bonaldi.me

Rupert Murdoch today said his sites “might go off Google”. Hardly anyone tried to defend it, until Ian Betteridge found a post from Mark Cuban with what looks like at first like a reasonable rationale for it.

Briefly, the idea is that the mess of traffic you get from Google is hard to make money from. If you live on advertising, you’re much better having a deep niche of people who visit time and again, with newcomers arriving thanks to links from people they trust (this means from Twitter and Facebook). So drop out of Google, build a select and committed audience, then make money from them.

There is a lot in this. If your site is clogged up with views from drive-by searchers, the rates you can charge drop sharply. You don’t know who your readers are, so instead of charging Vogue-esque prices for your select audience, you’re competing with the world and can barely command bargain-basement Ayrshire Leader rates.

However: cut off Google and while, yes, you lose the rubbish traffic, you also lose free promotion and what roughly equates to distribution. For a newspaper it’s like pulling out of newsagents and cancelling all your advertising; effectively, you’re going dark.

For that to make sense, you have to be sure that firstly you can get the readers in some other way, and secondly that you can make money from them. Murdoch can probably cross-promote enough to do the first part. He can’t do the second, for two reasons.

The first reason is the advertising revenue. The Cuban-Betteridge idea is based on advertising to niches, but in fact, News International titles are the exact opposite of niche: the money makers are mass-market papers like the Sun. It’s true that, as Betteridge points out, the papers are dealing in niches, but they’re not the narrow niches of a Gizmodo, they’re broad-brush dinosaurs. Online those carefully cultivated traditional niches are pretty much worthless.

A paper with a market niche can sell it in two ways: display advertising, and classified advertising. Classified advertising is the big money-maker offline, but online it’s dead: eBay, Rightmove and Monster have taken the market. All that’s left is display, and how attractive a proposition is a closed-garden Sun or Fox site going to present? These aren’t even ABC1s, and there won’t even be that many of them. Muck, and not enough of it.

Murdoch already knows this. He points out, rightly, that no blog or news site is making anything like serious money. There’s no advertising market there that can pay what he needs it to pay. This is why he’s still talking about charging, although he postponed it last week.

The impact on charging is the second reason opting out won’t work. Suppose the whole world is wrong and he can persuade people, after hundreds of years of ad subsidy, to pay for news not only what it costs to make but also his 20% profit margin. To have a hope of making that work, the prices need to be as low as possible. So he’s going to need a whole lot of readers paying up. Where will he get them? From the internet. Which means Google. Which he doesn’t want to be on.


This is why the idea is so incoherent. The only conceivable harm Google can do is to hurt your advertising rates. Murdoch isn’t really interested in advertising rates, he’s already written them off (and by extension, Mark Cuban’s plan). Murdoch is interested in attracting paying subscribers. But going off Google damages his sites’ ability to attract these mythical subscribers, and the only conceivable gain is protecting advertising revenue that is not now, and never will be, enough.

Ultimately, however, Murdoch is right: it’s no good for his business to be on Google. Not because of the traffic they send, but simply because it’s no good for his business to be on the internet at all. When he says he doesn’t want to be on Google, he actually means he doesn’t want to be on the internet, or have its economics apply to him.

The record companies tried that one already. So did AOL.

Me, on Twitter yesterday:

Got another email from new print journalism student. Is it even ethical to have a new intake? Might as well be a Philosophy degree

Adrian Monk, former head of journalism at City, a month ago:

[Potential journalism students] should be informed of the jobs crisis within journalism

Tim Luckhurst, former Scotsman editor, and head of journalism at Kent:

“[The majority of courses] at an undergraduate and post-graduate level are essentially worthless”

Both of them quoted in this piece from journalism.co.uk which says that, apart from Bournemouth and Kingston, no undergrad course has more than 40% of journalism grads working in media-associated professions within six months of graduation.

