than thebroadcast networks, Fox News and CNN are themost profitable television news services, moreprofitable even than NBC News, with annualearnings in excess of $400 million.13 This islargely due to the business model of cabletelevision, where Fox and CNN receive revenueboth from advertising and from fees paid by eachcable and satellite subscriber.

Again, this seems a fundamental shift. In awidely quoted article, Clay Shirky writes thatwhat has happened is nothing less than a

2 Reinventing Local News: 2010

“And that’s the way it is.”

The “CBS Evening News” has lost three-quarters of its audience since WalterCronkite retired in 1981 – and ABC laidoff a quarter of its news division in 2008.

Pictured: Cronkite’s last broadcast as “CBS Evening News”anchor, March 6, 1981.

“solution” to an industrial-age “problem.”14

“With the old economics destroyed,” Shirkycontinues, “organizational forms perfected forindustrial production have to be replaced withstructures optimized for digital data. It makesincreasingly less sense even to talk about apublishing industry, because the core problempublishing solves – the incredible difficulty,complexity and expense of making somethingavailable to the public – has stopped being aproblem.”

So much for the bad news.

Now for the good news: People stillwant news and information.

The number of different people who visitednewspaper websites each month - unique visitors- rose 15.8% to 65 million in the third quarter of2008 from the year earlier, according to NielsenOnline. Page views rose 25.2%.15 News Corp.will attempt to monetize its Britishnewspapers by charging for access to content, as itdoes successfully for The Wall Street Journal.According to one published report, News Corp.may attempt an innovative cross-platformrevenue growth plan by offering its Sky Newspay-television viewers a plan to bundle Sky witha subscription to, say, the Times of London, all fora small additional monthly fee.16

There is no reason cross-platform deals couldnot spread to local and micro-local newsproviders worldwide, local and micro-localproviders joining to bundle subscriptions withlocal cable companies or even broadcasters. Localpublic broadcasting stations could offer theirmembers subscriptions to local online news sitesfor just a small increase in the membership fee.Access to other news sites could even be a premiumfor those pledging to NPR news stations or alocal station’s broadcast of the “PBS NewsHour.”

These are major, rapid shifts in the landscape. Butthe shifts are moving in unanticipated directions:Instead of The Daily Me personalized newspaperpredicted years ago by Nicholas Negroponte,17

the Internet instead begat The Instant Me – anon-demand tailored news-information mix.

How can local news and informationtransition from the collapse of the 20th-centurymass media economic model to the emergence ofstill-unclear business models for 21st-centurynews and information? Reinventing Local Newsattempts to address this question.

Revisiting some case studies from the 2006edition, there are some encouraging signs. All-news WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., con-tinues to repurpose and repackage its journalismin many forms, in effect extending its services tonew audiences. WTOP’s 24-hour Internet newsservice for federal government workers, whichwas profitable the day it launched, now also isheard over-the-air on broadcast station WFED,where it is gaining still more listeners. In the pastthree years, WTOP Radio rose to become thenumber one station in theWashington D.C.mar-ket18 and in 2010 started to identify itself as“WTOP...on air, on line, mobile,” embracing thatnew medium, cell phones.

That was in part due to a winter storm, but ayear earlier, according to the February 2009Arbitron ratings, WTOP was No. 1 for the fullweek as well as morning and afternoon drive

All-news WTOP Radio inWashington, D.C., continues torepurpose and repackage itsjournalism in many forms, ineffect extending its services tonew audiences.


time. Among 25- to 54-year-old listeners – agroup highly sought by advertisers – the stationreached an 8.7 morning share, 7.4 in midday and10.8 in the afternoon. Even in evenings, normallynot a significant time for commercial all-newsoutlets,WTOP ranks eighth amongWashington,D.C., stations with a 5.5 share, and it is fifth onweekends with a 6.4 share. WTOP attractedmore listeners than any other station andoutperformed similarly formatted radio stationsin other cities around the United States, wherethe same all-news format is declining on similarcommercial stations – but NPR stations arebenefiting.19

This is one of the most dramatic cases ofwhat in other industries is called brand extension:For a small incremental increase in cost, a companythat sells soap or paper towels can introduce a

slightly different soap or paper towel to appeal tonew customers. Market segmentation – appealingto different customers with different products – isfundamentally different from the traditionalmonopoly of metropolitan newspapers andbroadcasters aiming for the broadest possibleaudience. In print and over the air, journalistshistorically developed a single publication ornewscast for the largest number of customers.

