Archive | journalism RSS feed for this section

Social Media Policies and Journalists’ Personal Brands

11 Mar

Photo by Dean Meyers on Flickr.

I recently read Reuters’ new guidelines for their journalists’ use of social media.

Here’s a paragraph that stood out for me:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

I find it highly interesting that Reuters acknowledges their journalists’ desire to have a personal brand here. I don’t think I’ve seen an explicit reference to that emerging reality in any other media company’s social media policies/guidelines so far. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that, please.)

I recently wrote in an academic paper about the increasingly real dilemma that both journalists and their employers will face in balancing individual brands with corporate brands, particularly with regard to the use of social media to establish both. I think that as today’s young journalists come into the profession – especially those who graduate from journalism programs where personal branding and entrepreneurship are emphasized – it may be challenging to find a happy medium between using social media for self-promotion and for corporate promotion.

Can corporate policies like this one help journalists strike that balance by reminding everyone of the significance of both brands? Or does having a social media policy restrict individuals’ ability to establish their own personal brands, to the degree that they begin to resent their employers?

Overall, Reuters’ policy emphasizes the individual journalist’s role in using social media responsibly, and doesn’t set out many strict rules, suggesting instead a string of things to “think about” when using social media. It’s good to see their trust in their employees’ critical faculties, rather than some of the more draconian approaches to social media that other media organizations have employed, though Reuters does still warn that “your manager and/or senior editors will retrospectively review your professional output” and that “We reserve the right to change your beat or responsibilities if there are problems in this area. In the case of serious breaches, we may use our established disciplinary procedures.”

This question isn’t really a problem just for journalism, of course; other professions will also face the challenge of managing employees’ commitment to “take care of No. 1″ – their own personal brands – as well as their employers’, especially when long-term stable employment seems more and more a thing of the past.

Though social media policies, other than Reuters’ version, don’t yet seem to address this dilemma in quite these terms, it appears likely that this will be a more relevant issue as our workforce becomes increasingly reliant on short-term, freelance and contract projects. After all, if one’s employer isn’t going to take care of you in the long run, then you might be prepared to do it yourself, no matter what you have to tweet.

Magazines’ Paper “Gimmicks”: A Failure to Communicate

4 Mar

Will magazines' fancy paper tricks come back to bite them in the end? Photo by Flickr user epSos.de.

I recently read this magazine “print gimmicks” story from Folio:

“In this era, when everyone’s excited about new media, we need to do everything we can to make older media as exciting as possible,” says Granger, Esquire’s editor-in-chief. The magazine’s latest print gimmick was its May 2009 issue where it featured a mix-n-match cover. The facial features of President Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake became interchangeable thanks to a tri-perforated cover.

The article also mentions 3-D covers from The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, pop-ups and bar codes in Hearst magazines, and innovative advertising inserts that try to catch readers’ attention. It describes the additional time it takes to plan and create these print “gimmicks,” as well as the additional cost for special inks, papers, and printing and folding techniques.

While it’s clever to come up with new ways to play with paper, I think these gimmicks are a misuse of magazines’ time and resources. You might gather a few more readers who pick up the magazine to play with its mix-and-match cover, or a few nerdy types (um, like me) who want to see how those barcodes work. (Hint: I never got around to doing anything with them.)

Ultimately, these gimmicks distract from what makes magazines special: the unique topic and voice of editorial content in the magazine, and the community that readers feel around that content.

I don’t think readers who might buy the magazine for these “gimmicks” are the long-term readers and subscribers magazines really need. Those aren’t the readers who identify with the magazine’s content in a deep and substantial way, who find a part of their own identity in the work of the writers, editors, photographers and artists in a magazine’s pages. Moreover, long-term readers of a magazine aren’t getting much added value with these techniques; if anything, they could be perceived as an unnecessary distraction.

My feeling is that if a magazine wants to secure a steady readership for its print edition – and for its brand, wherever it ultimately goes, online or off – it must invest in quality content, not meaningless and superficial tricks with paper that don’t connect with readers on a deeper level. The magazines that make that investment are the ones I want to keep reading and the ones that earn my loyalty.

Magazine Subscription Pricing: Communicating Value

8 Feb

Subscription cards from four of the magazines I receive: Sunset, Smithsonian, Triathlete and Make, all priced around $30/year.

Magazines have a serious dilemma in pricing subscriptions:

  1. What’s the maximum price readers will pay? (Or, how much is this magazine experience worth to them?)
  2. What’s the minimum price that will generate profit, or supplement advertising revenue adequately to add up to a profit?
  3. What’s the minimum price that still communicates that the product is quality and has value?

An interesting post recently at Ad Age suggests that, although low prices might appeal to readers, magazines that cut their subscription rates may not gain subscribers; they might even lose them.

As magazines have lost circulation dramatically of late, subscription revenue will likely become increasingly important to replace declining ad revenue. However, readers are slicing away unnecessary expenses themselves – with magazine and newspaper subscriptions likely among the casualties.

I’m certainly a magazine enthusiast, and when I find a subscription card offering me a magazine for $1 an issue, that $12 per year for a fresh magazine experience is pretty tempting.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that – as the Ad Age piece calls it – I often become part of the “marginal readership” of the magazine if I take the plunge and buy the cheap subscription. I haven’t invested enough to feel motivated to take the time to read the magazine unless it turns out to be quite appealing.

