My newsstand guy is quitting, victim of digital media

PAMPLONA, Spain -- For the past five years I have been buying my newspapers on the weekend at a neighborhood newsstand. The owner and I, Jesus Erro, got to be casual friends, and we talked about the politics and culture of our respective countries. He is a big reader.

Sign in the window announces the owner is retiring and closing the shop.

This weekend, I found out he is closing his doors and retiring after 27 years at that location. Nobody wanted to buy the business, and he had reached the legal age to retire, 62. His son is a teenager, and his wife works for the local government, and he plans to focus on them. But beyond that, he isn't sure what he will do.  

Versión en español

Three years ago, I interviewed him to get his perspective on the newspaper business in Spain. All the dailies were suffering at that time. It had been in a steady decline since 2008, first because of the financial crisis and then because of consumers' switching to digital platforms to get their news. Lately, it has gotten even worse.

Erro loves books, and his original idea when he bought the shop was to sell books. Newspapers were just a sideline. With the crisis, he also took to selling bread since lots of cafes and bakeries opened up nearby and also sold the local newspapers.

Below is a video of our 2016 interview, with subtitles in English.



On Tuesday, Nov. 19, Erro will close for the last time. He had a clearance sale going on. I bought an armload of National Geographic specials on science and archeology.

There are few nearby places to buy the national press, so I'm not sure what I will do. I still like the printed editions, especially on the weekends when there is a lot more to read.

Most of all, I'm going to miss our conversations.

Here is a link to our original interview: Newsstand owner adapts to survive media crisis

Letters to a newspaper publisher III: A shameful scandal right under your nose

How should a media executive manage the business during a time of disruptive technological change? Alfonso Nieto attempted to answer that question in his book "Letters to a newspaper publisher," written in 1987 when newsrooms in Spain were moving from typewriters to computers. His comments have acute relevance today.  

Alfonso Nieto, photo University of Navarra

In this letter to a fictitious newspaper publisher, titled "A Shameful Scandal", Alfonso Nieto criticizes media executives who are focused only on the bottom line without paying attention to the quality of the content in their own publications. (The scandal is a defamation lawsuit against a reporter.)

Nieto also emphasizes the importance of hiring journalists with high ethical standards. "This profession is so prominent that it should exclude those of mediocre character who are untrustworthy, resentful, or selfish" (p. 58).

The top executives of the media organization have the responsibility to communicate clearly the editorial standards of the organization, Nieto says. Without that, there is disorder in the newsroom. In the absence of clear direction, each section editor creates their own fiefdom, and "this disorder is the key that opens the door to misinformation and mistakes" (pp. 59-60).

Chasing clicks isn't bringing in readers or money

Some observations by media economics expert Robert Picard's observations about the challenges of media today, from an interview done by the University of Navarra Faculty of Communication:

Media companies need to develop revenue from many more sources than they did in the past.

Media companies are diluting the quality of their product by chasing reader clicks with light or frivolous digital content. "This is not bringing in money, and it's not bringing in audience."

Versión en español

Maybe 15 to 25 percent of the reading public will pay for serious news, Picard says. These are the people who really want news.

Journalists think their work is really important, and for the journalists, it is. But for most people, they just want to get on with their lives. If something important happens, then they will go online and read it somewhere, but most of the time they won't pay for it.

Newspapers have to stop thinking of themselves as a product for a general audience. The people who still subscribe tend to be the most active politically, socially, and financially in their communities. Newspapers should be selling that aspect of their audience, not a massive audience.

Newsstand owner adapts to survive media crisis

Newsstand owner Jesus Erro: Publishers are fudging their sales numbers.

PAMPLONA, Spain - Those who study the business of media tend to look at it from the perspective of journalists and publishers. But the owner of a newsstand in the heart of this provincial capital has a different point of view.

Jesus Erro, 56, has owned and operated Caprichos Books and Stationery for the past 24 years. He has seen the good times and the bad.

For the first decade or so, sales of magazines and newspapers -- about three fourths of his business -- were strong. But beginning in 2008, with the combination of the financial crisis and the Internet's impact on sales of print products, the business has gone down steadily.

Versión en español

"For small shops in this industry, it's very difficult to survive. A few years ago, when there was a favorable economic climate, everything was straightforward, more or less. You never expected to make a lot of money but you did expect to make a decent income. But now with everything that has come along -- the Internet, the economic crisis -- Pffff. We are trying to make just enough money to survive in these kinds of shops."

It's 1927, and the news media are out of control

Charles Lindbergh and his plane. (Library of Congress photo via Mother Nature Network)

Bill Bryson's book One Summer: America, 1927 captures a moment when the country's burgeoning news media feasted on the stories of two extraordinary men, Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh. The media made them into gods. The baseball hero basked in the attention. The aviator hated it.

