Guest Mindsetter: Journalism in the Age of Digital Literacy

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Guest MINDSETTER™ Michael Scully

 

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In just a handful of days, two of the nation’s top regional newspapers -- The Boston Globe and The Washington Post -- have announced, separately, that they will soon be under new management. On Saturday, The Globe was purchased by billionaire John Henry; and Monday, The Washington Post was purchased by billionaire Jeff Bezos. And while the news is very fresh, and the details unclear, one cannot help but draw comparisons and what each means to the larger reading public.

At the heart of the comparison is a media phenomenon known as “digital literacy” and more to the point: which of these new publishers is prepared to help move their respective media properties into the next phase of news consumption? Henry is a finance guy; Bezos is a doc-com revolutionary. Clearly, the fix is in.

But before we get into it, let me explain that “digital literacy” is an understanding of how to package, shape and distribute digital content to an Internet-based audience. Few in the news industry will disagree with me on the following point: The future of news is electronic but so far no one has been able to help a traditional news group make the transition to a digital platform. Winners in the pending digital age will be those who are digitally literate.

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In my version of the future most traditional newspapers will be repackaged in two ways: First, hard news and general news will be digitized and circulated through social media and published either online and/or on computer tablets; second, the newsroom will generate an analog weekly publication that will offer more analysis in a format similar to The New Yorker. For me, this is the Holy Grail for modern news but getting there has been very difficult. For over 20 years, the newspaper community has had an awful time getting to this place because electronic news is far less profitable than newsprint.

But that doesn’t mean The Boston Globe and The Washington Post haven’t experimented with digital news content. For a while, The Washington Post’s digital division was a leader in electronic content but their energy tapered off some years ago. Concurrently, The Boston Globe has also made some muddled advances but The Globe’s attempts at digital news have been half-hearted and ill-conceived.

Let’s look at the deals:

The Boston Globe deal: When I first heard that John Henry -- owner of the Boston Red Sox -- bought the Globe for $70 million, my gut reaction was one of apprehension. Given that The New York Times Company paid $1.1 billion for The Globe in 1993, I thought the current price, a mere 7-percent of the original, established the rock bottom for newspaper valuation.

When the story broke, I read Henry’s bio and realized that this guy made a fortune selling stocks, bonds and other commodities using investment protocols that removed human emotion from the decision-making process. That’s a great model for Wall Street but how will that translate in the publisher’s office? Journalism is/was a passionate field; and here, with this one deal, Henry is in a position to cull this last intangible element from the craft of New England news gathering.

So what’s next? I suspect that Henry will assess the media group’s value and then begin moving forward from there. His choices are few: He must sustain the print division’s profitability as he builds energy around a digital news product. Given the state of The Boston Globe’s current digital enterprises -- Boston.com and The Globe’s digital applications -- Henry is starting nearly from scratch. What’s worse is the fact that he really has no proven record in the digital world.

So, as the Boston shock jocks debate whether The Boston Globe’s sports desk can write objectively about the Red Sox, the more important question is this: What will The Boston Globe look like in 18 months? The outlook does not look sunny.

The Washington Post deal: It was announced Monday that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying The Washington Post for $250 million. Like Henry, Bezos is also a billionaire but he’s a different sort. As the founder and CEO of Amazon, Bezos has a very mature sense of “digital literacy.”

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In 20 years, Bezos has established Amazon.com as one of the top Internet retailers on the planet. Along the way, Bezos and his people have established dot-com protocols that have quickly become industry standards. In short, Bezos is one of the key founders of Internet commerce: he understands branding, he understands consumers and he understand Internet-based consumption. Add to this the fact that his company created the Kindle, which is the first commercially viable computer tablet, and you can begin to see the synergies surrounding this media deal. I suspect that during the next 18 months, we will see some form of The Washington Post packaged for the Kindle and presented as the go-to source for national and international politics.

Comparatively speaking, the Henry deal is fraught with troubles. Henry could transform The Boston Globe into the newspaper of record for New England but under the stewardship of The New York Times Company, The Globe’s reach fell well short of that mark. Further, The Globe’s digital presence needs a complete overhaul and Henry doesn’t strike me as the visionary to lead that development.

Basically, the synergies around The Washington Post deal seem so much more attractive to the media group. Bezos brings his dot-com known-how and a fertile distribution platform that will certainly serve The Washington Post and its content. In fact, just a few years ago, publishers at The New York Times toyed with the idea of replacing home delivery by issuing eReaders, like the Kindle, to its subscribers. Apparently, Bezos may be poised to do that very thing with one of the strongest media properties in the country.

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Michael Scully is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He spent 20 years in a series of newsrooms writing for CNN and Fortune Small Business magazine among others. At RWU, his specialty is “Digital Journalism.” 

 

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