Chapter 5
Find Your Own Way
Entrepreneurial journalists who have developed specialized skills and honed their brand identity so they can offer a unique product to a targeted audience are, in increasing numbers, choosing not to work for traditional employers. It’s a smart move considering the decline of traditional media jobs in recent years. Instead, they, like Gayle Falkenthal, are opting to work independently for clients who hire them to perform specific jobs, or like Times of San Diego founder Chris Jennewein, they are forming their own online media enterprises.
A veteran journalist and public relations consultant, Falkenthal owns a consulting business and doesn’t count any one client as her boss. Although she’s been following an entrepreneurial job model for decades, there is now more interest than ever in doing the kind of work she does. Learning more about her job only makes it sound more appealing.
Interview: A Conversation with Gayle Falkenthal, Veteran Journalist and Public Relations Consultant
What do you call yourself and what do you do?
The job that really pays my mortgage is that I’m a public relations consultant, and I’ve got probably at any given time six to ten clients who for the most part provide some kind of professional service. They’re an attorney. They are a professional association, of which I have two. An expert on green building. Green roofs and living walls are his expertise. A political pollster. That gives you a general idea. Those people pay me to position them in front of their potential clients so that when they’re ready to do business or seek services in those areas, they’re going to find my clients. Or in the case of the professional associations, it’s building membership, and in one case there is a direct consumer. When I first started, 90 percent of my job was media relations. Placements. Very straight PR. Now that’s maybe 10 percent of my job, tops. Now I’m the one producing the content.
What kind of content are you producing?
I’m producing content for their website. I’m managing blog pages. In some cases I’m ghost writing. For two of my ten clients I ghost write regular columns that are in traditional media, under their bylines. In one case I actually write the whole thing start to finish, under the byline of the client. I’ve internalized his voice so well that I just write it for him. He reads it, he approves it, and it’s published under his name. On the websites, we’re constantly looking for opportunities for more content. Several of my clients are fairly good, a little more self-sufficient about producing material.
Figure 5.1 Gayle Falkenthal.
What skill sets do journalists need today?
It really all comes down to being able to write and communicate well with your audience in mind. Here’s a great example of a skill I learned literally thirty years ago that I’m putting to use now. I never in a million years thought it would have any use. I worked in radio news, at a station called KNX. It was a typical news station that was literally doing an hour of news every hour. All-news radio. You’re churning out a lot of copy. And most of the people listening to you are in their cars. But you want to keep them listening as long as you can. Our goal was to keep them listening across two quarter-hours of the clock. That maximized your ratings, and maximized how much an advertiser would pay for commercials on the station. So you had to keep listeners there. How would you do that? By headlines that teased what was coming up. We ran headline sets eight times an hour, and I had to write those. So you’re writing 240 or 300 headlines in an eight-hour shift. That’s a lot of headlines, in addition to all the newswriting. I got to be wicked good at writing headlines. I’m now wicked good at writing headlines that turn into URLs that turn into search terms. I know how to draw somebody’s attention. You learn what language keeps someone listening. Search terms, tricks. Now it’s called “click bait.”
How can those just entering the field get the work experience they need today?
You can intern in the PR department of a hospital and write articles for their website. If you really want to work for a magazine, unfortunately the magazines that used to churn copy like crazy are gone. But in their place are things like the Red Bulletin. It’s the most beautiful, well-written, interesting, visually stunning glossy magazine you’ll ever see in your life. I get it for free. I read it cover to cover. I have zero interest in action sports other than peripherally. But it’s so well done, so well written. It is produced by a commercial corporation, but it’s tying its product name—Red Bull, we all know it—to this whole lifestyle of living on the edge. They profile athletes I’ve never heard of who do extreme sports. They’ll also do environmental articles because these people are going out to these remote areas. They cover travel. They do a lot of technology and gear reviews because their readers buy this stuff. You don’t see an actual ad for a can of Red Bull in that whole magazine. You don’t have to. It has the whole Red Bull lifestyle just oozing off the page.
What else do you do to pay the bills?
