Examining Media Convergence at the St. Petersburg Times
By Sylvia Lim
Introduction
Despite being Florida’s largest daily newspaper, St. Petersburg Times has yet to figure out a profitable news model that integrates traditional print and online media. However, the Times does not shy away from experimentation, or restructuring its news and creative staff to achieve that goal despite an abysmal year for the news industry.History of the St. Petersburg Times
The St. Petersburg Times celebrated its 125th anniversary this year. As the 25th largest newspapers in the United States, the Times started out as a weekly in Dunedin in 1884 called the West Hillsborough Times, according to its Web site. The newspaper changed ownership in 1892 and was renamed the St. Petersburg Times. In 1907, it became a semiweekly paper. Five years later, the Times was printed six days a week.
An Indiana publisher, Paul Poynter, bought the paper and started the Times Publishing Company and in 1924. The Times became a daily paper. Poynter’s son, Nelson, took over the paper as an editor in 1939. He succeeded his father as president of the company when the elderly Poynter died in 1950. In 1975, Nelson Poynter established the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and left his share of the company to this non-profit educational institution. Nelson Poynter died in 1978. While the younger Nelson helmed the paper, the Times won its first Pulitzer Prize in 1964.
Paul Tash became executive in 1992, two years after an attempted takeover of the Times Publishing Company. He became the publishing company’s president in 2000. During his tenure, the paper launched its first Web site, sptimes.com, in 1995. Tampabay.com, was launched four years later. In 1998, the St. Petersburg Times surpassed the Miami Herald as the largest daily newspaper in Florida, earning $210 million in revenue. Between 1980 and 1998, the Times picked up five more Pulitzer Prizes for various investigative and narrative reporting pieces.
The paper began assembling multimedia packages with photos, audio, some video and long narrative stories somewhere around 2003 and 2004, according to the Times archives. The packages became progressively interactive and sophisticated over the years, utilizing more advanced software and storytelling techniques. By 2007, the Times created various interactive quizzes and maps, in addition to the earlier techniques already employed. More recently, the Times deployed interactive animation to tell stories, such the package on the escaped Patas monkeys in Tampa earlier this year. In addition to these, the St. Petersburg Times also launched several Web products such as Mugshots, Home Team and PolitiFact, which won a Pulitzer Prize this year. It also won another prize in the narrative category.
State of the industry
Despite its standing as one of the largest newspapers in the country, the St. Petersburg Times is not immune to the national recession, the struggling real estate market in Florida and the shifting landscape of news delivery. 2008 was a tumultuous year for the newspaper industry.
Advertising, circulation and revenue numbers dropped dramatically, forcing some major corporations such as the Tribune Company to declare bankruptcy, according to the State of the News Media report compiled by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. Advertising sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter of 2008, the report stated, and spiraled to 18 percent by the end of the year. Contributing factors included loss of classified ads and employment advertising, the crash of the real estate market and the struggles of the auto and retail industries. In 2008, advertising sales for newspapers was estimated at $38 billion, compared to 2006 when newspapers made roughly $50 billion.
Circulation numbers continue to plummet. On average, major newspapers in the country saw a drop in weekday circulation in 2008, by about 10 percent on average, according to a recent New York Times report. Only three major newspapers – The Wall Street Journal, The Denver Post and the Seattle Times – saw a spike. In the Tampa Bay area, the St. Petersburg Times lost 10.6 percent of its circulation, while the Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune lost roughly 19 and 16 percent of its subscribers respectively, according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. The precarious financial trend carried on to 2009, where major newspapers such as the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor either ceased publication or went solely online.
Many news organizations, including major newspaper corporations such as Gannett, the McClatchy Company and the New York Times Company resorted to buy outs, lay offs, pay cuts and printing smaller newspapers. The St. Petersburg Times faced similar pressure: management offered buyout packages to 200 employees last year, slashed pay by five percent and froze employee retirement benefits this year, according to reports from the Times’ blog The Feed.
Despite the glum predicament, the newspaper industry remains profitable, according to the Pew report. Ad sales are still driving newspapers. Other cost-savings measures were implemented. Many newspapers, once fierce competitors, now share joint-operating agreements and resources. For example, the Bradenton Herald, a McClatchy Company paper, now share a joint-operating agreement with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a New York Times Company paper, for print and delivery of the paper product. The St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald now report from the same bureau in Tallahassee. Most importantly, many newspapers are shifting significant resources to boost their online/web products, and many are experimenting with different models of news delivery to increase earnings on that front.