As Malcolm Gladwell documented in whathe calls “the wisdom of spaghetti sauce,”20 thiswas used by newcomer Prego to crush thelongtime dominant brand, Ragu. Prego launchedseveral variations – extra spicy, or extra chunky, orextra thick – each of which attracted a devotedfollowing. The different Prego sauces were easilycreated by varying only slightly the same basicrecipe, but together they outsold Ragu. Perhapswe can consider WTOP’s spinoff WFED as theextra chunky of Washington, D.C.’s broadcastradio news.

Zoned editions of major metro newspapersmarked the beginning of market segmentation,but the extraordinary efficiencies of Internetdistribution are driving even major news andinformation services for ever-smaller micro-localgeographic areas – as small as a single apartmentbuilding. The Washington Post invested resourcesinto building a group of blogs to extend its brandsinto new micro-local niches – and to aggregateaudiences for the Post website.

Another broadcaster highlighted inReinventing Local News was WAMU-FM, also inWashington, D.C. There too is a success story,but because of a different set of tools. In the pastthree years, WAMU rose to become the No. 2station in Washington, second only to WTOPand outperforming similar NPR stations in othercities. The key, according to Jim Asendio,WAMU’s news director, is a determination to getcloser to communities and neighborhoods.

All things considered, not bad

Public radio programming fuels many ofthe most popular downloads on iTunes.

iTunes podcast data for July 20, 2010


Asendio says he makes room for expandedcommunity coverage by downplaying “official”news, covering statements from City Hall in shortscripted stories or very brief tape excerpts.21

Podcasts are way up, and mobile telephonesare emerging as a new mass market for text andaudio and video information. Public radioprogramming fuels many of the most populardownloads on iTunes. And this new medium maybe gaining ground even more rapidly outside theUnited States, where the number of cell phones isincreasing much more rapidly. And it isn’t justChina and India, with their large and expandingmiddle classes, where mobile phone audiences areincreasing and turning to news. In Kenya,800,000 people watched and listened to audioand video news reports on their cell phones whenVoice of America started offering the service.22

Now Kenyans have video talkback from theirmobiles.23

Simple technology and design tools also canboost use and revenue. Consider the success of anew business service that launched in 2008: “Justa year after its initial foray into the field,CNNMoney.com has become the most-popularsource of business-news video on the Web,”reported The Wall Street Journal.24 The siteachieved this striking result by using videoaggressively, which users clearly enjoyed.

Now for more good news:Technology may be saving local news.

When the Seattle Post Intelligencer andDenver’s Rocky Mountain News closed, reporterswho had worked at the newspapers started theirown websites, preserving at least some of the localnews and information sources in their communi-ties.25 And, in smaller cities and towns, local andmicro-local news websites are gaining enoughfinancial support to survive and turn a profit.

Indeed, even as the Ann Arbor News planned tocease publication,26 my USC colleague DavidWestphal reported that a new local online newsservice there was already making money.27

Nationwide, more than 800 community newssites were launched between 2004 and 2009,according to Jan Schaffer, executive director ofJ-Lab.28

“I think there is a bunch of media peoplegoing, ‘Oh, the world’s collapsing.’ And, as much asthat’s true, [news is] not going to go away, it’s justgoing to come into a new form,” Jason Barnett,executive director of a new Minnesota website,told CNN.29 “There are more opportunities nowfor entrepreneurs to figure out a system.”

While many lose money, a growing numberof micro-local information sources are reachingfinancial sustainability, typically with ruthlesslylow costs or assistance from foundation andindividual donors, using the public broadcastingbusiness model of voluntary membership.

Some are also information services of interestgroups, raising questions of credibility. For exam-ple, the California HealthCare Foundation hasteamed with USC Annenberg to develop originalreporting in regional health care. However, aslong as ownership is disclosed, the public will beable to know how to filter the information. On

A few newcomers have brokenthrough the digital cacophonyto become mainstream players.Politico is one example of aweb-based newsroom servinga niche—a large niche—thatbecame so successful that itstarted a newspaper.


the national level, the Kaiser Family Foundationand the Pew Charitable Trusts have been longtimeinformation providers in the fields of health,journalism and public opinion, and now more localorganizations and interest groups are doing thesame.

And a few newcomers have broken throughthe digital cacophony to become mainstreamplayers. Politico is one example of a web-basednewsroom serving a niche – a large niche – thatbecame so successful that it started a newspaper.Imagine that.