In addition to my so-called paying jobs, I am working as a copy editor and writing two regular columns for this online news organization started by someone who used to be a business editor at the Washington Times. I write on media. From that point of view, I’m writing about topics that demonstrate my subject area expertise. And because the site gets really good search pickup, I’m constantly feeding information about me and my byline into the “interwebs” so people can find me. I’m easy to find. If I write two or three columns a week, I’ve got all this material churning out there about myself.
What do you do that doesn’t pay the bills?
I’m a boxing writer. I love boxing. It’s my hobby. There is virtually no monetization for me in it. I get page views. In a good month I’ll pay my utility bill. But it’s an attention getter because being female and small, I’m not what they expect. Everyone says, “You do what?” And you only get good at writing by writing. It’s so completely out of what I normally do. It’s writing in a completely different voice and personality. It’s not like anything I do for a client. But it’s almost like cross-training. It is hard to figure out, “How do I make a decent living doing all of this?” It is super easy if you do it for free.
Why would a journalist write for free?
I’m thinking to myself, “Why am I doing this again?” Promotion for the site. Driving more page views. Eventually building the regular returning audience. It’s convoluted, but I know for a fact that I have clients on the adult, paying side of my work life that found me because of this stuff. They see me out there and they assume, “If she’s doing it for herself, she can do it for me.” At the site [Communities Digital News, or commdiginews.com] writers with an area of expertise monetize their interest and then make it into another job. On the other hand we also have people who have a subject matter expertise who are good writers and are talented. One of our most popular writers is a chef in Los Angeles. She writes about food and does recipes. People love her. This is absolutely free advertising for her restaurant.
How did you start your public relations career?
In the beginning, I took every client. That’s how I ended up with clients I realized were a nightmare. I had to tell myself, even though they weren’t the paying customer, my relationship with the media was just as important as—if not more important than—my relationship with the client. Clients come and go. My relationship with the media goes back way further than it does with any of the clients. That has to be maintained too.
Where are the jobs in the new media economy?
It used to be, at least at boxing events, the newspapers would have their own boxing columnists and send their own photographers. You would see a bank of photographers, and they’d all be from news organizations. Now probably 10 percent are from news organizations. AP will still send someone. Getty will still send someone. Our little news site doesn’t have the budget to pay for AP or Getty, but it doesn’t matter because the promoters who run these fights have hired professional news photographers who work for them full time. And faster than AP or Getty can turn me a photo, the promoters’ photographers will post their photos for media use, and they are every bit the quality. All I have to do is credit them. Also, HBO and Showtime have their own photographers on staff, for sports or pay per view. So all I have to do is look on their Twitter account or Facebook for links, or HBO will send me a zip file in twenty minutes, and I open it, and all I have to do is provide credit. That’s so incredible, and in a way so heartening about the profession. It isn’t really collapsing. It’s dispersing.
The Red Bulletin
Red Bull, the world’s first and best selling energy drink,1 isn’t just a ubiquitous beverage with strong extreme sports associations. It’s also a multi-platform media company called the Red Bull Media House. Through its magazines, Web, TV, and mobile media products, it promotes the Red Bull brand in a way simple advertising never could. Rather than merely promoting Red Bull, the Red Bull Media House is a concept that reinforces and extends the Red Bull brand, all without directly promoting the brand.
The Red Bull Media House, like the manufacturer of Red Bull, is headquartered in Salzburg, Austria, with a North American office in Santa Monica, CA. When Red Bulletin debuted in the United States, the media company was already publishing editions of the magazine in nine countries, Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany among them. At the time of its founding in 2011,
Figure 5.2a and 5.2b The Red Bulletin.
Figure 5.3 Red Bull has long been a branding leader. Photo by Dan Smith / Wikimedia Commons.
Associate Publisher Raymond Roker told USA Today that the magazine was created “to have a rich conversation with our audience.”2 The magazine was initially available on newsstands, by subscription, and in the Sunday editions of five big city daily newspapers in the United States. Although the magazine features the familiar Red Bull logo, it does not overtly advertise the drink. Instead it accepts advertising from other companies just as any other lifestyle magazine would. It is image-focused and platform agnostic. With distribution in Europe, the Americas, the Persian Gulf region, and New Zealand, as well as plans for distribution in South Korea and China, Red Bulletin is an international brand that exemplifies a degree of convergence that few companies have ever attempted. Clearly, the message the Red Bull Media House wants to send is that they can reach audiences wherever they are with messages that appeal specifically to them, regardless of the tools, the platforms or even the content. Brand image trumps everything.
