Posted by chicagomedia.org on November 13, 2008 at 09:29:53:
In Reply to: Tribune Gets Creative in Tough Times posted by chicagomedia.org on November 12, 2008 at 13:59:11:
Tribulations at Tribune
Tribune Co. has rewritten the rulebook for its newspapers, but where are all the new readers? (Not to mention the ad revenue.)
by Julia M. Klein
Nov 13 2008
When real estate mogul Sam Zell closed his purchase of Tribune Co. in 2007, he brushed aside dire prognoses about the newspaper business and promised to arrest its decline with a "fresh, entrepreneurial culture that is fast and nimble, and which rewards innovation."
To that end, he hired a pioneering radio programmer, Lee Abrams, as his "chief innovation officer" and unleashed him to create "a sustainable, relevant product for our customers and communities."
In a series of stream-of-consciousness memos and meetings, Abrams triggered jazzy redesigns of Tribune's eight newspapers, placing a counterintuitive bet on luring younger audiences and occasional readers to print.
Five months ago, Tribune unveiled the first project, a top-to-bottom redesign of the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. Heavy on charticles and bullet points, the new-look Sentinel reminded one veteran industry analyst of a print version of AM radio.
So far, Abrams' ballyhooed efforts to rethink the American newspaper - employing more radical versions of the big headlines, small articles, and colorful charts rolled out at other newspapers over the last three decades - have had no impact on declining circulation.
And analysts are skeptical about whether Tribune's focus on redesigning print makes good business sense as advertising, the main income generator for newspapers, continues to soften. On Monday, the company reported a 19 percent drop in advertising revenues and a 2 percent drop in circulation revenues for the third quarter compared with last year.
"Strategically, it's a distraction," Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst for Outsell and Content Bridges, says of the redesign effort. "The major challenge to a company like Tribune is not to try to incrementally either stop circulation declines or add a point or two, but to really remake itself into a multimedia modern company."
The Tribune redesign process "wasn't really market-driven" but rather "simply done by the seat of the pants because it was felt that something had to be done," says Alan Mutter, a new-media consultant who writes the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog. "That's a fairly dangerous way to run a multimillion-dollar business."
The risk, Mutter says, is that changes could "upset and potentially anger existing customers without attracting any new ones."
Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman says the company is "focused on executing, we're not focused on committees and 12 different pieces of focus-oriented, consultant-driven types of research." But he says that the redesigns were accomplished "in a very thoughtful way" and "first and foremost with readers in mind."
The man behind the redesigns, Abrams, is an affable Chicago native who made his name in radio. In the 1970s, using what he calls "a balance of science and emotion," he invented the album-oriented rock format that made FM radio commercially successful.
In his recent history of radio broadcasting, Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution that Shaped a Generation (Random House, 2007), Marc Fisher said Abrams' ability to intuit popular taste in music made him the radio industry's "most sought-after guru."
After cloning FM radio stations around the country, Abrams moved to XM Satellite Radio, the still-unprofitable broadcaster where he programmed dozens of channels.
In his latest incarnation as newspaper savior, Abrams, 55, says his aim is to convert occasional and Sunday readers into regulars. While each makeover is distinct, Abrams' tastes have been influential.
Under Abrams' prodding, Tribune papers generally have opted for smaller page sizes, larger photographs, fewer front-page stories, and more clearly compartmentalized content. The Baltimore Sun - the name is new, changed from the Sun - now has a dedicated Crime & Courts page, as do most of the other seven redesigned Tribune papers, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford, Connecticut, and elsewhere.
The Web's influence on the redesigns is obvious. But Abrams says he also admires foreign newspapers like the Guardian, a London-based daily he calls "intelligent but unconventional," as well as Mexico City's "visually stunning" Excelsior, the Wall Street Journal ("because of how well-defined they are"), and USA Today ("very easy to read").
The back-to-the-future Tribune approach also draws on what Abrams defines as the Golden Age of newspapers, from the 1920s to 1960s.