Citizen journalism also is filling the gap:Fifty-six percent of news is from citizen journalismnews sites now, closing in on professional legacysites (89 percent), and far more than blog content(27 percent).30 These sites may not be staffed byprofessional journalists, but their content is oftenfar from amateurish. And crowd-sourcing soft-ware such as Swift River can provide everyonewith powerful assessment tools to evaluateinformation that comes from unknown

individuals across town or, as we saw in Iran andin the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, strangersfrom the other side of the world.

Some are now reporting there is an ever morepromising opening for micro-local news. “Smallercommunities seemed to fare better,” according tothe “2009 State of the News Media Report.” Butwe all live in “smaller communities,” includingcommunities of niche interests, professions orhobbies, niches where new websites are recordingsome of the fastest online revenue growth.31

And we all live in small geographical commu-nities, from small towns to individual blocks andapartment houses in cities. That creates opportu-nities even in the largest media markets.

“[A]s the major metropolitan dailies decline,they are unfortunately cutting back at thecommunity-specific level, which really, in ourminds, creates a void in the amount, the qualityand the access to news and information at thatall-important community-specific level,” said JonBrod, founder of Patch.com, which hopes to makemoney providing online news and information forcommunities of up to 50,000 people.32

“I think there are two things going on,” Brodnoted. “First is that this is an incredibly low-costmodel.When you take out the ink, the distribution,the circulation, the print costs and the significantoverhead, and you compare … Patch.com to a like-sized daily newspaper, you’re looking at roughly 4.5percent to 4.7 percent of the cost.”

Perhaps the fastest-growing new informationtechnology is social networks. Consider thatFacebook has grown to more than 300 millionunique monthly visitors – twice as much traffic asGoogle, Yahoo or MSN.33 With this in mind,Michael Rosenblum last year constructed aninteresting model in his essay “Facebook +Content = Newspaper?”:

Old media companies have tried,and failed, to plug the old model into


Facebook harnesses socialnetwork technology to connectwith communities, just asWAMU or the Ann Arborwebsite do. But instead of acentral newsroom, you have acommunity of informedindividuals sharing news andinformation with each other.

the new technology. Take The New YorkTimes. Go to its website and what doyou see? A newspaper online.

Quaint.But look at a website that is alive,

humming, vibrant and growing – lookat Facebook. In only a very few years, ithas grown to 170 million users and it’sjust getting started. Something in hereworks.

What works is that the architectureof Facebook, that is, the way it works,matches what the web does – connectlike-minded individuals to like-mindedindividuals – all the time. It keeps theminformed.

Of course, what it keeps theminformed about is sheer trivia. “Went tothe park today.” “Can [you] believe Iordered the Osso Bucco here in Vegas?”

It is news, but of a rather banalstripe.34

Not so. Journalists and others are postingserious news and analysis on Facebook every day,and it is extraordinary – and extremely useful.

Facebook users can easily filter the news feedsfrom their Facebook friends to get the mix theywant. OK, much is of “a rather banal stripe.” So ismost of what is in the publications on a typicalwell-stocked newsstand. And the fluff onFacebook is just as easy to bypass and ignore.

Facebook harnesses social network technologyto connect with communities, just as WAMU orthe Ann Arbor website do. But instead of a centralnewsroom, you have a community of informedindividuals sharing news and information witheach other. It is exactly what Kevin Kelly predictedmore than a decade ago in his pioneering bookOut of Control. For me, the Facebook sourcesinclude former colleagues posting internationalnews from the distant shores of the Pacific andAtlantic as well as D.C. friends posting onWashington politics from inside the Beltway.And yes, there are relatives posting jokes andpictures of grandchildren.

But this is something new: the wisdom of aself-selected community.

Instead of The Daily Me, we have not TheInstant Me, but The Instant Us.

— August 2010


Copies of the original edition of

Reinventing Local News: Connecting

Communities Through New Technologies

may be purchased for $15.

To order, visit www.figueroapress.com

or call (800) 934-9313. The book also is

available at Amazon.com.

