Notes from S.I. Newhouse school Prof. Dan Pacheco from chapter 1 of "Entrepreneurial Journalism" by Mark Briggs. If you like what you read, do the author a favor and buy his book here: http://amzn.to/NxjtFx

1. JOURNOVATION
CREATING THE NEXT NEWS STARTUP
Notes on Chapter 1 of “Entrepreneurial Journalism” by Mark Briggs
Professor Dan Pacheco
Chair of Journalism Innovation
S.I. Newhouse School, Syracuse University

2. Reading Assignment #1
• Notes on Chapter 1 of “Entrepreneurial
Journalism” by Mark Briggs. Available for Kindle
and in print at http://amzn.to/NxjtFx
These are some things from my reading that I found
of interest. To learn more, I highly recommend
buying the book. – Dan Pacheco

3. My biases
• My notes reflect my bias as someone who has
worked in the newspaper industry off and on for 10
years, and a total of 17 in the Internet space.
• Briggs’ chapter explains better than anywhere else
how the Internet upended newspapers’ business
models, and also why even the most digitally
innovative newspaper companies failed to solve what
Harvard professor Clay Christensen calls “The
Innovator’s Dilemma.”

4. Notes
• About a third of newsroom jobs that existed at
newspapers in 2001 were gone by 2010. Newspaper
circulation declined by 25% in the same period.
• Past: Legacy media companies controlled delivery of
information. After internet, they no longer have that
monopoly, and thus must compete.
• Well into 2000s, media companies responded to shrinking
audience by raising advertising rates!

5. Notes
• Previously bundled commercial services – like home listings,
car ads, classifieds – work better as standalone services, like
Zillow, Cars.com and Craigslist. This is great for consumers, but
bad for media monopolies.
• Audience decline begun before the Internet. The Internet just
sped it up. Percentage of Americans reading newspapers
started dropping in 1940, even as total circulation rose due to a
growing population.
• “Revenues declined because traditional media companies
jealously guarded their cash cows instead of pushing new lines
of business.”

6. Newspaper revenue, 1985 – 2009.
Source: Pew Research Center’s State of the Media report, 2010.

7. Notes
• Looking back: Newspapers were once the disruptive force in
media. From 1880 to 1920, newspaper growth rate mirrored
that of Internet growth today.
• Rate of growth of new Internet media companies is much
faster. E.g. Huffpost added 13M UV’s in just four years.
• Television: Thanks to online video, top rated TV shows
today get 12M viewers – which would have lead to
cancellation in the 1970s.

8. Notes
• Audio audiences (“radio,” internet radio, podcasts) have
fared better due to aggressive digital strategies. Talk radio
also helps: it’s cheap and controversial topics attract
listeners.
• Bloggers do a better job of growing audiences because
they’re small and scrappy, and earn half as much as
traditional journalists.
• “In the near future, instead of a daily newspaper with 150
journalists, a small city might have 20 digital news
operations.” This mirrors newspapers in early 20th
century.

9. Notes
• West Seattle blog, founded by Tracy Record. No startup
cash, no business plan. Makes $100,000 a year. Two staff,
lots of photo freelancers. 11M pageviews.
• Tracy Record: “Don’t do what you think you want to do
unless you know there’s a need for it and someone will be
helped by it. That’s the sort of thing you can do as a hobby;
it won’t be a business. If you don’t have any idea what
there’s a need for, are you sure you want to do this?”

10. Notes
• More people read a newspaper in print than watched the
Super Bowl in 2011. “It’s not a readership problem; it’s a
revenue problem, especially on the digital side of the
business.”
• Broadcast: Evening news viewership has dropped, but
broadcasters are building large digital businesses.
• Trading physical dollars for digital dimes.

11. Notes
• Misconception that readers used to pay for news. Print
subscriptions rarely covered the cost of ink of paper and
didn’t cover actual work of journalism at all. Those costs
were covered by advertising.
• Yet people just assume that newspaper readers online should
pay for online news.
• This misguided approach has led to paywalls, which largely
haven’t worked.

12. Notes
• “Publishers didn’t recognize … that the Internet’s unique
capabilities would make their content look like black and
white TV in the age of color.”
• Legacy news companies hired as few people as possible to
manage digital products. Most of those hires reformatted
content created for print.
• “Traditional newspaper stories and TV news broadcasts are
the product of the age of scarcity. The Internet is about
abundance.

13. Notes
• “When legacy news publishers forced the same content
product into a new Web-based market, they were
offering the equivalent of VHX casettes on Netflix.”
• “Entrepreneurs who try to reproduce a newspaper in
digital form are doomed to the same obsolescence.”
• Ad dollars aren’t just shifting from print to online.
They’re shifting from bundled products built for a
monopoly to more focused niche, digital products that
come up in search.

14. Notes
• “Deliver a product that meets the needs of today’s news
consumer, and you will build an audience and reap the
rewards.”
• Online ad dollars grew 13.9% to $25.8B in 2010, eclipsing ad
spends in newspapers for the first time.
• Pure online companies not all growing. AOL and Yahoo
have both fallen.

15. Notes
• Why has newspaper company revenue not trasferred from
print to digital even as their audience is shifting? Because
newspapers sell online ads the way they did in print. Lack
of innovation around ad model.
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: Companies that have significant
market share spend their time and energy protecting their
position instead of expanding into new markets or
attempting to innovate with new products.

16. Notes
• Newsrooms are traditionally the most change-resistant and
defensive cultures in any industry. Sense of entitlement,
belief that because of their place as a public trust and
constitutional protection that they don’t need to compete for
attention just like everyone else.
• Enterprising journalists who have embraced changing
dynamics were mostly mavericks.

17. Notes
• The new, collaborate, transparent and authentic journalism:
• Engage with audience and invite collaboration with it.
• Build trust.
• Be transparent.
• Embrace diversity of voices.
• Write with your own voice (be authentic).

18. Discussion Question #1
• 1. True or false: Newspaper companies' total audiences have
been declining in the digital age.

19. Answer
• Answer: False! Overall “newspaper” readership for print and
online together has actually increased. But digital ad
revenues have not been as high as print revenues.

20. Discussion Question #2
• 2. Newspapers and TV biz models are based on scarcity.
Internet is about abundance of content, so it breaks the
model. If space is now abundant, what is still scarce that
digital businesses can leverage?

21. Answer
• (Answer: Open ended, but I think time is increasingly scarce. If you
can save people time, they value you.)

22. Discussion Question #3
• 3. Overall online ad spending eclipsed newspaper
spending in 2010 for the first time. But it didn't apply to
all online properties. AOL and Yahoo both fell. Why do
you think that is?

23. Answer
• Open ended, but my view is that AOL and Yahoo’s one-size-
fits-all portal-based approach is a mismatch for how people
really consume content online through 1) search, and 2)
social media.

24. Discussion Question #4
• 4. The author says newsrooms are the most change-resistant
and defensive of cultures in any industry, that they assumed
being part of the public trust and having constitutional
protection meant they didn't need to compete like everyone
else.
• Do you agree or disagree? How would you push for change
from within an existing company?

25. Discussion Question #5
• 5. Syracuse's daily newspaper (the Post-Standard) is going to
three days a week in print. It is focusing even more online.
Based on what you learned in this reading, what should the
Post-Standard staff do on Syracuse.com and elsewhere to
boost audience and revenue together?