Six Months Is Too Long to Wait for Newspaper CEOs

Like millions of other people around the country this morning, I got up, made a cup of coffee, turned on my computer and hooked up to the Internet to check the news.

After reading about death threats against President-Elect Barack Obama, his mother-in-law's move to Washington and the most expensive cities to buy groceries, I turned to another topic of interest -- the newspaper industry's struggle to survive in the new media landscape.

I clicked on a story by Editor and Publisher about a summit for newspaper CEOs held by the American Press Institute. (Click here for summary of the event.) The topic of the conference was the saving the newspaper industry.

(Let's forget that the conference was closed -- although someone in the room was twittering about it, God love them. I'll come back to this later.)

Interesting points from the story include:

1. All but one of the public companies at the event "were below the safe range" for bankruptcy, according to James Shein, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

2. The group was told by Steve Miller, the executive chairman of auto-parts maker Delphi Corp, "Cutting staffs will reduce costs, but it won't happen fast enough, and will erode the product."

3. "The biggest hurdles to progress [is] the industry's senior leadership, including some people in this room," Shein said. "I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes."

4. The group plans to meet again in six months to talk about the problems.

So here's my question: If an expert in business turnarounds walked into your office today and told you that your company was in financial trouble and your effort to cut costs by cutting staff was eroding your product's quality and you -- as the top dog -- were part of the problem because you're doing the same old, same old and it isn't working, would you wait six more months to talk about it again?

No, you wouldn't.

But that's what the group of newspaper CEOs plans to do. In all fairness, the executives who attended did get some homework for the next class. The list includes:

1. Act -- and think -- like an entrepreneur.
2. Create new initiatives and kill them quickly if they fail.
3. Don't wait for all the data. Take action.
4. Downsize to achieve larger goals, not as a cost-cutting tool.
5. Leverage core competencies into new areas.
6. Be honest with workers. Get ideas from them.
7. Don't whine. Inspire.
8. Bring in experts with a different view to see if they can help.
9. Leverage your brand.

It's a good list, to be sure. Given the number of journalists who have lost their jobs in the last year, (Journalists whose personal stories I haven't read because no one wants to write about their own industry's toubles), I especially like item number four. As the crisis worsens, companies keep resorting to cutting staff and quality with no real long-term solutions.

In addition, I'm keen on number six, although I must say it's kind of hard to get ideas from the front lines if 1. The meetings are closed. 2. The folks sitting in those meetings are the same ones who failed to see the changing market conditions that have now devastated our newsrooms.

Most importantly, I think a good dose of number eight might heal what ails us. If we can use crowd sourcing to examine how Cape Coral, Fla., financed the expansion of its water and sewer project, (costing $20,000 or more to some of us who lived there) I'm pretty sure we could find experts in other fields who would be interested in helping save The Fourth Estate for our children.

At least I hope we can.

What's SEO?

In the last few days, as the newspaper industry continues to implode, I've been invited by a former newspaper colleague to join a facebook group called "Newspaper Escape Plan." The description starts out like this: "Escape from newspapers while you can! At this rate, everyone will be laid off." I think you get the picture.

The backdrop to the invitation has been e-mails, phone conversations and text messages from friends -- some who still work in the industry and others who have been laid off -- who want to know what they need to learn to jump from the print game to the web world.

Note: I'm not an expert. What I've learned, I've learned -- as I did in print -- by doing. Yes, I was in charge of managing online projects and database reports for my last newspaper. But that doesn't make me an online expert by any stretch of the imagination.

At my job as editor at an Internet startup company, they asked me to come up with content for a reference web site, kind of a no-brainer for me. In return, I got a job that allows me to learn as I go, and I've done it by using my journalistic skill for adapting to change. As much as I miss traditional newspapers, this job allows me to do what I've been doing all week -- explaining some aspects of the web to former colleagues who are eager to learn, particularly now.

In the last few weeks, I've had a number of conversations about search engine optimization. They followed after I noted on several social networking sites in my "status" that I'm working on a project to improve seo on our web site, divorce360.com. Most of the conversations began like this: "What's seo?"

If you're going to make the jump to online, it's important to know what it is. So here's the layman (or woman's) version from a former print person.

Search engine optimization involves examining urls and headlines in web content to make certain that the Google bots (robots or spiders) that come to the web site find enough of the right words in all those things to push your content up to the top of the search pages.

So when someone searches on google for a term, let's say...divorce laws... or parental alienation syndrome...the stories on your site that include those words will pop up at the top of the first page of the search engine results.

You can also improve search engine optimization by doing what's called metatagging. It sounds really exciting, but for a journalist, it can feel like watching paint peel. Essentially, it means you pick key words from the story and tag the story with them. The purpose is the same -- so that the bots, which crawl around web sites, can examine your content, decide it's worthy of improved seo and then spit them out closer to the top of the search that a user does. You can do the same thing with key words in the stories.

Why would you do all that? Because if you improve seo, you can improve traffic. Simply put, if your content is higher up on the searches, users are more likely to click on it -- more often.

It's a lengthy process, to be sure. And it's not an exact science. Google has patented the way it calculates search engine optimization. So there's a whole industry of seo specialists who say they know the secret code to seo, but it's really trial and error.

It isn't exactly the kick you get when you're breaking a good news story. But once you publish the seo changes and see your content move up the ranks, it does feel similar to something else we used to do in print -- deliver the news to the readers who want it.

Interesting Post for Journalists

If you're a newspaper journalist and haven't seen this article "Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obsolete? Not If Journalists Collaborate, you need to read it. Given the state of the industry, it's got some great advice for the new media landscape.