NOTES

1 Pew’s New Media Index, www.journalism.org/print/209492 Swift River, http://swift.ushahidi.com/3 See www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2010/06.html4 “The Web We Weave,” by Guy Rundle,The Age [Australia], March 15, 2009,www.theage.com.au/opinion/the-web-we-weave-20090314-8yga.html.5 Ibid.6 “State of the News Media” 2009 edition, PewResearch Center’s Project for Excellence inJournalism, www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/7 Ibid.8 Ibid.9 “ABC News to Cut Hundreds of Staff,” TheNew York Times, February 23, 2010,www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/business/media/24abc.html10 “Advertising Losses Put Squeeze on TVNews,” The New York Times, May 10, 2009.11 “BIA Raises 2010 TV Station RevenueForecast,” Television Broadcast Magazine, June30, 201012 “State of the News Media” (note 0.6).13 Ibid.14 “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,”Clay Shirky,March 13, 2009, at www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/15 “State of the News Media” (note 0.6)16 “The Empire and the Son,” Financial Times,June 19, 201017 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1996.18 “WTOP Tops Ratings,” The Washington Post,March 3, 201019 “Consider This: NPR Achieves RecordRatings,” The Washington Post, March 23, 200920 Malcolm Gladwell lecture, June 24, 2008, at

www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html21 Jim Asendio interview, at his office at WAMURadio, February 13, 2009. A similar techniquehas powered the growth of KPCC in SouthernCalifornia.22 “Kenyans Download VOA Audio/VideoThrough Safaricom,” Voice of America newsrelease, March 24, 2009.23 “New VOA Mobile Phones Let KenyansSpeak Their Minds,” VOA, June 15, 2010,http://author.voanews.com/english/About/2010-06-15-swahili-mobile.cfm24 “CNNMoney Bulks Up in Video,” The WallStreet Journal, March 5, 2009.25 “Citizens and Former Journalists Create theirOwn News Sources After Newspapers Fail,”Journalism in the Americas blog, Knight Centerfor Journalism in the Americas, March 25, 2009.26 “Ann Arbor News to Close,”Editor and Publisher,March 23, 2009.27 “Recession? Local News Sites Are HangingTough,” by David Westphal, Online JournalismReview, February 26, 2009,28 Jan Schaffer interviewed in “Future of OnlineNews May Be ‘Hyperlocal,’” CNN, May 1, 2009.29 Ibid.30 “State of the News Media” (note 0.6).31 “Niche Web Sites Buck Media Struggles,” TheWall Street Journal, March 2, 2009.32 Interviewed on “As Newspapers Cut Back,Online Reporters Step In,” “The NewsHour withJim Lehrer,” April 13, 2009.33 “OurSpace: The Shift to a Social Web,” byJeffrey F. Rayport, Business Week, May 18, 2009.34 “Facebook + Content = Newspaper?” March23, 2009, at www.rosenblumtv.com/?p=2962


About the Center on Communication Leadership & Policy

Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, the Center onCommunication Leadership and Policy conducts research and organizes courses, programs,

seminars and symposia for scholars, students, policymakers and working professionals to prepare futureleaders in journalism, communication and other related fields. CCLP focuses its activities in two areas:1) The Role of Media in Democracy and 2) Communication Leadership. Current projects include:Public Policy and the Future of News; New Models for News; The Constitution and the Press; Mediaand Political Discourse; Children’s Media and Ethics; Women and Communication Leadership; andPhotographic Empowerment.

Advisory Board

Michael (Mickey) Kantor, co-chairNorman Pearlstine, co-chairRebecca ÁvilaIna ColemanJohn F. CookeDavid FisherClothilde HewlettThomas (Tom) NidesRica OrszagGary PruittAmbassador Robert H.TuttleDean Ernest J.Wilson III, ex off icio

Staff

Geoffrey Cowan, directorGeoffrey Baum,managing directorMark Latonero, research directorSusan Goelz, off ice managerLauren Schultz, IT and student managerKelsey Browne, project specialistErin Kamler, research associateCynthia Martinez, research associateMaría J. Vázquez, research associate

Fellows

Distinguished FellowWarren Bennis

Executive in ResidenceJeffrey S. Klein

Senior FellowsNeal BaerJeremy CurtinDan GlickmanCinny KennardAdam Clayton Powell IIIKit RachlisRichard ReevesOrville SchellDerek ShearerDavid WestphalNarda Zacchino

Faculty FellowsSasha Anawalt, journalismTom Hollihan, communicationChristopher Holmes Smith, communicationJack Lerner, lawMichael Parks, journalismPhil Seib, journalism/public diplomacyStacy Smith, communicationRoberto Suro, journalism

Junior FellowsMonica AlbaRebecca Shapiro

734 W. Adams BoulevardLos Angeles, California 90089-7725communicationleadership.usc.edu

Documents

Reinventing local news final3