18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't get too excited about a book that virtually ignores 90+% of U.S. dailies, June 13, 2010
This review is from: Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get (Hardcover)
Doctor writes this book from an elitist perspective, without ever telling the reader and, given his own journalistic background in places such as Eugene, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; and St. Paul, Minn., perhaps without even realizing it. First, Chapter 1 is written as if every American is frantically searching the Web for the highest quality journalism about everything, all of the time. But while one-third (say, 33%) of the U.S. public uses Google every day, in a typical day less than 1% of the U.S. public is reading, on paper and online combined, The New York Times. The same goes for readership of each of The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, or viewership of CNN, BBC, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, or Rachel Maddow, and virtually all newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and radio programs that Doctor implies "everyone" is now consuming because of the Web. The fact is that The New York Times was widely available nationally on paper both before and after it was available on the Web, and the Times never was able to get even its Sunday on-paper circulation over 1.5 million in a country of roughly 300 million people despite supposedly everyone wanting to read it. All of Chapter One is written based on a claim, an assumption, that Americans want the highest quality journalism, but he provides NO evidence anywhere in the chapter that this is true for more than a small fraction of the public. It is not until page 81, in fact, that Doctor finally admits that most news consumers settle for "good enough content" (which is true now and always has been). But his recognition of John Q. Public settling for "good enough content" is in direct conflict with his Chapter 1, in which all of us are our own editor, frantically searching the Web all the time for the most excellent journalism.
For a former newspaper editor, he leaves out numerous pieces of context that would show that the U.S. newspaper industry is not quite as incompetent, broke, etc., as it might seem. For instance, on page 10 and elsewhere, he mentions paid circulation figures only for on-paper editions and how quickly they are dropping; he leaves out that many metro dailies total readerships (print and online) have increased dramatically because online readership growth exceeds print readership decline. He also leaves out context for news media that show limited reach; for instance, on page 14, Doctor writes that half of all Americans watch a news video at least once a month. First, such self-reports always exaggerate real numbers. But even if accurate, that means that only 5 million Americans (out of nearly 310 million) watch a news video (such Katie Courac with Sarah Palin, see p. 20) each day which, when divided by the number of news videos available, is not very many per video on average, and is not impressive in total number or percentage of the U.S. population. (Again: a tiny percentage of the U.S. population ever has seen the "gotcha" Palin interview, either live or on the Web.) Likewise, he reports that one-quarter of Americans reads a blog at least once a week. Even if these self-reports (claims) are true, that is a little more than 10 million persons doing it each day, which is only slightly more than 3% of the U.S. population: a large number, a tiny percentage.
"For a former newspaper editor...." (continued): On p. 54, he takes 12 minutes a month on "local newspaper" (see below) websites as evidence that they have bad websites or other news organizations have better ones, but Doctor doesn't point out that local news on local newspapers' websites is not competing against state, national, or international news on other websites. The obvious conclusion is that in suburbs and small cities and even smaller towns all over America, people still want to read their local newspaper PRINTED ON PAPER. On p. 47, he vaguely concedes, "smaller city newspapers are faring a bit better" than regional or metro daily newspapers. Unfortunately, Doctor deemphasizes (to put it mildly) this rather key point, and omits entirely that more than 90% of all U.S. daily newspapers in the United States, as well as more than 90% of all U.S. weekly newspapers, are "smaller city newspapers." On p. 75, he claims that the Internet "began to affect their [newspapers] business in the 1990s," but this has been disproven in fine studies; U.S. newspapers began reacting to the Internet in the 1990s, but the Internet had virtually no impact on newspaper readership until 2003. (This was true for newspaper advertising, too, as Craigslist was still in only 18 cities by the end of 2002.) On p. 85, he writes, "Why has all this money moved [from newspapers] to online?" without a shred of evidence that anything other that much classified advertising has moved from newspapers (as opposed to other media or being new ad dollars) to online. Also on p. 85, he writes, "The Web just works better for so many advertisers than traditional media," again without provided a shred of evidence that is true for anything other than classifieds (cars, dating/sex, real estate, jobs, housing, Google listings ads, etc.).
To full grasp how the U.S. newspaper industry is structured (which Doctor never bothers to tell you, either because he doesn't know himself or because it would get in the way of the narrative he has constructed in his head and wants to pass to you), I refer you to: [..]/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States_by_circulation.