Working for Yourself
In these days when many of the traditional journalism jobs no longer exist, it is common to hear about both beginning and seasoned journalists going to work for themselves instead of waiting for someone else to give them a job. This can mean any number of things, from freelancing and doing consulting work, to forming a partnership or taking on a new project. For some particularly ambitious and hard-working journalists, it can mean building a new business from scratch. Although some journalists end up doing work that is outside the sphere of what we might ordinarily think of as journalism, many gravitate to projects that are a more natural extension of the work they did either in their journalism classes or in earlier, more traditional journalism careers. For this latter group, launching a new publication is an obvious choice. While in the past this was a particularly ambitious project given the high cost of print and distribution of a physical product, in the online world new publication launches are quite common since the costs are low, although news sites, blogs, and online magazines face more competition than ever. Creating them is relatively easy. Getting them to generate revenue is another matter entirely.
In 1995, as print journalism was enjoying its last days of prosperity, the late John F. Kennedy Jr. famously introduced the political glossy George into an already crowded magazine marketplace. Clearly, Kennedy’s famous name was an advantage for the magazine, whose early issues attracted significant attention. Although the magazine’s own lifespan was cut short by the death of its co-founder in a 1999 plane crash, it was unlikely that even it would survive for long in the face of rising paper and printing costs. George ultimately folded in 2001, at a time when print journalism’s revenue model was beginning to falter as websites, blogs, and other online publications started multiplying. The economic retrenchment that occurred at the end of 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, hastened the decline of many print publications that were already struggling or vulnerable.
Figure 5.4 George magazine’s debut November 1995 issue.
As the Internet expanded, bandwidth increased, and more people gained access to computers with high-speed connections, the Web gradually became more influential. Audiences grew more fragmented as their viewing and listening choices expanded. Even though speed and access remained significant barriers to true entrepreneurial journalism in the 1990s, it was gradually becoming clear that the mass media model was in trouble—and that was not such a bad thing for readers, writers, and other content creators who had become less dependent on gatekeepers to deliver their messages to the world. The first journalism entrepreneurs created online newspapers and magazines that looked much like their print cousins. It is understandable that the mass media model, which provided a small, fixed selection of content to the largest possible audiences, would serve as a model for the first journalism entrepreneurs who had known little else. The vast majority of startup publications in the 1990s had circulations that were quite small compared to the reach of today’s most successful blogs. A September 2014 report estimated the readership of the Huffington Post, one of the most prominent online news sites today, at more than 110 million unique visitors a month.3 At the end of 2013 (the year for which the most recent media audit figures were available at publication), the print magazines with the highest circulation topped out at around 22 million, with yearly projected declines.
Given the world’s changing demographics, it should come as no surprise that the most widely circulated consumer magazines are AARP The Magazine and the AARP Bulletin, which had circulation rates at the end of 2013 of 22,274,096 and 22,244,820, respectively.4 The AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, represents Americans aged 50 and older, not coincidentally a group more likely to read print publications. At the end of 2013, once major American magazines reported much lower circulations. Good Housekeeping was just above four million, while Woman’s Day, Ladies Home Journal, Sports Illustrated, and Cosmopolitan were just above three million. All were down in circulation from the year before.5 It is clear to see why those who want to reach new and grow existing readerships are not looking to print. They are looking online.
Chris Jennewein is an entrepreneurial journalist with long careers in both print and online journalism. He is a rare example of someone who has successfully transitioned from the traditional to the new journalism world. As early as 1993, Jennewein ushered the Knight–Ridder newspaper chain into the digital age with the United States’ first entirely online newspaper at the San Jose Mercury News. At the San Diego Union-Tribune, he led that paper’s early popular website, SignOnSanDiego.com. He then led digital-only initiatives at the former San Diego News Network and Patch.com, where he was editorial director for Southern California until early 2014, when he founded the online news site Times of San Diego. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (where he studied urban planning) and the London School of Economics.
Figure 5.5 AARP The Magazine, which serves an age 50-plus readership, has enjoyed among the highest circulation of any print publication in recent years.