In recent years, "many newspapers have been on autopilot," Abrams says. "I thought we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned," from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage.
Even as he extols such labor-intensive endeavors, though, Tribune has continued reducing its payroll - shedding 75 newsroom jobs in the most recent cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times and leaving the editorial staff about half its size in 2001. It also announced the consolidation of all Tribune-owned newspapers' Washington bureaus into one super-bureau, with significant reductions in reporters and editors.
In a recent column in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, Steve Outing argued that print redesigns should be aimed at retaining core, older readers, while also directing them to newspaper websites. He noted that the thinning of newspaper content has turned off many devoted newspaper readers without attracting new ones.
Charlotte Hall, editor of the Orlando Sentinel since 2004, says the Sentinel redesign is geared primarily at "people in their 30s and people in their 40s," whom she calls "key demographics for us in the future."
Launched in late June, the redesigned paper tries "to be more personal and more emotional," says Hall. "That means a hotter look overall, it means bolder headlines, playing your columnists up big, encouraging your writers to write in different ways, making news more accessible."
Veteran newspaper analyst John Morton says that Tribune is "trying to make the front pages of newspapers look like commercial radio" - in other words, "flashy, edgy, abrupt." It is possible, he says, that the designs will help attract "young people" with "short attention spans."
But there is as yet no evidence that this is happening. Weitman says the Sentinel has several hundred fewer subscribers now than it did before its redesign. Another Tribune newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel, has lost even more subscribers since its makeover in August.
"We can't find any impact from the redesign," says Norbert Ortiz, the Sentinel's vice president for circulation and consumer marketing. He adds that it could take six to nine months to gauge the redesign's effects.
In Chicago, where "your new Tribune" was introduced September 29, the Tribune's new editor, Gerould Kern, says he sees "opportunities with people in their 30s and 40s" as the newspaper becomes more "locally relevant" and "personally useful."
"We wanted people to care about the paper...because they found compelling storytelling, found themselves reflected in it, and saw stories about subjects they cared about," Kern says. The Tribune now devotes pages 2 and 3 to "The Talk," which touches on topics - such as the Tina Fey-Sarah Palin skits on Saturday Night Live - designed to reflect or spur water-cooler conversation.
Kern says that anecdotal evidence suggests that "younger readers almost universally liked the new approach." About 0.2 percent of subscribers canceled in the wake of the redesign, less than normal circulation churn, he says.
Doctor, a former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, says that the Tribune redesigns - "bolder, more colorful, more sidebars, more useful, fewer jumps" - represent "really good newspaper print ideas of the 1980s." In the digital age, he says, "they're not going to drive a lot of new readership."
But Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design, another critic of the Tribune effort, argues that done right, redesign can boost both circulation and advertising revenue - and that results are usually quick. He cites his own successes at smaller papers in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Waterford, Connecticut; and Duluth, Minnesota.
The redesigned Tribune papers are "prettier" than before, Jacobson says. But the design prototypes suggest no significant changes in content, he says. "I wouldn't call it redesign. I would call it redecoration," he says.
The redesign process has sparked a cycle of emotions within Tribune newsrooms, Abrams says, from fear to acceptance to excitement. (Abrams' own "think piece" memos, with their misspelled words and seeming naivete about such matters as foreign correspondents, may have increased the anxiety.)
Journalists worry - unduly, Abrams says - that "any kind of change means you're going to dumb it down, or any graphics means you're going to emulate USA Today, or any significant change is instantly going to upset 50 percent of readers."
In fact, Weitman says, the readership response has been relatively muted. And some analysts say that at this point any experimentation in newsrooms is welcome.
"People's perceptions of how news is presented have changed because of the Web," says Mark Potts, an internet and media consultant who now blogs at RecoveringJournalist.com. "Doing things with smaller bytes and bigger headlines and more entry points and a little more clarity is a good thing. It's making it easier for a generation that's now Web-savvy to relate to what's going on in print."
While change is not always guaranteed to work, "staying the same hurts," Potts says. "We know that."
(Portfolio.com)