There, you may note that newspapers #1, #2, #3, #5, and #63 are national newspapers.
Almost all of the others in this top 100 list are or might be called metro dailies, except most of the ones from 89 to 100. The 1,300 U.S. dailies that are NOT on this Wikipedia list are ALL small-to-medium-sized newspapers. Doctor talks about the entire U.S. newspaper industry while, based on his book, seeming to know or care little to nothing about any daily newspaper except the largest 34 of them (St. Paul Pioneer Press [where, not coincidentally, he was managing editor] and larger) out of 1,400.
In fact, Doctor never defines, and therefore can never keep straight, what is a "regional" newspaper and what is a "local" newspaper. On p. 24, he says they both "shrink rapidly." On p. 45, he refers to the metro daily Minneapolis Star-Tribune as a "local" newspaper, and on p. 46, he says that seven "local" newspapers are in bankruptcy while referring to the following metro dailies: Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and others. (Nor does he tell you that they were all put into bankruptcy by overleveraged buyout deals combined with the recession, and not put there by the Internet generally, the "Dirty Dozen" or any other external force.) On p 53, he refers to the Gannett Company as if it consists of nothing but "large dailies," but Gannett Co. owns 82 dailies: one national paper (USA TODAY), 10 metro dailies (Phoenix, Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Nashville, Rochester, Des Moines, Honolulu, and Wilmington), and 71 medium-to-SMALL sized dailies. Bottom line: Gannett, far from being all large dailies, consists overwhelming of NOT large dailies. And Doctor is dead wrong when he says on page 6 that "every city" has or had "hundreds of journalists." (The typical U.S. daily, which has a circulation of less than 13,000, has a news/editorial staff of about 15 journalists, not "hundreds.")
On page 16, Doctor provides the wrong lesson regarding The New York Herald Tribune and the weekly Life magazine, saying that they died because they did not "excel." In reality, they were both superb, but the Herald Tribune (the quality of which nearly matched, and sometimes exceeded, The New York Times) folded because of a massive union strike that hit all New York City dailies, while Life magazine's advertisers mostly left for network TV while its readers still loved it (it was closed in December 1972, despite a January 1972 rate base of 5+ million circulation!). HINT: Is this what is happening to daily newspapers? Readers drifting away slowly while advertisers leave too quickly? On p. 29, when he makes his point about top journalistic achievement coupled with poor financial performance, he doesn't point out that one can find prominent examples of this in media over hundreds of years! But then Doctor obviously is no historian, journalism or other.
On page 18 and several other places in the book, Doctor never answers the question of whether the average news consumer, or whether anyone, wants or needs the 4,000 news sources on Yahoo! or Google. (Not the least of which reason is this: based on what he tells repeatedly, there are not 4,000 different news organizations doing their own reporting on anything, even Pres. Obama or the Iraq War; only wars get 400, most U.S. national political news can barely scrape together 40 news organizations, so virtually all of the content in 4,000 news organizations is duplicative. Doctor never tells you that either.)
But perhaps the strangest Doctor error or omission in the book is that he almost always leaves out the Great Recession (the largest economic collapse in world history since the Great Depression of the 1930s), which started during Fourth Quarter 2007 and ended during Third Quarter 2009, with a very weak recovery since except Fourth Quarter 2009. On p. 2, he notes drop in U.S. newspaper advertising revenues in 2009, but doesn't mention the Great Recession. Doctor makes the same omission in writing on p. 77 about both revenue figures and the acquisitions of the Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Chicago newspapers, and on p. 78 on why no one would buy a newspaper the last 2½ years. On p. 85, for the very first time, he finally admits it was a "deep recession." But after having repeatedly told the reader what happened to newspaper advertising revenues the last several...
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Vivid Dispatch From the News Wars, February 5, 2010
This review is from: Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get (Hardcover)
Ken Doctor's new book published Tuesday, "Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get," sounds as if it is going to be a treatise, but it's not. Sure, there is plenty of solid analysis, but "Newsonomics" reads more like a series of battlefield dispatches from the hunkered down camp of beleaguered old media and the loosely organized fronts opened by new media insurgents.
And Doctor is a virtual Christiane Amanpour of the news wars -- quick-moving, observant, solid in his interpretations and engaged without being a cranky partisan. Doctor delivers the book I would have expected, given his balanced perspective and consistently rewarding Content Bridges blog. Here are three things I like about the book.