Figure 5.6 Chris Jennewein.
Interview: A Conversation with Chris Jennewein, Veteran Journalist and Founder of Times of San Diego
Is the kind of change we’ve seen in media in recent years unprecedented?
If you entered the business in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, you could sort of plot your career and say, “I want to be A, B, C, and D,” and it was a pretty straight course. But since then, and largely because of technology, it hasn’t been, and I think that requires people in media to be entrepreneurial. If you went back fifty or a hundred years, this is exactly the way it was. People who got into media in those days had to completely reinvent themselves as things changed. New York once had twenty-five daily newspapers, and they kept changing, going out of business, restarting… it’s really a wonderful, exciting business that you have to be continually adapting yourself for.
Where do the biggest opportunities in journalism now lie?
In addition to this tremendous growth in online is the growth of non-media newsrooms. One of them, for example, is the county news center here. It’s really a news website for San Diego. Another good example is San Diego State University. Their home page is really a news site. Another example is Martin Guitar. Some of the stories on their home page are about particular models, but a lot of what you see is something an editor would put together.
Does it matter that the boundaries that once separated journalism from public relations are falling away?
Almost any PR person will tell you placement doesn’t matter anymore, that it’s nice to get into the Union-Tribune, yeah, it’s nice to get on TV, but increasingly you go directly to your audience. Public relations companies get hired to create news sections for sites. They get hired to create a Facebook page. They get hired to create the online profile of a company. And if they get a placement along the way, that’s fine. That’s wonderful. It’s opened up many more opportunities. Now increasingly you see people moving back and forth a lot between journalism and PR. In the old days of PR there really was a separation of skills; the PR world was very different.
What should beginning journalists do to prepare for a job in the field?
I think technical virtuosity is an important thing. That almost goes without saying, When you’re 18, 19, 20, you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a smartphone, you’re on Twitter, you’re on Facebook, on Instagram, you know these things.
What is the best way to prepare for a career in journalism?
You have to have a lot of internships where you do a lot of work. I learned how to write news style, which still has a lot of value, in internships. When I first joined the college newspaper, my writing was atrocious because I hadn’t taken any courses and I had no examples. So I learned by doing it.
What kinds of unexpected skills do journalists need to prepare for new and future careers?
A year or even a semester of statistics could be extremely helpful. I’m amazed at the people who still can’t do a percentage or who look at numbers and don’t know what they mean.
Where is online journalism going?
Across the Internet, communities of interest are extremely powerful. A community of interest might be West Coast surfing or it might be home vineyard growing, or it might be taxpayer advocacy. There are hundreds of thousands of websites out there that do very well focused on things like that. Something like Lifehacker. That’s a community of interest, and it works because it draws from the entire world. What I’m trying to do with Times of San Diego is, I’m trying to provide essential news for San Diego for a largely younger audience, but by making it all of the metropolitan area, I’ve got a bigger audience to draw on for advertising and just for pure audience size.
How did you immediately differentiate Times of San Diego from the many other local online news sources out there?
What I’m doing is not that dramatically different from what anyone else could do. I think that’s the nature of a lot of innovation. I’m trying to provide twenty-five essential stories a day on a typical day. I’m aiming at a younger audience that wants to know what’s happening in San Diego but doesn’t read a newspaper, doesn’t watch TV. We keep our stories short. We often use bullet point style to say what we want to say. We post very rapidly. I’ve focused a lot on search engine optimization. That’s one reason for our growth, because we very early on got into Google News. I personally cover one thing a day in person. I approach it not like a traditional reporter, where you hang in the back and take notes. I walk in with a pocket full of cards, and I hand out cards, and I send everybody who I get a card from a link, and that’s one technique anyone can copy.
Describe the mission of Times of San Diego.
To a certain extent it’s a labor of love. I wanted to start something new. My mission is to provide essential local news for a primarily younger audience that is not now getting its news in any other way. That’s one thing. In terms of a business, I want to make it self-sustaining, and to do that I need to reach about 300,000 unique readers a month, which I think can be done by the end of the first year.
How long did it take you to launch?
The short answer is: not long. I sat down and did a business plan, filed for an LLC registration, and I think eight weeks later launched the site.
