CJR Steps Backward

By: David S. Hirschman Columbia Journalism School dean Nick Lemann couldn't have been clearer in his recent New Yorker article analyzing the growing influence of the Web and citizen journalism: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."

Thursday, however, Lemann informed staffers at one of the Columbia Journalism Review's Web sites, CJR Daily, that he has made the decision to, in effect, strip reporters away from the Web by slashing the site's budget by 45% to help prop up the money-losing print edition of the magazine with a direct-mail campaign. In response, editor-in-chief Steve Lovelady and his deputy editor, Bryan Keefer, have resigned from the site.

It's not unusual for a media company to make cuts to balance the bottom line (indeed it's common lately, at many newsrooms around the country), but considering Lemann's recent statement about the importance of online journalism, this decision to cut from the Web in order to keep the print magazine afloat is pretty counterintuitive.

Lemann explained the cuts in a statement, saying "everybody in journalism knows, [the Web] does not yet produce revenues commensurate with its quality."

I'd argue that not everyone in journalism "knows" -- or even believes -- that. Online ad spending has been rising dramatically over the past few years and is forecast to rise even more rapidly in years to come, particularly on sites where advertisers can target a valuable niche audience. While Lemann blames slow Web ad revenue generally, there are more than a few online news sites and blogs that turn a nice profit. CJR Daily staffers say they had long been urging the business side to work harder at selling online ads, but that the efforts never materialized.

"Bryan [Keefer] and I presented Nick [Lemann] and Victor Navasky, his sidekick, a business plan to sell ads on the site a year ago," says Lovelady. "It was tabled because at the time they were expecting big bucks from a funder who ultimately didn't come through in the manner which they expected. Now, finally, they're in the process of contracting with an ad networking guy. But they're estimating first-year ad revenue would be no more than $125,000 or so and it costs six times that to run the site at its current staffing level."

By shifting resources to the print edition of the magazine, CJR is essentially saying that it would rather serve the 20,000 aging journalists who still like to get a paper edition in their mailboxes (and attract a few more perhaps), than continue or expand the dynamic, globally accessable product Lovelady has created over the past year and a half.

Strategy-wise, it's also somewhat suspect to choke off an editorially successful Web product in order to fund a massive direct-mail campaign. Like print, direct-mail is quickly becoming very retro. Even the New York Times has found recently that it is actually much more effective to sell print subscriptions by using online behavioral analysis to target likely subscribers.

The Times' marketing department recently teamed with behavioral marketing company Tacoda to collect and analyze data about the online behavior of NYTimes.com readers, which then determined which kinds of readers (by interest and geography) were most likely to subscribe to the print edition. Using cookies, the Times determined the rate of subscription conversion across all the sections of the paper as well as 350 different content categories, and cross-referenced the findings with geographic data found in the user's IP address. The paper then could market directly to those people with the highest likelihood of converting (through ads targeted to them specifically). The result, according to Tacoda's Sales Strategy VP Greg Rogers, was a vastly reduced cost-per-acquisition for the paper, and more subscriptions.

In 2006 you can't rescue floundering print products by relying on more print. To prop up and reestablish offline publications you need to work with cheaper, more effective online tools and use your Web presence to highlight your brand to a worldwide audience, some part of whom might be interested enough in your content to buy a print subscription.

BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis says that in Lemann's place he would have killed the magazine and converted everything to online (including advertising), inviting free content and contributions from the public. "CJR already has a brand and a reputation and a history," says Jarvis. "I would think the brave thing to do when you're facing a crunch would be to go online and figure out how to make it work."

Lovelady, who calls Lemann and Navasky "creatures of print," says that there was never any thought whatever to shutting down the print magazine. "That option is not and never has been on the table," he says.