If you can't bear the constant assault of 24-hour cable news, Buzzfeed, and Facebook updates, you should realize that America lived through a similar media explosion in the 1920s.

Then the mass media were newspapers, radio, talking pictures, phonographs, and the telephone. Thes media of the day hounded and entertained people on the streets, in their offices, in their leisure hours, and in the privacy of their homes. Sound familiar? The difference may be only a matter of degree. Today we carry the mass media with us on the devices in our pockets.

In the '20s, the new media were just becoming massive national, industrial-scale businesses that needed big stories to feed the news cycle.

More proof that journalists need to brand themselves

Version en español aquí.

New York Times editor Jill Abramson says that half the people coming to the newspaper's website in the runup to the election were searching for Nate Silver, the political forecasting whiz who writes the blog FiveThirtyEight.

"He got huge, huge readership," she said at a conference covered by MediaBistro. "They weren't coming for the rest of the Times; they came for him,"

In other words, Nate Silver has developed a personal brand that is bigger than the New York Times when it comes to the niche of political forecasting.

To young journalists: learn multimedia, languages

Versión en español aquí. 

In an interview with the Spanish website LaInformacion.com, Juan Antonio Giner, co-founder of Innovation Media Consulting, shared some of his strong opinions about how young journalists and traditional media should confront the  challenge from digital media. Spain's traditional media, like those in the U.S., have experienced devastating declines in revenues and have cut staff ruthlessly. Some excerpts from that interview follow.

Q. What advice do you have for young journalists who want to make a decent living practicing their chosen craft?

The job market is limited, and for that reason there will never be work for everyone everywhere and in all media. Competition today is fierce, and that is a good thing. The only ones who will find work are those who are the best trained, who have acquired the most knowledge, who have mastered telling stories with multimedia, who speak more than one language, and, above all, who want to take on the world. This is a profession for people with passion, with fight, who are undaunted, relentless.

Social media challenge Google for news distribution

The importance of search engines to traffic on news sites spawned an industry of consultants on search engine optimization (SEO). But now social media may be challenging the dominance of "Google juice."

The percentage of Americans getting their news via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ has risen to 19 percent, more than double what it was just two years ago, according to a Pew study of news consumption habits. 

The data point that should get the attention of newspaper publishers is that almost as many  Americans (19 percent) are getting news through social networks as from print editions of newspapers (23 percent). (Note: In both cases, the survey asked people where they got news yesterday.)

Are newspaper brands back? Report from Spain

Rosalia Lloret: People are searching for credible
sources amid an avalanche of information.

Versión en español aquí.

El País is widening its lead as the No. 1 newspaper website in Spain with 7.6 million unique users in June (for comparison, the number is 74 million for the New York Times).

At the same time the newspaper's corporate parent, Prisa, is struggling financially and faced a one-day strike over 200 layoffs at its radio affiliate and employee anger over cuts at its financial daily.

Despite the bad financial news, Prisa's chief digital officer, Rosalía Lloret believes there are signs that El País is strengthening its brand. She made her comments during the recent summer course of la Universidad Complutense de Madrid in El Escorial.

Two-thirds choose the brand

Lloret noted that more than half of the users of El País and its affiliated websites come directly to the site, either by typing in the web address or from a bookmark. That is, they are coming intentionally, not by chance.

Independent print startup thrives despite crisis

While print newspapers are losing subscribers and advertisers in the rest of Europe, an Italian print publication launched by an investigative reporter is thriving because of its independent voice.

Il Fatto Quotidiano (The Daily Facts) has been slaying sacred cows since 2009 and makes its money from subscribers and newsstand sales -- roughly 6 million euros in profit in both 2010 and 2011. Part of its success may be attributable to its opposition to then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose control of a vast media empire tended to stifle criticism of his administration.

As of June last year (the latest figures available), Il Fatto had circulation of 127,000 daily, with 42,000 subscribers (at 290 euros annually), with the rest sold on newsstands. Earlier this year it reported 450,000 unique users daily for its online edition.

The fact that a print publication supported by subscribers could thrive amid a worldwide economic downturn and a collapsing economic model for print seems remarkable.

When will mobile ad revenue reflect time spent?

Two years ago the buzz was that mobile was the next big thing, and now that consumers are moving to tablets and smartphones, the moment has arrived.

• Nielsen says that 50.4% of mobile users now have a smartphone.
• More than two-thirds of those in the 25-34 age group have a smartphone. The report is here.