How did you get Times of San Diego off the ground so quickly?
I think my connections locally have helped build traffic. I sent an email when I launched to probably 500 people. But a lot of it was pretty basic. It was setting the site up properly for Google News indexing. It’s not rocket science. I used WordPress. That’s the best CMS out there. It’s really the world’s standard. I spent three or four days looking at different WordPress themes until I found one I really liked. Then I set it up and started experimenting with it for a couple weeks, trying different combinations of things. And once I got it the way I liked it, I hired some contractors, some people I’d worked with, and that was it.
How do you monitor the success of Times of San Diego ?
One of the things I spend a lot of time monitoring is which stories are getting traffic at any given time. There are a wealth of tools out there, like Google Webmaster Tools for example, that can give you very detailed information on how the site is doing.
Would you call yourself a journalism entrepreneur?
Sure I would.
What’s next for Times of San Diego and the news business in general?
I think you’ll see a lot of entrepreneurs and sites vying for attention. The entry costs are low, people are getting more and more sophisticated about how to do this. The tools are out there, things like Google Ad Sense and AOL networks. You can monetize the site. I’ve had ads on the site since it went public. So we have an environment now that’s very encouraging for entrepreneurs and media. The bar is higher in the sense that there’s more competition, but the costs of entry are lower. Twenty years ago if you wanted to start something you couldn’t really start anything in the video world. It was far too expensive. You could start maybe a suburban newspaper, but even that was expensive. Now it’s much easier to do this across the board.
Did you get any investors?
I haven’t yet. I wanted to move very fast, and I could do this very fast. Bootstrapping is an old concept. You start out with some money you have. I’m not endangering my financial future, but I want to show several months of success, then I will be looking for additional investment.
Is there any new proven model of journalism on the horizon?
I think there’ll be many models competing. I think nonprofit works to a certain extent, but if you’re not buying advertising, what are you buying? I worry about nonprofit because the people giving the money at some point will want something, especially the really big givers.
What is the future of journalism?
I think it’s completely positive. I think there is a wide variety of new opportunities out there for graduates, primarily in the online world. And for those who don’t want a media role, there are these non-media newsrooms that are springing up everywhere. The challenge there is finding out what the job is called. You’re not going to be hired as a reporter or an editor. You’re going to be a manager or a director or a coordinator, and it might be marketing and it might be content and it might be something different.
Analytics are Everything
Analytics is the in-depth analysis of data patterns to determine trends or predictions in consumer behavior. Although analytics doesn’t just apply to online readership, most people these days are familiar with the term as it relates to measuring the performance of websites in terms of hits, clicks, and visitors. Analytics are critical to journalists launching ventures online because they are the only means by which they can measure how well (or whether) they achieve their goals. Much like how traditional media audits provide information on newspaper readership, radio station listenership or television station viewership, analytics show how many people visit a site, how often they visit, what pages they click on within the site as well as the pages from which they landed on the site and the clicks on links that took them off the site.
If bloggers or website administrators want to show potential advertisers or investors how successful they’ve been at reaching their goals and attracting online audiences, analytics are the only solid and reliable data they can produce. Analytics data are also much more detailed than most of the old media measurement tools that could only speculate on such things as pass-along
Figure 5.7 A snapshot from wordpress.com blog stats.
readership and consumer attitudes toward various media based on self-reported information that was often misleading or wrong.
One story from an actual media audit of weekly newspapers in Philadelphia in the early years of the new millennium illustrates a common problem with the traditional process of surveying local media consumers. In Philadelphia at the time there were several local newspapers—two major city dailies, two weekly tabloids, and a few specialty papers with small distribution or specific readerships (such as student newspapers or shoppers). At the time, reader-ship surveys were conducted via landline phone, and the mostly older people who would take the time to answer the surveyor’s questions were casual media consumers. They lived in homes that for decades had received their news from the city’s big daily broadsheet the Inquirer or its big daily tabloid the Daily News, and from the six o’clock news on one of the local network affiliates. In these demographically older households, the younger-skewing alternative weekly newspapers the Philadelphia Weekly and the City Paper were not as well read. It is likely that few of those who picked up their landlines in the middle of the day to answer a fifteen-minute media survey were even aware of their city’s alternative weekly newspapers, which contained extensive entertainment calendars, movie listings, news analysis with a liberal bent, and pages of personal and pornography ads in the back pages. However, when asked if they read the City Paper, respondents said yes in greater numbers than when they were read the names of the city’s other papers. One of the auditors at the time speculated that the respondents had considered “city paper” a generic term for Philadelphia’s big daily, the Inquirer. This kind of polling mistake would be much less likely in online analytics.
