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Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get

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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 years, Doctor still has omitted to tell the reader what happened during the Great Recession to the supposedly booming Internet advertising industry that he is so excited about: $21.2 Billion in 2007 revenues, up to only $23.4 Billion in 2008 revenues, and DOWN to $22.7 Billion in 2009 revenues (note: U.S. daily newspapers still bring in more advertising dollars by themselves than all Internet ad dollars spent in the United States!).

On p. 109, Doctor merely asserts that newspapers couldn't withstand a 25-35% drop in their Web traffic if they cut off Google. He has no proof for this at all, and in fact, elsewhere has told us repeatedly that local newspapers' websites have hardly any traffic and aren't doing well selling ads. My take: if nothing plus nothing equals nothing, than nothing minus nothing also equals nothing.

On p. 114, David Simon is quoted as saying that bloggers aren't in the city hall or courthouse covering the news. Doctor tries to razz-ma-tazz the reader all through chapter 6 with all the things the bloggers are doing, but by the end of Chapter 6, he still hasn't told us of a single blogger who is personally covering news in city hall or at the county courthouse. Simon goes completely unanswered!

On p. 126, Mary Lou Felton tells us that banner ads on the Internet are ignored by 99% of people, and on p. 170, we're again told about the "complete ad blindness that is now prevalent on the Web as a whole." Doctor doesn't dispute this, and one wonders how he can be so confident back on p. 85 that "Why has all this money moved to online?" (a question that has no stated factual basis other than classified ads) and especially this whopper, "The Web just works better for so many advertisers than traditional media." How can the Web work better than newspapers or television or magazines if Internet users are BLIND to ads???

On p. 131, Doctor estimates that the average newspaper has 15 journalists blogging. Strangely, the AVERAGE U.S. newspaper has only about 15 journalists working for it, so Doctor is WAY off. And should Doctor (let alone the rest of us) be impressed that 70 NY Times journalists blog out of a news/editorial staff of about 1,150?

For a book that as "onomics" in the title, which suggests that Doctor knows something about media economics, he is again WAY off on pp. 135-136 in his analysis of bringing in (and charging for) traditional real estate advertising versus blog-related real estate advertising. He is enthusiastic about a hits or results oriented ad on a blog bringing in $1,950 to $4,875. Doctor doesn't seem to know that even even medium-sized daily newspapers bring in more than that much from one full-page ad from a realtor, placed, priced, and charged the old-fashioned way. Why is Doctor (and so many others) so excited about new media having 4,000 hits on a blog, or 400 followers on Twitter, while old media (even in 2010) deliver numbers like 40,000 total readers (daily newspaper on the small end of the medium-sized range); 400,000 total readers (smaller metro daily, or medium-sized national magazine or viewers of a small national cable channel); or 4 million (viewers of network news broadcast)?

On p. 150, Balboni tells Doctor and us, in fact, that blogs are NOT of interest to advertisers, which seriously calls into question Doctor's speculation on pp. 135-6.

On p. 142, Doctor is unfair to newspapers handling their business sections. What almost all newspapers did was cutting back on or eliminating stock tables, bond tables, currency prices, commodity prices, etc., which typically took up 2-4 full pages. Most metro dailies almost never had more than 2-3 full pages of actual news and feature stories about business, and many of them were Associated Press.

On p. 149, Doctor says that Americans have reacted to low quality news on TV. This is true. But Doctor is misleading to even imply or suggest that Americans rejecting crappy local and national TV news also means that Americans are dropping newspaper subscriptions also because of low quality. In every way, metro newspapers have more and higher quality news than metro TV stations, and small market newspapers also have more and higher quality news than small TV stations (assuming that a small daily even has to compete directly with a local TV station covering local news, which most of them don't). Most Americans settle for "good enough" news, and the really sad part is that a lot of local TV news is not even "good enough" for consumers to settle for it.

On p. 159, Doctor claims that 15 years ago, "many" newspapers didn't even know the names of their subscribers. Perhaps "many" out of 1,500 dailies, but utterly false for a very large percentage of them. Fifteen years ago, most U.S. newspapers had already spent 20-30 years telemarketing subscriptions to former subscribers, new residents, etc., and they knew EXACTLY who they were calling. Doctor, typically, cites no source for this insulting assertion.

On p. 167, Doctor writes that blogs, Google, etc., are "totally transitory." If true, then he certainly is incorrect that "every...rule, every best practice, and every bit of conventional wisdom has been devalued." If that were correct, blogs and Google, etc., would dominate, be permanent, etc., and not "totally transitory."

On p. 169, he mentions a blogger breaking a news story from his/her living room. Seriously, Mr. Doctor, what story of any significance, could be covered from someone's living room, unless it was being covered entirely by leaks, a la Matt Drudge (and he's no typical blogger)?

On p. 191, Doctor says that "changing news and classified games" are the reason for "bankruptcies and near bankruptcies" of newspapers. This is simply false. The reasons for bankruptcies and near bankruptcies of MediaNews Group, Tribune Co., Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Philadelphia papers, the Chicago Sun-Times based group, GateHouse Media, Journal Register Co., and others have been: too much debt from paying too much to buy too many newspapers in a few years leading up to the Great Recession, and the Great Recession resulting in huge cuts in U.S. ad spending (most of which did NOT simply move to the Internet).