This slide from Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley shows
the opportunity for mobile advertising. Although consumers spend
10% of their time with media on mobile platforms, mobile
is getting only 1% of the ad revenue, a $20 billion opportunity.

Warren Buffett bets on value of local news

Warren Buffett's decision to buy 63 daily and weekly newspapers from Media General confirms the market value of organizations that build a strong community around local news.

That value is precisely what digital news entrepreneurs like MinnPost, Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego are counting on as they build their organizations.

Buffett, CEO of the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, is not betting on newspapers, so all of those bankrupt organizations out there that are looking for capital had better look elsewhere. Buffett is betting on the value of community news, especially in smaller communities where newspapers are the primary source of news and information.

How I ran my newspaper monopoly (and Warren Buffett ran his)

Back in the 1960s, before baseball had a designated hitter, I had a paper route. This was a job formerly given to 12-year-olds but now has been taken over by adults.

It was a measure of the daily newspaper's market dominance that a kid who wanted a paper route had to buy it from another kid. Having a paper route was the pre-teen equivalent of owning an NFL franchise, an enviably profitable protected monopoly. Mine was a particular block on a particular street. The price to buy it was equal to one week's collections -- in my case about $40.

In the grand old days of newspaper monopolies, people had only a few places they could get the news -- either a daily newspaper, the nightly TV news or radio. If you wanted to know if the local major league team won and hadn't listened to the game on the radio, you had to stay up till 11 o'clock and wait until the announcer gave the score. Or you waited until the next morning's newspaper arrived.

Newspaper culture still blocks move to digital

Gumersindo Lafuente of El Pais (photo by James Breiner

Versión en español aquí.

The culture war of print vs. digital rages on and continues to block the transformation of the newspaper industry. An incident at Spain's most prestigious daily and a study of 38 U.S. newspapers both made this clearer recently.

At El Pais in Spain, the newsroom protested after Gumersindo Lafuente, the head of digital operations, told a journalism conference that a prime consideration when hiring a journalist should be the number of his or her Twitter followers.

It didn't help that Lafuente and his team were imported two years ago from a failed web operation amid layoffs of print journalists, according to the report in prnoticias.com.

It's "digital first" from here on in news biz

The digital publishing industry will hit a significant milestone this year when for the first time it will book more ad revenue than all print newspapers and magazines.

The really bad news for print media, even those with robust web operations, is that most of the revenue is going to non-print publishers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.

Facebook still not driving as much traffic to news sites as Google

All the numbers for Facebook are impressive, from its 750 million users to its $500 million in estimated first half profits this year.

However, as a driver of web traffic for news outlets, the results look disappointing at first glance.

At the 25 biggest news websites in the U.S., the percentage of traffic from Facebook is still only in the single digits, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Google, by comparison, was responsible for an average of 30 percent.

Tech, intermediaries leave newspapers far behind

I came away from reading the State of the News Media in 2011 with the sense that newspapers in particular are being left farther behind by all of the advances in technology and payment systems.

One example is Apple. Although it is selling subscriptions to publications on its iTunes platform, it is taking 30% of the revenue and keeping the all-important customer data and credit card information to itself.

Web users are lazy, selfish and ruthless

(Versión en español aquí.)


Somebody brilliant said that, and if we need any proof we need look no further than a study by Comscore and the Newspaper Association of America.

The data show that the 108 million unique users of newspaper sites in June 2011 spent an average of just over a minute a day, 32 minutes a month, viewing their contents. (Updated July 2011.)

In a separate study, Facebook users were shown to be spending 14 times more time on that social networking site, or a total of 7 hours a month.

It´s one reason why newspapers are trying to make their contents part of that social web with strategies such as hiring community managers.

Headlines for cellphones produce $60,000 a month for Guatemalan newspaper

Newspapers battered by the collapse of the traditional business model might turn to this type of text-based SMS service as a new source of revenue.

(La versión original en español se encuentra aquí.)

El Periódico of Guatemala has launched a headline service for cellphones that is producing $60,000 a month. After only four months, the service had 40,000 subscribers, said José Rubén Zamora, founder and president of the newspaper. (Photo from International Center for Journalists)

The subscribers for these headlines outnumber the 30,000 who buy the daily paper.

Zamora is not aware of other media offering this type of service, but he is bracing himself for competition in the niche from his biggest competitor.

Six messages a day

Subscribers pay the equivalent of 36 cents a day to receive three text messages with news in categories they choose, such as traffic, sports and business. The next three messages are free. The charges are added to the subscriber´s cellphone account, and the newspaper receives 30 percent.

Zamora said the goal is to send no more than six messages a day so as not to overwhelm the subscribers.