Why Analytics?
Google Analytics is the most established and best-known tool for measuring visitor behavior on your site. Businesses use it to better understand the needs and interests of their customers and the performance of various pages on their site. Like businesses that measure and analyze customer behavior so they can make their products and messages more appealing to current and potential customers, those who manage blogs or news or media sites use the same tools to determine the kind of content that most interests their readers. Using the information they collect about their visitors, they can learn more about who they are and what their habits and interests are. This can help content managers and producers determine the most (and least) appropriate content for their site. If a lead story on local politics coincides with a measurable drop in visitors to the site, the content manager may consider replacing the lead story with another story that more closely aligns with the interests of site visitors, who, for example, through their clicking behavior, show a distinct preference for arts and entertainment stories.
Bounce rate: The percentage of users who view only one page of a site; an indication of how relevant the site is to those who arrive on it.
Click: The action a user takes to reach a page on a site.
Conversion: The rate at which visitors to a site execute a prescribed action, such as subscribing to or following a blog.
Direct traffic: Traffic to a website that does not arrive through a link to the site.
Impression: Each display of an online ad.
Keyword: Term users enter in a search engine to find relevant content.
Landing page: The page on which a visitor to a site first arrives.
New visitors: Visitors to a site who do not have stored information, or cookies, on their computer that indicate a previous visit.
Paid traffic: Visitors who arrive on a site after clicking on an ad.
Page view: A visit to an individual page on your site.
Referring site: A site from which visitors to your site arrive.
Returning visitor: Someone who has visited your site more than once; this indicates the content is relevant or meaningful to them.
Traffic: Total visits to the site.
Unique visitor: Each non-repeat visitor to a site.
Visit: Each time a site is accessed.
Quantcast.com is a tool that allows users to compare traffic on various web-sites to determine their relative performance over time. This helps bloggers and website managers better understand how well they are doing in comparison to their competitors. Quantcast is similar to Google Analytics in that it provides information about the number and frequency of hits, demographic information about those who visit a site, how and from where they access the site as well as their interests as reported in an “Affinity Index.” This helps those who run websites better understand the habits, needs, and interests of website visitors.
Jennewein also makes use of Google Webmaster Tools, which help him maximize his site’s reach and performance proactively. While Google Analytics shows him where his readers come from and where they go when they’re on his site, Webmaster Tools can proactively troubleshoot the site, helping him avoid malware and bad links. Webmaster Tools also helps him improve the way his site and its pages appear in Google searches. While Google Analytics measures the behavior of visitors to a site, Google Webmaster Tools focuses more on how search engines find a particular site. This is the kind of detailed data that may have made a difference to the fate of print and broadcast outlets had it been available to measure their audiences years ago.
Summary
While many beginning journalists still pursue work through traditional mass media channels, a growing number of them now entertain entrepreneurial opportunities. For some, like veteran journalist and public relations professional Gayle Falkenthal, the transition from mass media to media on demand was seamless, as she has spent her entire career learning new tools and techniques in anticipation of potential clients’ future needs. Although Falkenthal now runs her own public relations consulting company, her clients are also her employers. But unlike most of her predecessors who worked for one boss in an office for forty hours a week, she serves them on her own schedule, which she flexibly adapts to meet both their needs and hers.
With years of experience across most media, Falkenthal has first-hand knowledge of the benefits and challenges of doing journalism today. Unlike many of her peers, she was not caught off-guard by the changes the Internet brought to journalism. Even though the nature of her job has changed in some dramatic ways in recent years, she is always happy to retrain and learn. It may be easier for her than it is for most, given the degree of change she has already faced during her career.
Falkenthal is excited and energized by the transformation of media business models in the Internet era. That she is more focused on producing content for her public relations clients than pitching traditional media outlets on her clients’ stories means she is able to shift her emphasis to a different set of related skills. Navigating such a dramatic shift is no problem for those who have a wide and varied skill set.
