Successful business strategies are characterized by hard work and patience. But as newspapers fumble online their tendency is to favor low-effort, high-return schemes.
Take for example the partnership of Jeff Jarvis and the New York Times. They plan a handful of "hyperlocal" sites that are uniformly named "The Local." Each site is led by one NYT reporter who it seems will eventually be responsible for covering multiple locales with the aide of Jarvis' students.
Howard Owens is peeved that Jarvis and the NYT pin their financial success on "scalability." (Churn out more sites without hiring more people.)
Why would anyone build a site targeted toward a small group of people and then worry about whether it can "scale" to serve a large group? That smacks of a confused business strategy. A hyperlocal business must first be able to make money by standing on its own -- even if it never becomes a franchise.
That's real scalability. Quite frankly, it's dumb to start any business that can't break a profit unless it rapidly expands. I'd be leery of anyone pitching such an idea, which isn't much sounder in strategy than a Ponzi scheme.
Rolling out a new product as quickly as possible to as many places as possible inherently means reacting to how it's received isn't a priority, which is further proof these ideas are schemes, not strategies. Beware any one-size-fits-all idea that hasn't been tested on some, nevermind all.
Believing the if-they-build-it-the-audience-will-come pontificators who have long peddled these schemes to newspapers requires buying into the same sort of get-rich-quick thinking that has crippled newspaper Web solutions. User-generated! No work! Great pay!
There is no shortcut to online success. Media companies look at their competitors from the technology world and see only what exists now, conveniently overlooking the immense effort and sacrifice it took the founders of Facebook or MySpace to attain. They see the traffic successes of Huffington Post or DailyBeast and overlook the quality of the content -- at least for their audiences -- and dismiss it as "user generated" or "freelance" when in fact it took a lot of effort to cultivate. Oh, and they selectively forget that profits at these success stories are still nonexistent or took a long time to appear.
I'd recommend that the Times take a bit of Howard's advice and hire a few people who are willing to put in the sort of effort that doesn't easily "scale."
Comments (3)
As always, good post, Lucas.
Besides overlooking the hard work -- and smarts -- that went into, Facebook, say many people overlook all the failures.
Most businesses fail. Building business is damn hard work. There are no short cuts.
Unfortunately, newspapers continue to search for the quick easy fix. It doesn't exist.
Posted by Howard Owens | March 1, 2009 7:34 PM
Posted on March 1, 2009 19:34
I'm the New York Times editor whose project is under attack here. There's a lot of rhetorical fire being aimed at my babies, based -- it appears to me -- on theology rather than any time spent looking at our sites: http://nytimes.com/maplewood and http://nytimes.com/fortgreene.
The Times is approaching this effort with utter humility. We don't know if we can make a go of hyperlocal. We're experimenting with citizen journalism, something that others have more experience with than we do. We're experimenting with the notion of collaborating with a J-school. (Lucas, you've mischaracterized the role of CUNY journalism students. They are a., only working with our Brooklyn site and b., charged with teaching community members how to do journalism. Their role is not to do the coverage themselves.) We are going to have to learn new, inexpensive ways of gathering ad dollars if this is going to pencil out for us; our operation is built on gathering high-priced national advertising, so the ad-based part of the business model is back-to-the-future for us.
The best thing we've got going for us is the game, community-minded spirit of the journalists who are undertaking the experiment. None of them are interested in creating cookie-cutter sites; we fully expect the Brooklyn site to evolve in different directions than the New Jersey site, and we expect we'll learn more about how different various future Locals (if there are any) need to be based on these two pilots. What we've asked our journalists to figure out are the principles of serious community journalism for the 21st century. If we can distill that formula -- something that most placeblogs and community newspapers haven't figured out, or at least aren't delivering on -- we will have something valuable to share with communities beyond the two where we've started. Is it a business? We'll see. Jim Schachter, Editor-Digital Initiatives, The New York Times
Posted by Jim Schachter | March 6, 2009 9:58 AM
Posted on March 6, 2009 09:58
Feel free to defend the content of the sites. I'm criticizing the business model.
It appears that this business is expected to succeed by rolling out to multiple locations, by "scaling." Here's how your partner Jeff Jarvis described it on his blog:
"The Times needs this to be scalable; it can’t afford to - no metro paper can or has ever been able to afford to - pay for staff in every neighborhood and town."
And I consider that assumption flawed. Perhaps Jeff mischaracterized the plan.
Otherwise, if this strategy doesn't at least try to hire staff in every viable neighborhood and town, then it's an avenue toward failure. After all, local blogs such as Brownstoner (which broke the news of the Times' new project) will always have people dedicated to covering their little parts of the world. Mainstream media can't do less than its small-time competitors and hope to succeed based on an initial burst of effort followed by rested laurels.
Posted by Lucas | March 7, 2009 12:28 AM
Posted on March 7, 2009 00:28