Close-up reporting: Doctor's consulting practice gets him around the country. Without going all featurish, the book includes well-observed details, such as the contrast between the mammoth, half-empty newsroom of The Philadelphia Inquirer with the studio apartment-sized digs of [...](one of the biggest and best of the independent, nonprofit start-ups).
Opening the second chapter, Doctor describes New York Times brand-name tech columnist David Pogue holding forth on a stage in Monterey, Calif. Then he wheels into a solid discussion of how much money the Times may be making on Pogue's work alone.
In the manner of John Morton in his heyday, Doctor taps into insights from questions he is asked and from what he hears from his clients. The result is authoritative.
Good with numbers: Doctor has an eye for the telling statistic. He explains them without a lot of jargon and avoids some of the more convoluted modeling that creeps into some whither-the-news conversations.
A case in point is a commentary on why digital ad rates are still only a fraction of their print counterparts. One reason, Doctor suggests, is the short time that all those millions of unique visitors spend on each site. So, he suggests, most news consumption still occurs in print.
That sent me to my calculator. (My numbers here, not Doctor's.) If there are about 70 million unique visitors per month on newspaper sites and they spend an average of 30 minutes there (on all newspaper sites, not just their hometown paper's) that's 2.1 billion minutes. An average of 43 million print papers are purchased daily. Figure a very conservative 20 minutes per day reading time (and we're not counting pass-along readers), times 30 days. That's 25.8 billion minutes in a month. Ten times as much, about the same as the print/online ad split!
First-person perspective: Linear is out, right? Doctor does not proceed in a straight line, breaking up the loosely knit chapters with newsy sidebars.
The book is organized in the manner of John Naisbitt's 1982 classic, "Megatrends," around 12 stories within the big story. None of the trends are oh-my-God startling, but they add up to a far-reaching overview of what's decaying and gone and of the new order that is emerging.
Most chapters close with a short Q&A interview or two with digital doers. That adds to the from-the-trenches feel of the book and accommodates varying viewpoints. Doctor asks a nifty final question to most people: "What lesson in digital media do you wish you had learned faster?"
Mike Orren, publisher of the Pegasus News site in Dallas, replies (among four takeaways): "Ad sales will ramp 70 percent slower than your most dour prediction. But if you can hang on, they will ramp."
Some readers may be disappointed that the book is not totally up-to-date. But that's inevitable when you try to match the pace of book production with a fast-moving subject. Thus Doctor doesn't really address the course of the recession and likely post-recession scenarios, and his discussion of paid online content is informed but missing the important developments of the last six months.
The book also lacks a grand synthesis or a definitive take on where it will all end. I take that to be a mark of Doctor's intellectual honesty. One can identify important trends, but there is a disorderly, world-turned-upside-down aspect to the current state of the news. Too tidy a book would not be true to the reality of the subject
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The (Semi) Positive Economic Future for Journalists, February 5, 2010
This review is from: Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get (Hardcover)
Ken Doctor, in his valuable new book, Newsonomics, cites a quote from former Knight Ridder exec Jim Batten that "the institution of American journalism owes more to the institution of the department store than the First Amendment."
But what's going to support journalism now that department store advertising is withering; big chunks of paid classifieds have been Craig's Listed; and the circulation (audience) has increasingly moved down the slippery slope to a potpourri of "continuous partial attention" news channels.
Indeed, the details found in newsprint aren't always especially sought after. As Doctor notes, just 44 percent can be bothered to click past the headlines in news aggregators like Google News to get to the original source.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Nobody in their right mind would plan a future at a newspaper or TV news broadcast anymore, right? But then there is this inconvenient statistic: applications to journalism schools have more than doubled in the past several years - even with tuition bills exceeding $50,000 at the elite institutions.
For the journalist who will pursue his or her avocation, plentiful options exist, notes Doctor, a former Knight Ridder Digital exec and publisher at newspapers and alternative weeklies who currently does analysis for Outsell, inc. and writes the Content Bridges blog. The solutions are structured in the book as "twelve new trends that will shape the news you get."
The trends are right on and more than familiar to our Local Onliner audience ("Itch the Niche!"). But happily, Doctor avoids the blue sky and covers the bases with the aplomb of an all star. His comprehensive review, interesting detail and demand that the relationships between business and journalism be creatively re-explored makes this a valuable book for those who care about the future of journalism, and its critical role in democratic societies.
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