Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos demonstrated yesterday that he desperately needs a primer on the publishing business before he buys The Washington Post next month.
In his first interview since the purchase was announced, Bezos showed his
naivete about the industry with this comment:
“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient. If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.”
The last time I looked, the vast majority of American newspapers’ revenue came not from readers but from another type of customer – advertisers. Sure, perhaps Bezos knows better and decided to emphasize the noble journalistic side of the business rather than the grubby capitalist side.
But he didn't go out of his way to curry favor with advertisers: "I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece."
Many of the Post’s advertisers, who view Amazon as a ruthless and even unfair competitor, are already wary of a Bezos-owned Post. Knowing that his vision for the Post apparently does not include pleasing them will do nothing to allay those fears.
Bezos needs to learn the first rule of owning a newspaper: Don’t piss off your advertisers; that’s what reporters are for.
Other Dead Tree Edition articles on the newspaper industry include:
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Lessons About the New World of Publishing from an Unlikely Source
My colleagues in the publishing industry could learn some valuable lessons by observing an unlikely source of publishing wisdom: Moonlighting postal workers. After all, when it comes to web traffic, these “amateur” publishers are kicking a lot of professionals’ butts.
I follow four web sites about postal issues that are published by current or former U.S. Postal Service employees – not the kind of folks we usually consider to be part of the “real” publishing industry. And I follow a variety of web sites covering the magazine, catalog, printing, and paper industries – all produced by publishing professionals and most affiliated with a magazine.
From the data I can glean, the four postal sites -- postalnews.com, PostalReporter.com, Postal Employee Network, and PostalMag.com – typically get at least three to five times more web traffic than any of those professional B2B sites I follow. Postalnews had a recent month with more than 100,000 unique visitors, truly a lofty number for a one-person web site, according to Compete.com. I have my own data as well: Even though most Dead Tree Edition articles are not about postal issues, only Google rivals any of the four as a source of visitors to my blog.
Frankly, they're better than we are
Frankly, part of these amateurs’ success is that they usually do a better job of meeting the needs of their target audience than we “professional” publishers do.
The Web has given such “talented amateurs” the tools to undermine the traditional publishing industry, as I explore in my new article for Publishing Executive magazine, The Seven Habits of Highly Inefficient Publishers. No longer does freedom of the press apply only to those who have access to a printing press.
But these outsiders also show us what publishing can be like without the seven deadly habits that keep us chained to mindsets and business models that no longer work. (One hint: Stop equating “publishing” with “writing articles.” Another: The future of publishing lies not in creating the content people want but in providing them a gateway to the content they want.)
Missed opportunity
There must be a million or more people who work for the U.S. Postal Service, retired from it, or are otherwise intimately involved in it. Why didn’t any mainstream publishers – like maybe the Washington Post or Government Executive -- think of launching a product aimed at this market?
The Post probably couldn’t conceive of running such a business without spending well into six figures for reporters, an editor, etc. The concept of creating such a product primarily by providing links to articles and reports in other media is simply not in the DNA of the Post, or, for that matter, anyone else in the MSM (mainstream-media). Which makes me wonder what other hungry, potentially profitable audiences we’re overlooking because of our hidebound ways.
And for you self-righteous MSMers who complain about aggregators ripping off real publishers, take note: I have seen unique content from this blog rewritten or cited in several daily newspapers and in other name-brand publications without any attribution or link. A noted B2B magazine once took most of a Dead Tree Edition article, rewrote it only slightly, and published it under the byline of one of its own reporters. And When Barry Diller recently talked about the prospect of Newsweek cutting back on print, several major media outlets published quotations that were lifted from SeekingAlpha.com, without attribution rather than from the webcast itself. (Including SeekingAlpha's misquotes gave them away.)
But I have never seen the four postal web sites come close to violating anyone’s copyright or doing anything even remotely unfair (though they occasionally give me a public scolding when they disagree with Dead Tree Edition or spot an error). I can’t imagine any publisher complaining about the brief excerpts that appear on these sites – or about the thousand or more, sometimes many more, visitors that typically follow the link from such excerpts back to the source.
Practicing what I preach
So why don’t I practice what I preach and aggregate content from other sources? In the web ecosystem, some are meant to be aggregators and some to be aggregatees. With a blog that serves multiple interests (publishers, print buyers, printers, postal workers, environmentalists, paper makers, etc.), Dead Tree Edition is better off feeding the aggregators than competing with them.