On p. 203, Doctor writes that there are 200,000 students in journalism schools right now who want to go into journalism. But based on the annual surveys done by Dr. Lee Becker and his team at The University of Georgia, the number of students in U.S. journalism/communication schools who want to go into journalism (print, broadcast, cable, Internet, wire service, etc.) is more like 15% (at most) of the 200,000 total enrollment figure, or maybe 30,000. The other 170,000 students are interested in: public relations, advertising, marketing, speech/rhetoric, Web design, graphic design, printing, technical writing, creative writing, photography, e-commerce, videogames, non-news TV (drama, talk shows, game shows, comedy, children's programming, religious programming, documentaries, etc.), radio announcing and DJing, television/cable production, radio production, event planning, fundraising, pursuing a master's degree in journalism/mass communication, going to law school, etc. And new enrollments are not up by big percentages at average j-schools, or most of them; those percentages are based on just a few.

Doctor can't seem to make up his mind in the book whether "media" is a singular or plural noun (hint: it's plural).

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

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.

None of this is news, but this is a good, coherent and relevant collection of thoughts on how the news industry got where it is and some discussions of how to move forward. Very realistic view points which I appreciate. I find the media hubbub about micro-payments frustratingly myopic.

Journalists hate to talk about the economics of their profession, which is why this is such a valuable book. Doctor proceeds from the assumption that the newspaper industry as we have known it is an irreversible decline and that only a handful of national dailies will exist in a few years. There's no reason to belabor that point, and he doesn't.

Instead, he devotes the rest of the book to the much more important discussion of how journalism can be reinvented and deliver value in an economically sustainable model. His perspective is both optimistic and uplifting. Doctor sees the end of the vertically integrated news organization as creating opportunities for focused and nimble ventures to emerge that can indeed deliver quality journalism and pay their reporters a living wage. Competition will raise quality standards and ultimately deliver a better product. We have to go through an ugly deconstruction process in order to get there, but Doctor sees bright light at the end of the tunnel.

A lot of journalists are uncomfortable with Doctor's views because they fear the loss of the comfortable salaries and modest output demands they have long enjoyed. Well, welcome to the new world. Jobs are going away and the US is becoming a nation of self-employed contractors. Journalists with initiative, innovation and skill will be able to make a better living working for multiple masters than they could have made working for media companies. News organizations will be under pressure to be more responsive to their readers' demands, but Doctor does not believe this will result in the "dumbing down" of news. Tiered models will emerge that deliver high-quality journalism to those who are willing to pay a modest amount for it.

Newsonomics was published 18 months ago, but its lessons and predictions are just as valid today as they were then. This is a clear, concise and ultimately hopeful look at the economics of $45 billion industry in the middle of wholesale reinvention.

I just graduated journalism school and read this toward the end of my final semester in a class called the Business and Future of Journalism. It does an excellent job organizing the biggest changes, trends and innovations going on in this Schumpeterian moment into an unbelievably quick, fun and easy read.

It's best suited for people with some connection to the media, but those curious about the revolution going on in a field that affects us all through the news and journalism we get (hence the subtitle) will enjoy it also.

Several key themes run throughout the book, most notably the shift from a one-way conversation in which the news was "pushed" out to a two-way conversation in which it is "pulled" by those formerly known as the audience-- now the user-- but I did not find any of the content redundant.

I should note that it is NOT easy to keep my attention for hundreds of pages (Nicholas Carr is on to something in his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains), but reading Ken Doctor's Book was a breeze because it's structured like a long-form, hard-copy blog, essentially. Brilliant.

On the front cover it's the "twelve new trends that will shape the news..." On the back cover it's "twelve laws that will shape the news..." Which is it? Look, for example, at #4, "the Old News World is Gone-" That's neither a law or a trend.

On page 58, he says that Seattle "has become a one newspaper town". This is incorrect. There is a second daily newspaper in Seattle, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce www.djc.com, over 100 years old.

I still prefer books where I am not "my own editor"

With all the conjecture about the future of the news media floating around cyberspace and the constant debates about new media vs. old media; bloggers vs. journalists and when exactly newspapers will die off completely, it was such a pleasure to read a book rooted in facts, and filled with people who care deeply about the industry. Not only do these people understand the landscape of digital news, they are crafting the future and their ideas make sense.

The author is Ken Doctor, and if you don't know him, you should get to know him. Ken is a leading media industry analyst and a super-smart guy. I know him from his blog, Content Bridges, which is a favorite in my RSS feed and I am never disappointed with anything he writes.

In Newsonomics: Twelve new trends that will shape the news you get; Doctor takes us from the early days of journalism, sharing his own experiences during a lengthy career with Knight-Ridder to current-day issues, attitudes and concerns...and everything in between.

He talks about the curmudgeons who are so often blasted by new media types (myself included at times) but in a way that helps you understand them better. There is so much more to this debate, and it is uncovered beautifully throughout the pages of this book. News is changing, but it is nowhere near death.

On page 3, Doctor writes:

"The second decade of the twenty-first century will truly be a Digital News Decade, just as the first has been one of profound transformation. "

The transformation referenced is what the first part of the book explores in great depth. The title of chapter four sums it up well: The Old News World is Gone -- Get Over It.

Doctor has coined a specific group of organizations: "the digital dozen" which he says will dominate.

Some of the Q&A sections should be required reading for journalism students. Joe Apprendi of Collective Media shares insights on what he thinks most publishers miss in thinking about digital content vs. print. Wendy Warren of [...] discusses local journalism online and Nancy Shute of U.S. News & World Report talks about the new "gig" economy as it relates to journalists. All three offer great insights and there are many more that are equally insightful.

Newsonomics is an important book. It sheds light on a topic that is discussed at conferences all over the country. Whenever I attend such conferences, I am typically left quite frustrated, but this book had the opposite effect. It's like having something you can just hand a person to enlighten them (or shut them up) instead of arguing and I am grateful for that.

I'm not having this argument anymore. I'm just sending people to Ken Doctor. I wholeheartedly recommend this book. If you care about news, you will surely enjoy it.

Angela Connor
Author, "18 Rules of Community Engagement" 18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online