Truth or consequences

Newspaper executives are in San Diego this week tilting at windmills, howling at the moon, thumping their chests and gathering around the fire in a man-circle getting in touch with their inner innovator.

Unfortunately, this is all too little, too late, and too much.

Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy Newspapers, says "Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies - fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print." This is hardly news. Newspaper companies have been diddling around the digital media for decades without truly getting serious about a conversion to the "hybrid media company" Pruitt envisions. And they are still diddling around. They're still thinking and planning, wishing and hoping. That won't get you into our hearts. Certainly, they've done very little in a whole lot of time.

The World Wide Web entered our peripheral vision in 1991 when the first commercially available ISPs started up and early adapters began to see what could be possible. But not newspapers. Today newspaper executives are talking about the internet as "new" media and the digital transition as if it just snuck up on us along with the virulent recession and combined to engineer newspapers' destruction.

Covering the NAA conference for The Huffington Post, media observer Jeff Jarvis opines bluntly that the newspapers "blew it." Boy, nothing is more true. But the bigger question is why did it happen and how can companies avoid it in the future.

When I worked in the corporate headquarters for a Fortune 500 newspaper company, my boss asked all his managers to offer opinions on why we were not a "gold medal company." What characteristics, he wondered, prevented us from being great. My answer: Because we don't want to be great. We want to make money. Being great means taking some chances. Great companies step off the ledge and if they fail, they consider it a step toward an eventual success.

This is not the way of the mainstream media company. Their way - the McClatchy's, the Gannetts, - is to wait until all the issues have been resolved, the bugs have been worked out, and then jump in potentially improving on the prototypical models with a new product. This may have worked in the past - almost certainly did. But in the forward driven world of new media technologies and digital integrations this approach was a catastrophic failure.

Newspapers have always been willing to be silver medalists - so long as they got paid well for it - only in this competition, the came in dead last.

Now, having lost the race, newspaper executives are left whining about internet aggregators linking to their sites without paying for the privilege. Even now, as tens of thousands of press operators, designers, graphic artists, support staff, reporters, copy editors and photographers are spending their days waiting in the unemployment line, newspapers are still not acting. They are still talking about what we need to do, rather than doing it.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt today warned that newspapers risked alienating their readers by mixing it up with aggregators who conservatively bring about 50% of the hits into the newspaper web site. It is typical behavior, however, for newspapers to make decisions based on what editors and executives think people want without actually finding out for sure and then finding someone else to blame when it doesn't work

In fact, many newspaper decisions regarding the digital space have been driven by executives who neither use nor understand the technology. In large newspaper companies, executives often are given programs to roll out at their locations but they are ineffective at promoting them to either advertisers or readers because they are behind on the technology that drives them. And the problem drifts top down. For example: Up until 5 years ago, Gannett executives were forbidden to buy Blackberries without permission from the head of the newspaper division.

The time-honored way for newspapers to pretend they were getting input from "real people" on decisions and products is to have a focus group. These groups are usually small -- 10-20 people. Papers that do this right may have several focus groups so that they bring in over a few weeks more than 100 people. But most papers have one. A set of controlled questions is asked. Sometimes readers are left alone with the paper or a prototype to peruse the product while they are observed for their reactions.

But frequently after all the information gathering is done, the information would come up for discussion at the local, regional or enterprise level. And this is where newspaper executives showed their true colors. What normally ensued is a couple of hours of discussion about how the reader just didn't understand what we were trying to do, or didn't realize that we already had that feature (a sign that they couldn't find it or didn't like it), or why what the reader wanted was unrealistic or undesirable. In the end, the paper would go off and do whatever they wanted to in the first place, having managed to negate the opinions of their focus group.

In 1997, Gannett launched a program called News 2000. At it's core was the premise that newspapers should write for their readers. Wow. Eleven years later, we are still battling the same issue - a core selfishness and self-aggrandizing that will not permit the possibility that the best and brightest minds in the industry have been wrong all these years. That a group of 20 year olds who run Facebook could have twice as many "clients" as the newspaper industry - at least using Gary Pruitt's stat that 100 million adults read a printed newspaper every day. Although figures from the Pew Institute put newspaper readership at 33% daily and assuming children under 15 aren't snapping up the paper, that's roughly 85 million.

Meanwhile, Twitter is approaching 2 million users and LinkedIn, which is a very targeted business community, has 35 million.

The lesson is one of ego, fear and greed. Gold medal companies look the future in the eye. They take some chances, the make mistakes, they accept some losses as the cost of doing business. They find out what their customers want even if they have absolutely no idea why anyone would want that.

Look around, guys. You did blow it. And you can't fix it by trying to play catch up. You must leap ahead and find what's next and make it yours. And while you're trying to figure that out, better play nice with your new friends Google, Facebook, Digg, Slashdot and whatever else just launched in the time it's taken me to write this. If they pick up their balls and gloves and go home, newspapers are going to be left standing in an empty field with no one to kick dirt at.

Coming this weekend: What would the newspaper look like if you could build it yourself? Would love to hear your suggestions on this.