But I am practicing what I preach in another way: The Publishing Executive article (which editor Jim Sturdivant says that some might call "crazy") mentions that corporations’ reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission are often a better source of news than their press releases. Two Dead Tree Edition articles this month -- Soft Market, Digital Investments Drag Time Inc. Down and Sartell Shutdown Will Cost Verso Dearly -- came from 10-Q reports that the MSM overlooked while focusing on the companies’ press releases.
I follow four web sites about postal issues that are published by current or former U.S. Postal Service employees – not the kind of folks we usually consider to be part of the “real” publishing industry. And I follow a variety of web sites covering the magazine, catalog, printing, and paper industries – all produced by publishing professionals and most affiliated with a magazine.
From the data I can glean, the four postal sites -- postalnews.com, PostalReporter.com, Postal Employee Network, and PostalMag.com – typically get at least three to five times more web traffic than any of those professional B2B sites I follow. Postalnews had a recent month with more than 100,000 unique visitors, truly a lofty number for a one-person web site, according to Compete.com. I have my own data as well: Even though most Dead Tree Edition articles are not about postal issues, only Google rivals any of the four as a source of visitors to my blog.
Frankly, they're better than we are
Frankly, part of these amateurs’ success is that they usually do a better job of meeting the needs of their target audience than we “professional” publishers do.
The Web has given such “talented amateurs” the tools to undermine the traditional publishing industry, as I explore in my new article for Publishing Executive magazine, The Seven Habits of Highly Inefficient Publishers. No longer does freedom of the press apply only to those who have access to a printing press.
But these outsiders also show us what publishing can be like without the seven deadly habits that keep us chained to mindsets and business models that no longer work. (One hint: Stop equating “publishing” with “writing articles.” Another: The future of publishing lies not in creating the content people want but in providing them a gateway to the content they want.)
Missed opportunity
There must be a million or more people who work for the U.S. Postal Service, retired from it, or are otherwise intimately involved in it. Why didn’t any mainstream publishers – like maybe the Washington Post or Government Executive -- think of launching a product aimed at this market?
The Post probably couldn’t conceive of running such a business without spending well into six figures for reporters, an editor, etc. The concept of creating such a product primarily by providing links to articles and reports in other media is simply not in the DNA of the Post, or, for that matter, anyone else in the MSM (mainstream-media). Which makes me wonder what other hungry, potentially profitable audiences we’re overlooking because of our hidebound ways.
And for you self-righteous MSMers who complain about aggregators ripping off real publishers, take note: I have seen unique content from this blog rewritten or cited in several daily newspapers and in other name-brand publications without any attribution or link. A noted B2B magazine once took most of a Dead Tree Edition article, rewrote it only slightly, and published it under the byline of one of its own reporters. And When Barry Diller recently talked about the prospect of Newsweek cutting back on print, several major media outlets published quotations that were lifted from SeekingAlpha.com, without attribution rather than from the webcast itself. (Including SeekingAlpha's misquotes gave them away.)
But I have never seen the four postal web sites come close to violating anyone’s copyright or doing anything even remotely unfair (though they occasionally give me a public scolding when they disagree with Dead Tree Edition or spot an error). I can’t imagine any publisher complaining about the brief excerpts that appear on these sites – or about the thousand or more, sometimes many more, visitors that typically follow the link from such excerpts back to the source.
Practicing what I preach
So why don’t I practice what I preach and aggregate content from other sources? In the web ecosystem, some are meant to be aggregators and some to be aggregatees. With a blog that serves multiple interests (publishers, print buyers, printers, postal workers, environmentalists, paper makers, etc.), Dead Tree Edition is better off feeding the aggregators than competing with them.
But I am practicing what I preach in another way: The Publishing Executive article (which editor Jim Sturdivant says that some might call "crazy") mentions that corporations’ reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission are often a better source of news than their press releases. Two Dead Tree Edition articles this month -- Soft Market, Digital Investments Drag Time Inc. Down and Sartell Shutdown Will Cost Verso Dearly -- came from 10-Q reports that the MSM overlooked while focusing on the companies’ press releases.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Son of Black Liquor Finally Enters the Limelight
Dead Tree Edition’s long – some would say obsessive – campaign to raise awareness of the Son of Black Liquor giveaway to pulp companies paid off big time today in the form of a major Washington Post article.
