Industry leaders discuss the digital marketplace in a series of interviews conducted during May and June 2009.
By Alecia Swasy
Each summer, Craig McKinnis at USA Today spends time with the new interns, first asking where they get their news. This year, he asked: "How did you learn about the airplane that went down off the coast of Argentina?"
Their responses were diverse:
- "I was instant messaging and a friend told me."
- "My Windows Vista has a CNN.com news application available that I enabled."
- "I was on Facebook."
- "My friend Twittered it."
Notably absent from their responses: "I read it in the newspaper or saw it on TV," says McKinnis, content licensing project lead at Gannett’s national newspaper. "They get news in fragmented ways…and they snack on it, they don't have full meals of it."
To survive, McKinnis and others know that they, too, have to be in the fragments. "We have to be in all those splinters," says McKinnis.
No small task for USA Today, which grew by giving readers a ubiquitous, national newspaper that had the same content, regardless of readers bought it in Los Angeles, New York or Washington, D.C
"We are placing a big bet that we can plug and play into this new content ecosystem."
"Content consumption is changing," McKinnis says. "More of it leans to niche or subject specific versus general news or section-based delivery of news. The old model was you build a web site and get audience coming to you. That is changing and we now have to be where audiences already exist."
Like other national media companies, McKinnis is searching for new ways to package and distribute content to survive as readers like the interns flock to alternative offerings. But his search is hampered because change is so rapid and newsroom budgets are squeezed.
To combat that, McKinnis and others are meeting with as many potential partners, whether device manufacturers such as Amazon, maker of Kindle, or the middlemen who already distribute USA Today's content. He's also active in the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Digital Publishing Alliance. Its mission: bring together innovative folks to figure out the next big thing in digital publishing.
"We are placing a big bet that we can plug and play into this new, content ecosystem," says McKinnis, a Radford University journalism graduate and self-described "geek for the IT part" of the profession. His affinity for the profession actually began as a child because his father, David McKinnis, worked at the Washington Post for 37 years. "I grew up in a family surrounded by the product, the business, and Posties."
"They're popping up like mushrooms"
USA Today is already on Kindle, which is "exceeding our expectations," as measured in monthly subscriptions and single-copy sales. He sees plenty of other competitors moving rapidly into making e-Reader devices. "They're popping up like mushrooms."
Talk to anyone in traditional news organizations and they say one of the industry's greatest hurdles is the overcoming the ink-stained, print-based cultures. Much like newspapers had to make an investment in websites, they now need to free up funds to do research on what e-readers want. That can be tough in most newsrooms, where budgets are being cut from declining ad revenues.
McKinnis and his colleagues gather information wherever they go. Whether with interns or outside vendors, he gathers snippets of information on the grazing habits of consumers. It's nearly impossible to stay ahead as once-fads such as Twitter are now a source of news. "That could be a flash in the pan by next summer," he says.
“We may need to consider hand crafting these…and not treat them like an afterthought."
Another obstacle is newsroom computer systems, which are widely viewed as antiques cobbled together from leftover CCI and Atex parts. "Newspaper companies are now starting to take a serious look at their content management systems and how they function across the enterprise, from print to digital to mobile. They’re finding some difficult decisions are going to have to be made soon," McKinnis says.
So, how do you pay for it?
McKinnis doesn’t see advertising being a major revenue stream until more readers adopt the new e-reader devices. "My take on it is not to bother with ads for two to three years" when the technology allows for better displays of ads and more consumers actually looking at them. "But, I have colleagues that have the opposite opinion and I understand that completely," McKinnis says.
He does see a day when newspaper companies will be forced to further curtail their circulation of print editions, just like Gannett did in Detroit, and force readers to either use an e-reading device or rely on the website.
McKinnis and others at USA Today are noodling how to be more proactive about thinking about e-readers just as they do with print subscribers. "What if we proactively approach the market, with a graphic design team and an editor to build these products versus sending out a raw content feed and attempting to automate the process into templates?" McKinnis says. "We may need to consider hand crafting these with our packaging and branding attributes and not treat them like an afterthought."
While he tries to keep up with the ever change industry landscape, McKinnis sees great promise when he visits campuses, just as he did for the Digital Publishing Alliance meeting at the University of Missouri. "Those kids already get it," McKinnis says. "They were born digital," he says, but they also embrace the futuristic research "seeping into the classrooms. That’s different from the J-school I went to."