That’s worse than the latest figures for architects, which have just 49.5% working in the field six months after graduation. The Unistats (body run by UCAS and hotcourses) figures for the big four journalism courses do work out largely like it says:

Luckhurst talks about post-graduate courses as well, however. I can’t find the figures for Kent. Maybe his courses are worthless, but the others really aren’t:

So … undergrad journalism doesn’t really get you anywhere –– in fact, as a putatively vocational degree, it probably does more harm than an avowedly useless but challenging generic humanities degree. If you want a journalism job, do a postgrad, preferably at Strathclyde. Which is how it’s always been, really. Many of the best journalists I know came from the Strathclyde course, and it’d be both a disaster and surprising if they weren’t finding jobs.

Still, those are the 2008 figures, and the really swingeing cuts in newsrooms didn’t begin in earnest until the end of 2008. Next year’s figures are going to be worse — there’s hardly anywhere for those postgrad figures to go but down anyway.

More importantly, even if they do find jobs, though, the newsrooms they work in are going to be much poorer places to start careers from. There have been waves of layoffs, so instead of learning from experienced colleagues they’re going to get thrown in at the deep end. The people who would be able to help them are busy and few.

When I started subbing, received wisdom was it took two years to make a sub-editor you could let loose on something important. It might not be as long as that, but there’s no question that you do a tonne more learning after you start than before. It took years before I worked on a splash story. At my last paper, the dedicated sub for the front page had been in the job for a decade, and there wasn’t a sub quite like him; you couldn’t help but learn from his editing. Only rarely did anyone else get a look in. Then he took redundancy, and by 2009 we were so short on staff we gave splash stories to casuals and new starts who’d barely been subbing for six months.

The same month, a reporter came in on work experience, a 21-year-old who had just graduated from the same philosophy course I’d been on, and got six stories in the paper, including a page lead. On her first day.

So, yes, the figures aren’t quite as bad as journalism.co.uk makes out, but they don’t tell the whole story. Undergrad journalism really might as well be philosophy for all the vocational help it’s going to be, but you can still get a job if you do a post-graduate course. It’ll just be a job, though, not the start of a new career in print.

It’s already too late to get into the world of journalism, because if it hasn’t already vanished at your paper, it’s just about to.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten about this gem. “Come, fill the voids left at The Herald and Evening Times after we culled everyone, and get ‘gold standard’ training in how to put out a paper with no staff.” Not to say there’s no gold there, but it’s not the people with time to go and give lectures.

After Metafilter’s 400th thread about saving journalism, I realised all my answers were saying the same thing. So I posted a new version of this Slashdot comment-turned-meme to speed up snarking:

Your blog advocates a technical/legislative/market-based/crowd-sourced approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) ...

The full thing looks crappy on this template, so read it in full here

“Peeling the onion, peeling the onion” he intones. “That’s what’s being lost. The vital stuff of placing things on the record, of challenging the official account. These monsters who have taken over papers in America today have lost sight of it. We have to keep doing it. Not in a partisan way – just let’s find out what the bloody facts are!” – Harold Evans

(It’s badged as an interview by Alan Rusbridger, but reads more like he swept in and owned the place.)

So much for my pledge not to start another link blog, but this is a top little essay on how to write:

Psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, “To be or not to be” might have come out, “To continue as a social unit or not to do so. That is the personality problem. Whether ’tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions induced by one’s lack of orientation in one’s environment or — ” But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy.

(via the goddamn great Big Contrarian)

So, according to Google Reader, WikiHow, this little get-it-done wiki, has 15 million readers:

15 million. And it doesn’t look like they make any money.

We have 200,000 readers, make pots of money … and are staking our future on web readers.

Something’s awry.

In Salon, Gary Kamiya writes in praise of editors:

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

And then Digg got its hands on it. From the comments thread there are many gems. Ninjaboy:

I think we would need less editors if we had less grammar nazi’s.

Or Merkhava:

Editors are censors. We need no more censors. We need no more “Deciders.” And we need no more police clad in black armor and combat boots carrying M-16 rifles.

Which reminds me of the time I tried calling for editing on Comment is Free, the Guardian’s hopelessly flame-ridden bitch-fest of a forum. “We doesn’t need n0 edit0rs,” someone said, “because we has the intern3ts now and we can read what we like”.
Yes, we can. Until there’s nothing left to read except Merkhava’s blog. When your sample size is in the billions, the law of averages can take you to a very low place indeed.