Steven Mufson, a Post reporter who helped bring the original black-liquor credits to light in 2009, wrote today of “a new binge of tax breaks” for companies that burn the pulp byproduct to produce energy, as they have been doing since the 1930s.
“It was not the intent of Congress to reward that behavior, but the industry and its accountants persuaded the Internal Revenue Service to allow black liquor to count as an alternative fuel in 2009,” Mufson wrote. “Under that program, the paper industry received more federal money than almost any industry outside the auto sector.”
The new tax breaks come in the form of cellulosic biofuel credits, he noted, which “can be applied in future years, slashing tax bills perhaps as late as 2015.”
Mufson, by the way, did not use the phrase “Son of Black Liquor” as first the The Vancouver Sun and now Dead Tree Edition do in reference to the cellulosic biofuel giveaway. But that’s exactly what today’s article is about. (I should know; I provided him with links to financial reports and other background information for the article.)
The article highlights the odd IRS ruling that made pulp manufacturers eligible for Cellulosic Biofuel Producer Credits and details how some companies have already collected hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mufson cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate that the original black liquor credits were worth $4 billion to the U.S. pulp and paper industry – an erroneous estimate that CBO has never corrected. Publicly traded companies reported more than $6 billion in payouts from that program, and privately held companies probably raked in at least a couple of billion more.
For months, it seemed that only Dead Tree Edition and a couple of environmental groups were writing about the black liquor credits. But the Washington Post article is just the latest in a recent string of mentions from various media, including:
Steven Mufson, a Post reporter who helped bring the original black-liquor credits to light in 2009, wrote today of “a new binge of tax breaks” for companies that burn the pulp byproduct to produce energy, as they have been doing since the 1930s.
“It was not the intent of Congress to reward that behavior, but the industry and its accountants persuaded the Internal Revenue Service to allow black liquor to count as an alternative fuel in 2009,” Mufson wrote. “Under that program, the paper industry received more federal money than almost any industry outside the auto sector.”
The new tax breaks come in the form of cellulosic biofuel credits, he noted, which “can be applied in future years, slashing tax bills perhaps as late as 2015.”
Mufson, by the way, did not use the phrase “Son of Black Liquor” as first the The Vancouver Sun and now Dead Tree Edition do in reference to the cellulosic biofuel giveaway. But that’s exactly what today’s article is about. (I should know; I provided him with links to financial reports and other background information for the article.)
The article highlights the odd IRS ruling that made pulp manufacturers eligible for Cellulosic Biofuel Producer Credits and details how some companies have already collected hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mufson cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate that the original black liquor credits were worth $4 billion to the U.S. pulp and paper industry – an erroneous estimate that CBO has never corrected. Publicly traded companies reported more than $6 billion in payouts from that program, and privately held companies probably raked in at least a couple of billion more.
For months, it seemed that only Dead Tree Edition and a couple of environmental groups were writing about the black liquor credits. But the Washington Post article is just the latest in a recent string of mentions from various media, including:
- Energy Déjà Vu: Obama Must Break with Failed U.S. Policies: The original black liquor credits were the "most scandalous" of pork-barrel energy programs, Yale professor Michael Graetz wrote yesterday, because they "increased, rather than reduced, petroleum use, while bestowing about $8 billion of government largesse on the paper industry from 2007 to 2009."
- Biorefining deals underway, project financing picks up: "The black liquor and the so-called son of black liquor credits have incentivized pulp and paper mills to burn their spent cooking liquor for energy rather than find other outlets," Biorefining magazine said last week.
- Pulp, Paper Companies Amend Tax Returns: "The cellulosic biofuels industry might produce a maximum of 17 million gallons this year, but the pulp and paper industry continues to be the biggest benefactor of advanced tax credits meant to spur renewable fuels, with pulp and paper companies working to recoup billions in tax credits by amending prior-year tax returns," DTN/The Progressive Farmer reported last month.
- Black Liquor Credits Still Flowing: Printing Impressions' environmental columnist (and long-time friend of Dead Tree Edition) Gail Nickel-Kailing, summed up the black liquor credits aptly a month ago: "Suffice it to say, that if there is a loophole to be found, there is someone (or more) lined up to take full advantage of it."
- And then there's the quotation from a British Columbia newspaper this month about a 1963 boiler explosion at a pulp mill: “The liquid [nicknamed black liquor] inside is a very caustic acid, so they said that it was even hard to identify the dead because they turned black and it started to eat away their flesh.”