Chris Jennewein is another veteran San Diego journalist with strong technical skills as well as an extensive journalism background. Like George magazine founder the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, Jennewein decided not to wait for others to give him opportunities to work for them, and decided to make his own. Although he spent most of his career in print, Jennewein has seen print newspaper circulation decline year after year. It wasn’t difficult for him to determine his future would be online.
These days the largest circulation print magazines, AARP The Magazine and the AARP Bulletin, reach a fraction of the readers the most successful websites do. Clearly, traditional print journalism shows no signs of a rebound, and Jennewein doesn’t think that’s a problem. That’s because he understands the media are in constant flux and that the changes the Internet has brought to print only add to the century of changes that have transformed journalism. Indeed, journalism is not dying. It is simply done differently these days.
Central to determining the success of a website, blog or online publication are analytics. Data assembled through analytics include the number and frequency of visits to a website or page, demographic information about those who visit websites, and the way visitors to a site interact with its pages and content. Much more detailed and accurate than traditional media audits that relied largely on self-reported information gathered in telephone interviews, Web analytics provide essential feedback to those who determine and direct online content. Analytics data can aid in deciding which content is appealing to visitors and should be promoted, and which content is not appealing and should be eliminated. These decisions allow a site to better serve the interests of its key audiences while helping to meet the needs and serve the interests of more readers and viewers. Effective analytics tools now available to bloggers and journalists working online include Google Analytics, Quantcast, and Google Webmaster Tools.
Journalist’s Toolkit
An entrepreneurial journalist, like any other kind of journalist, must always keep in mind her audience. Increasingly these days, journalists serve various employers, clients or simply themselves. Fewer journalists now want to work for others in dusty traditional newsrooms forty—or sixty, or eighty—hours a week. Many now work for clients or for themselves out of home offices or even libraries or coffee shops. Thanks to new tools and technology, entrepreneurial journalists can work anywhere—and they are everywhere, just like their clients and audiences.
Skills
Writing
Producing multimedia content
Basic Web development
Making presentations
Search engine optimization
Social media optimization
Basic analytics.
Sites
Commdiginews.com: The website for Communities Digital News, for which Gayle Falkenthal writes.
Google.com/analytics: Home page of Google Analytics, a popular tool for analyzing website traffic and visitor behavior.
Lifehacker.com: An online resource offering tips for simplifying life and getting things done.
Quantcast.com: Browser-based tool that allows visitors to compare traffic patterns across websites.
Application
- Interview an entrepreneurial journalist in your community who used to work for one or more traditional media outlets. Ask them to explain the challenges and other considerations they weighed as they decided whether to go into business for themselves. Also ask them how their current work differs from the traditional work they used to do, as well as what lessons they learned in the career transition. Optional: Assemble your interview into a feature story with additional background reporting. Pitch the resulting story to a student publication or other publication in your community.
- Find a “lifestyle publication” that is published by a non-media company. Analyze its content for image, quality, and integrity. Then describe the publication’s impact (if any) on the company’s brand.
- Use Quantcast or a similar site to compare visitors to two or more websites. List at least three conclusions you can draw from the comparison.
Review Questions
- Why does the company that manufactures Red Bull also create and distribute content?
- What kinds of information can you find in analytics reports, and what kinds of adjustments can you make in response to them?
- What is the difference between Google Analytics, Quantcast, and Google Webmaster Tools? What kind of information does each tool yield, and how can that information be applied?
- What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? How do analytics options differ between them?
References
1. “Who Makes Red Bull?” Red Bull U.S.A., http://energydrink-us.redbull.com/company.
2. Horovitz, Bruce. “Red Bull Plans Glossy Mag in U.S.: ‘Red Bulletin’ Targets Lovers of Energy Drink,” USA Today, May 9, 2011, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.nu.edu/docview/865306540.
3. “Top 15 Most Popular News Websites September 2014,” eBizMBA.com, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites.
4. “Top 25 U.S. Consumer Magazines for December 2013,” Alliance for Audited Media, http://www.auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/february/us-snapshot.aspx.
5. Ibid.