When I have spent a lot of money (for me) on a subscription, as with The New Yorker, I’ve felt serious guilt over not being able to read every issue faithfully. I feel like I’ve let down my “pledge” to become a reader and am disappointed in myself and my failure to follow through on my spending. (Yes, I tend to be hard on myself; can you tell?) So, the greater the subscription expense, the greater my desire to fully invest myself in that magazine experience. The expense isn’t the only determinant of my reading enthusiasm, of course, but it is a factor.

This phenomenon is one reason why I’d argue that many magazines should charge more for their content. I think readers “buy into” a magazine’s uniquely constructed experience and offerings, and want to become part of its community through reading. Undervaluing that experience by putting a small price tag on it also undermines the sense of worth that readers ascribe to their participation with the magazine – and, as side effects, could diminish their loyalty as subscribers and their attention to advertising messages within the magazine.

In these times, magazines need to do everything possible to maintain their existing subscribers and attract new ones. Counterintuitively, the best way to do that might be to keep subscription prices at current levels or raise them slightly.

Of course, I’d also be willing to spend more on magazines to fund better content and to liberate magazines from the many editorial constraints they experience as a result of their reliance on advertising. I’d also like customizable magazines and other innovations. And, of course, it would be great to see magazines on iPads that are awesomely designed. I’ve written about all those things here. And if publishers want to have the funding to make those things happen, they need to communicate to the audience that their monetary investment is necessary to continue the creation of terrific magazine products.

My one nagging question, though, is whether it’s fair to raise subscription prices and inevitably price some readers out of the opportunity to participate in magazine readership. Would raising prices create a certain elitism around magazine subscriptions? (Maybe that already exists?)

Perhaps the growing field of print-on-demand magazines, along with the digitizing of magazines, eventually will lead to such efficiency in the publishing and distribution process that prices will adjust accordingly and remain accessible to a variety of readers. It may be that as these new approaches develop, the act of subscribing to a magazine will look so different that these concerns are no longer relevant.

MediaShift: On-Demand Magazine Publishing

2 Feb

I have a new post up at MediaShift covering some of the new opportunities in on-demand magazine publishing. Here’s a favorite selection from the piece:

“I don’t think that computers and the Internet make real people’s need for real physical media go away,” said Powazek of MagCloud. “There’s content that deserves to be archived in print and some that doesn’t. For moment to moment updates about news, the web does that really well, but longer-lasting community-based niche content will still have a home in print. I hope that some magazines that have fallen on hard times will find their way to MagCloud and publish their whole back catalog there.”

So which magazines deserve to stay in print? As environmental resources become more precious and distribution channels multiply, we’ll have to determine what content deserves print status.

I also see a lot of potential in these on-demand services for student publications. Though that wasn’t a focus of this piece, it would be hugely convenient for journalism educators to use on-demand publishing to create student magazines or other collections of student work. Students could be provided copies and then order additional copies themselves to distribute to friends and family, while readers elsewhere in the world could even become fans. This seems like a cost-effective and innovative way to create student projects.

Will Young People Pay for News?

20 Jan

My students won’t pay for the New York Times.

When it implements its metered system in 2011, the New York Times is probably going to lose some of its most needed readers – young people who are slowly building an appetite for news.

I hope I’m wrong, and if I am, maybe some of my students or other young people will comment here and set me straight. But I think that today’s youth are so accustomed to free content, news and otherwise, that it will be difficult to change their ways and begin asking them to pay for news.

Photo by Flickr user striatic.

My students are not interested in paying for news, or for the entertainment they value: music or movies or TV shows. They’re used to getting all of these for free, either legally from sites like Hulu or through less ethical channels. I’ve asked them semester after semester about these issues, and they just aren’t willing to pay for any of it. They have always read news for free online, and asking them to pay is going to be a difficult demand.

It seems to me that a good starting point for getting young people to pay for news is to work with formats they have always paid for. For example, my students with iPhones are used to paying for apps. They don’t pay much for them, of course, but they do shell out a few dollars here and there. This is a media format that has always cost them money – not a new imposition of charges that will be seen as exactly that, an imposition and an “unfair” change in news organizations’ policies.

Working on young audiences first through these more familiar paid formats might be one strategy to open their minds to the need to pay for news. For example, The Guardian‘s iPhone app is $3.99, and may at some point involve further subscription fees. The McSweeney’s app is $5.99 and requires later renewals to keep new content coming. And yet the New York Times app is free. This seems like a missed opportunity to begin getting young people to pay for news access.

Photo by Flickr user LoveSystems.

I’m not personally opposed to the NYT‘s metering policy; I read the site extensively every day and will certainly end up paying for their content. I believe that if we want good journalism in the future, we have to put our money where it counts. I don’t think news organizations are obligated to provide their product for free, and I’d rather pay a reasonable amount for news than have it become solely reliant on advertising revenue and thereby even more subject to advertisers’ whims.

However, I’ve been socialized into believing that because I grew up in a family where newspapers showed up on the breakfast table daily, because I was required to engage with news throughout my education, and (especially) because I went on to graduate school in journalism and now teach it. I know that not everyone shares these values.

Therefore, I’d argue that beginning to ask younger generations to pay for online news – or at least the current generation of young people that is going to be most startled by this transition – needs to be accompanied by education about the value of journalism to our society. These young people, I fear, will be doubly skeptical of journalism: first because of the general public doubts about the value of the news media, and second because of what they may perceive as a “demand” for their money in return for online news.

Overcoming these doubts will require a great effort of education and positive public outreach on the part of the news organizations that hope to sell news to all their potential customers, young and old.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,133 other followers