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Washington Post's New Magazine Will Bypass USPS
In what may be a troubling precedent for the U.S. Postal Service, The Washington Post is about to launch a paid subscription magazine that will bypass the USPS delivery network.
Capital Business will be delivered each week to paying ($49 per year) subscribers along with their Monday copy of the Post, according to the Post’s announcement. The move suggests that the country’s newspaper industry may be ready to try a new twist on a strategy that failed in the 1990s -- competing with the Postal Service to provide home delivery of magazines.
Two networks of daily newspapers delivered a variety of consumer magazines in their home markets during the early and mid-1990s. At the time, the delivery systems for most daily newspapers (kids on bicycles using marked-up address lists) were not suited to delivering a specific package to a specific customer, so the magazines were rarely delivered along with the newspaper, a former insider tells me.
The struggling efforts collapsed when the Postal Service restructured Periodicals postal rates to encourage worksharing (such as dropshipping), which led to lower postage costs for many publishers.
But times have changed. Postal officials want to return to the practice of increasing Periodicals postage prices much faster than the rate of inflation. Newspapers have learned to deliver several products through their daily carrier network -- already capturing a significant portion of The Wall Street Journal delivery business from the USPS. And customers have become accustomed to having publications delivered to their driveway rather than their doorstep.
With major newspaper companies like Hearst and the Washington Post Company (which owns Newsweek) also publishing magazines, finding a critical mass of newspapers and magazines willing to follow the Post’s lead would not be difficult.
Getting heavily into magazine delivery would require further enhancements to newspapers’ delivery systems, but the Postal Service seems unlikely to undercut them this time around. Postal officials believe they are losing money on Periodicals, though in reality the Postal Service would be even more unprofitable without them -- especially without the large consumer magazines that tend to mail most efficiently.
Another unusual feature of Capital Business, which will focus on the Washington area, is that it “will be available only to subscribers of The Washington Post,” according to the magazine’s Web site. And its content will apparently be available on the Web only to the magazine’s subscribers.
For more information about Periodicals postage rates, please see:
Capital Business will be delivered each week to paying ($49 per year) subscribers along with their Monday copy of the Post, according to the Post’s announcement. The move suggests that the country’s newspaper industry may be ready to try a new twist on a strategy that failed in the 1990s -- competing with the Postal Service to provide home delivery of magazines.
Two networks of daily newspapers delivered a variety of consumer magazines in their home markets during the early and mid-1990s. At the time, the delivery systems for most daily newspapers (kids on bicycles using marked-up address lists) were not suited to delivering a specific package to a specific customer, so the magazines were rarely delivered along with the newspaper, a former insider tells me.
The struggling efforts collapsed when the Postal Service restructured Periodicals postal rates to encourage worksharing (such as dropshipping), which led to lower postage costs for many publishers.
But times have changed. Postal officials want to return to the practice of increasing Periodicals postage prices much faster than the rate of inflation. Newspapers have learned to deliver several products through their daily carrier network -- already capturing a significant portion of The Wall Street Journal delivery business from the USPS. And customers have become accustomed to having publications delivered to their driveway rather than their doorstep.
With major newspaper companies like Hearst and the Washington Post Company (which owns Newsweek) also publishing magazines, finding a critical mass of newspapers and magazines willing to follow the Post’s lead would not be difficult.
Getting heavily into magazine delivery would require further enhancements to newspapers’ delivery systems, but the Postal Service seems unlikely to undercut them this time around. Postal officials believe they are losing money on Periodicals, though in reality the Postal Service would be even more unprofitable without them -- especially without the large consumer magazines that tend to mail most efficiently.
Another unusual feature of Capital Business, which will focus on the Washington area, is that it “will be available only to subscribers of The Washington Post,” according to the magazine’s Web site. And its content will apparently be available on the Web only to the magazine’s subscribers.
For more information about Periodicals postage rates, please see:
- Postal Service Preparing Double Whammy for Publishers: The USPS is planning to hit magazine and newspaper publishers with big rate increases starting next year.
- Can the Postal Service Still Afford Periodicals? The Postal Service's own numbers show that it is better off with than without Periodicals, even though it thinks the class is unprofitable.
- Increased Efficiency Led to Higher Periodicals and Catalog Costs, Goldway Says The USPS's convoluted accounting logic on Periodicals seems to have taken in the chair of the Postal Regulatory Commission.
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