Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Ken Doctor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. 219 pp.
Ken Doctor is a “Leading Media Industry Analyst.” It says so right under his name on the cover of his new book, Newsonomics. A former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Doctor spent twenty-one years with Knight Ridder. Now, as an analyst for a company called Outsell, he has joined the cottage industry that proclaims the future of media for all who will pay to listen.
How does he foretell the future? Mostly, it seems, by reading blogs. Apparently that is where all the wisdom required to understand the future of the mass media can be found. What method do bloggers use? “We build on each other’s ideas,” explains Doctor, “engage in intellectual battles.”
Doctor directed new media for Knight-Ridder, based in San Jose, until 2005. Now he’s a consultant whose work “centers around the monetizing power and democratizing work of digital content.”
One source you won’t find in Doctor’s prescription for the new economics of news are media economists or scholars examining digital media. In fact, Newsonomics offers no citations or references of any kind. Doctor doesn’t need the input of academics to formulate his dozen maxims for what he terms the coming Digital Decade. In addition to all of his online experts, he’s got lots of colleagues and former colleagues to call on for wisdom, of which there seems to be no shortage when it comes to the future of media.
According to Doctor, because news now surrounds us, “it’s hard not to know what’s going on.” At least, not if you’re as plugged into the blogosphere as Doctor is. Because of this oversupply of news, only the fittest will make the cut, ushering in a new age of “Darwinian content.” The winners, of course, will use technology better, engaging the social nature of Web reading and focusing news to audiences. Newspapers will survive for a while, according to Doctor, but not in all cities. They will be more expensive, printed only as a niche product for boomers and older.
Newsonomics is not based entirely on conjecture, however. Doctor does some calculations to bolster his arguments: At about 150 stories per year for every position lost, for example, he figures that 828,000 stories are now not being reported every year due to the newspaper layoffs of 2007-08.
Doctor also offers a theoretical basis for his prediction that a handful of giant media conglomerates will dominate the new media world. He calls them his “Digital Dozen,” although they actually add up to about sixteen to eighteen, and their domination will be enabled by what Doctor describes as a “multiplier” effect in which the big only get bigger. A writer for the New York Times, for example, might generate two million page views per month, which at an advertising rate of $12 per thousand readers (CPM) for each of three ads on that page would add up to $72,000 in revenue. A writer for a Web site with less traffic—say that of the Washington Post—might only get 200,000 page views, which at a CPM of $8 would amount to only $4,800 in monthly revenue.
Thus, it pays to hire the best writers, so deep-pocketed conglomerates will dominate New Media just as they dominate Old Media. At least that much won’t change. While the “Digital Dozen” were forced to trim their sails during the recession, local media were “blown away,” bringing a redefinition of local news, or what Doctor calls “remap and reload.” Remapping for some newspapers means going “hyperlocal,” right down to the neighborhood level despite diminished resources. Reloading is aimed at finding new ways of reporting, as bloggers and citizen journalists pick up the slack.
The new media revolution, Doctor says, is actually two revolutions in one. A reader revolution has seen audiences migrate online as Old Media have failed to see the value of things like aggregation, search, and online video. An advertising revolution has been far quieter, but has seen a similar flight to the Web, where techniques like behavioral targeting and data mining allow such things as direct e-mail marketing. According to Doctor, it is nothing less than “the perfection of selling in our time.”
Newsonomics loses steam in its second half, as chapters grow shorter and rely increasingly on clichés. Blog syndication is the “Great Gathering,” which capitalizes on “Other People’s Content.” Citizen journalism enables a “Pro-Am World” of media content. Business news and the Web are “a match made in heaven.” Doctor’s “10 Percent Rule” sees technology do the heavy lifting while humans add only 10% in skill and judgment. Where journalism once was a hardscrabble job for itinerant reporters, it’s “Back to the Future” in the new “gig” economy of freelancing.
Doctor ends by urging us to “Mind the Gaps,” like the “Chump Gap” created by those who get their news online for free, and the “Fun Gap” that Old Media have difficulty bridging in an age of Jon Stewart hilarity. Suffice it to say that this is a different Doctor than is found in the academic world, one whose expertise comes not from the systematic study of media but instead from a kind of digital osmosis. Newsonomics is what one of my colleagues derides as an “opinion piece.” Amid the spate of punditry and prediction, it serves mostly to test the limits of new media fatigue.
MARC EDGE
Sam Houston State University