Integrating staff and products
Though faced with some hefty challenges, many in the industry are adapting to slimmer newsrooms and faster turnaround time. Some also see the downturn as opportunities for changes and experimentation with various business models. Though the St. Petersburg Times faced its fair share of financial difficulty, the paper continues to innovate on the Web presentation side.
The drop in paper circulation – its weekday is now 240,000 and Sunday is 370,000 – was a calculated consequence after the company decided to do away with third-party paper sales, said Stephen Buckley, publisher of Tampabay.com. Its online readership, however, has grown from 1.6 million unique visitors last year to 2.2 million recently. Through the Internet, the Web site is able to attract readers from all over the country and the world, he said. Search engine optimization has helped in referring readers to Tampabay.com.
In terms of media convergence, (i.e. delivering news through various media platforms) the Times made adjustments that are not only visible through its online news packages. Like many other newsrooms, the Times changed its staffing structure. The paper devoted a team of five to six reporters to a NOW desk, Buckley said. They are responsible for covering and updating breaking news on the Web site. The Times also created a digital sales manager position, someone who is in charge of developing an online audience. In terms of staffing, Buckley said the organization is fairly integrated, which means any reporter, ad sales rep or marketing artist works on both print and web products. “Structure is helpful to create a more cohesive newsroom when it comes to print and Web,” Buckley said. We also “need people with right set of skills.”
Restructuring the newsroom meant altering the mindset of more traditional journalists. Up until three years ago, Buckley said some Times staffers were resistant to posting scoops online. That sentiment passed. Now, the challenge lies in getting the same journalists to develop skills in telling stories through various multimedia tools, he said. Photographers, for instance, should develop competency in shooting videos and photos for both the Web and the newspaper. But there should not be an expectation that the journalist can accomplish all three expertly. “What I tell journalists is, make a distinction between competence and expertise,” he said. “We should be careful about making everybody experts in all things at the same time.”
While some journalists are still figuring out how to tell stories using different platforms, some are navigating the technological arena with relative ease. The latter group appears to be breaking innovative grounds of information access and delivery. The paper makes a distinction between Web sites – products with its own domain – and features, which are incorporated to Tampabay.com. The company currently produces three Web sites: Tampabay.com, tbt.com and PolitiFact.com, Buckley said. It also has mutiple Web features accessible through Tampabay.com, such as Home Team, Mugshots and a golfing page. Unlike the print product, Buckley said feedback or responses to how successful a product is are often immediate.
Rethinking information delivery
Like many other news organizations, officials at the St. Petersburg Times is also trying to figure out how to make their online content profitable, yet maintain a standard of journalistic credibility. “What’s challenging on digital side is, content and commerce go hand-in-hand,” Buckley said. As it stands, print ad sales are still more lucrative than digital ad sales. Despite grim premonitions about the state of newspapers and the uncertainty the industry is facing, Buckley remains optimistic. “The good thing about this leave us free to experiment, it should lead us to experiment,” he said. “We should be taking some risks we haven’t in past.” Matt Waite, the Times’ news technologist, enjoys that challenge. Waite’s job description is unusual, and he belongs to a team of five who figure out how to present mounds of information in one permanent place, and create Web sites and features for the Times. Even his location – he is based in Lincoln, Nebraska – speaks volume about how newspapering has changed.
An award-winning investigative journalist, Waite is an expert in computer-assisted reporting. With 10 years of reporting experience under his belt, Waite decided to learn how to put data on the Web. He taught himself how to program and started thinking of ways he could organize information online and target specific niche markets. This resulted in several Web products, including a Pulitzer winner political Web site, a one-stop database for local high school sports and a revenue-generating site that requires minimum labor. These are examples of “entrepreneurial journalism products and web development, ideas built from a journalistic perspective.”
PolitiFact, which won a national reporting Pulitzer, started out as a simple idea. The site is devoted to fact-checking statements made by politicians and pundits, started prior to last year’s general elections. It serves as a portal where news consumers and voters can verify such statements, and draws readers from all over the country. It contains colorful graphics and charts, and takes on statements propagated through television, Facebook and even chain e-mails. In the same vein, Waite created Home Team, a site that serves as a database for all the Times’ coverage of local high school sports. Parents who have children involved in sports can access stories, photos and videos through this feature. These packages are tagged or divided into three categories: schools, players and sport. As for Mugshots, Waite managed to create electronic bots to “grab” arrest information and photos of those booked into Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk and Manatee county jails every three hours. This saves readers from than sifting through multiple law enforcement Web sites.
