What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

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The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalismtrucks, and most broadcast news was tied to narrow geographic areas. Evenwhen local newspapers expanded their circulation far beyond their metropolitanareas, the results were usually disappointing—the more geographicallydistant the reader, the less loyalty and interest in the content. (Threenational newspapers—USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall StreetJournal—avoided most of those constraints by delivering national ratherthan local news in authoritative, attractive packages.) By contrast, publishingonline means that any article or video will become immediately availablearound the world, at no added cost. Meanwhile, broadcast outlets’ reach,once defined largely by geographic and bandwidth constraints and enforcedby regulatory agencies, is expanding. Their content is no longer limited tolocal markets and thus is less restricted by federal regulations.Impact: Journalists and media companies can go where the audience is, expandingmarkets at low costs. But the advantages that went along with distributionlimits—such as protection against new competitors—are disappearing.• Digital platforms enable publishers to deploy their readers and viewersin publicizing and distributing their content. Print publishers usedto tout the “pass-along audience”—people who didn’t buy a magazine ornewspaper but picked it up in, say, a dentist’s office, and could therefore becounted as readers. Advertisers were often skeptical of the numbers, whichdepended on surveys of readers trying to remember if they read a publicationthey didn’t pay for. But digital news organizations can track preciselyhow people share content—a few years ago mainly by email, and now alsoby social media like Facebook and Twitter. For journalists, such distributionhelps validate and publicize their work.Impact: Publishers get free distribution with excellent, real-time information.At the same time, they are losing control of the distribution platform thatgenerated such healthy profits. And they have less say over how their contentis portrayed; sometimes users post links and add a dollop of nasty criticism.14
Columbia Journalism School | Tow Center for Digital JournalismIII. What’s Happening To Consumers?• News organizations can more easily build new audiences centered onspecialized topics or interests. Because everything online is instantaneouslyand ubiquitously available, it’s far easier to create offerings of more focusedcontent and find users no matter where they live. Fans of a city’s footballteam may be spread around the world, but a news organization can build asite that will draw a substantial audience.Impact: Highly focused audiences can provide more value to advertisers. Butseparating audiences into too many niches can bring on a new set of problems.Consumers may find that dealing with multiple content providers—with few guideposts to judge the quality or authority of the source—isn’tworth the bother.• Publishers have more information about their readers, in real time.Whether a citizen is using free Google Analytics on a blog, or a mainstreamorganization is deploying more sophisticated usage-tracking services likeOmniture or Chartbeat, journalists know much more about who’s viewingtheir content, where the audience is coming from and how it is engaged.Unfortunately, many of these numbers are unreliable, misconstruedand prone to exaggeration. Usage estimates often vary by 200 percent ormore. This issue was explored in detail in a report last year by ColumbiaUniversity’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. 11 Metrics have always beenchallenging for advertisers, especially in the broadcast world. But as the Towreport notes, digital media have failed to come up with common standards;they have not yet settled on metrics, whatever their flaws, as broadcast mediadid generations ago. “It is a long-appreciated irony of media measurementthat accuracy matters less than consensus,” the report said. “Doubts don’tmatter much as long as no competitor is seen to benefit.”Impact: Media companies can measure the popularity of articles, videos orsections and adjust their strategy to maximize revenue and audience. But uncertaintyaround metrics inhibits advertisers from investing fully in the digitalmarketplace and depresses advertising rates for those who do take part.News from Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism 15
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