Online products are often susceptible to Web trends, especially ad formats, Buckley said. Tampabay.com also offers advertisers the option having their ads designed for them for the Times’ Web site. Trends have shifted from banner ads, to videos, mobile and all sort of formats. “Part of the challenge is, web advertising is in transition,” he said. “People now ask for creative advertising that they didn’t have before.” Instead of saying no, Buckley said his team is willing to experiment.
Innovation must also be reasonable in terms of time and labor investment. At the Times, they are “willing to build sites quickly so if it doesn’t work, we don’t have to invest years of time into that. It’s the ‘Fail-fast, fail-cheap model,’” Buckley said. Three to four months is reasonable time to spend on a new online feature or Web site, he added. “If it works, fabulous, if it doesn’t, we only spent a little time on that.” Waite said it took about six weeks to build PolitiFact, and about a week to complete 80 percent of the programming for Home Team. So far, Buckley said the paper has not ditched a single site or feature. “Lots of people ask me about the difference between (what I do) and software development,” Waite said. “The difference is we’re doing things on journalism deadline and we’re doing it with very few people.”
There is another blurring boundary that newspapers must confront, and that is where to draw the line between editorial and advertising. In a changing media landscape, that line is becoming thinner. Recently, the Dallas Morning News announced a reorganization that requires certain section editors to report to general managers in charged on increasing advertising, according to a story on Editor & Publisher. Though Buckley says he is uncomfortable with the concept announced by the Morning News, he accepts that certain collaboration between the two departments must happen. “When we build sites, we have to be thinking about not only cool content but how are we going to generate value for this,” he said. That traditional line doesn’t really fit into the current context anymore, Waite said. “I fully expect to be involve in these discussions. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.” As newsrooms shrink, many do not have the luxury of declaring such line anymore, he said. It’s not unlike running a small startup. “If you are starting up a news organization tomorrow, would you isolate the ad and journalism people? I don’t think you would, or could.”
Implications and discussion
If the St. Petersburg Times wants to train an age of tech-savvy readers to keep reading, it has more work to do. In a brief interview with three readers in their mid 20’s to 30’s, all said they keep up with current events from online news sources. Two out of three said they still enjoy reading the newspaper product. One reader added that it was difficult to access Tampabay.com on her cell phone.
Victoria Biekempis, a USF alum, and Melanie Marquez, who works at the USF communications office, said they read both versions of the paper. Biekempis prefers the paper product because the online one can be hard to navigate while Marquez likes to read longer pieces on the paper as opposed to reading it in front of a computer for a couple of hours. Colleen Glenn, an attorney who resides in St. Petersburg, prefers MSN.com as the format is more compatible to her cell phone. Unlike Marques and Biekempis, Glenn obtains most of her news through her phone. All three said they rarely click on the multimedia packages that sometimes accompany stories.
Dealing with such a diverse readership, the Times has its work cut out for them to make online news profitable. The slow migration of readers to the online product, attracting and maintaining readers from outside of the Tampa Bay area continues to be a challenge. As for paid content, Buckley said the industry missed the boat 12 to 13 years ago when they had a chance to “train” consumers to do that. As for now, that is not a viable option especially if the Times’ competitors are still offering content for free.
Waite, however, thinks there is no magic bullet of a solution to the industry’s financial woes. “Newspaper business, as it existed, will be gone,” he said. Chances are newspapers will still exist, he holds, perhaps in a weekly format with more in-depth stories aimed at a wealthy and well-educated clientele. “But it will not have the reach as it does now.” There will be also be different business models and products too.
Perhaps a model could be tampabay.com’s Mugshots, a feature requires almost no labor to maintain other than periodic checks to make sure it functions correctly, Waite said. “That’s where it is. It cost very, very little to run every month, and whatever we got off it is profit at this point.” The challenge is to figure similar products to fund those that require serious journalistic endeavors. Experimentation is key at this point, he said. “Bear in mind, most of these newspapers bring in hundreds of thousands dollars in revenue every year. …Someone is going to capture that market. The only thing we can do now is experiment and try some things out.” As newspapers progress in various directions, Buckley has a simple objective for the Times: “ I have only one goal over the next several years, and that's to build features and sites that provide interesting, useful, credible local content and generate a lot of revenue.”