Q&A with Patrick Spain of Newser
Jinfo Blog
14th April 2009
By
Robin Neidorf
Item
During April's Buying and Selling eContent conference
in Scottsdale, Arizona, VIP Magazine had an opportunity to speak with publishers, intermediaries and content buyers. A series of brief interviews explore innovation in the content market and how publishers are working to meet the needs of today's enterprise content buyers.
Patrick Spain is Chairman and CEO of Newser
an online news service that adds human intelligence to machine-driven aggregation. Newser staff search for stories all over the web, read them, and deliver succinct, sharply written summaries in a grid format that features photos, video and audio, and links to the original source.
Mr. Spain was formerly the CEO of HighBeam Research, a rapidly growing online research company based in Chicago, which he founded in 2002 and sold to Cengage Learning in December 2008. Spain was also the co-founder and long-time chairman and CEO of Hoover's, Inc., leading it from a small book publisher when he became CEO in 1992 to a profitable, publicly traded company with $31 million in revenue in 2001. View Patrick Spain's full biog.
VIP: Our reviewer conducted in-depth testing of Newser in this month's review. She really loved the Web 2.0 features built into the product and commented that those features were a great reason to take a look at the offering. There is a huge variety of 2.0 tools you could have included, and you clearly made some choices there. How do you make choices about what features to include?
PS: We're essentially a traditional publisher in that we have our editors choose the stories, but once they've chosen we want readers to be able to react to them, comment on them, and share them. So our whole focus with looking at 2.0 tools is to ask, 'What does an informed and engaged reader want to do with their stories?' The answers to that question formed the basis of what we selected to include.
We tried a couple things which didn't work very well and are now gone. But the commentary part, for example, seems to be a big hit. We used to keep commentary on a separate page, but because it's so engaging, now it comes up on the same page as the story.
We're always testing things. If people don't like something that we are doing we always give them the opportunity to say, 'Take that feature away, take that tool away; I don't want to see it anymore.'
VIP: Our reviewer did find the advertising on the site distracting and commented that she may be inclined to go with a paid subscription product to avoid that distraction. Is that something Newser would ever explore in the product to give that to an audience that is willing to pay?
PS: Well, never say never. Advertising, if it successful, is designed to be distracting, because they want you to be distracted to them. Most people are prepared to put up with the distracting aspects of advertising in order to have a free experience. I don't think we are anymore distracting that anyone else with our ads. But if the world moves in that direction, we'll certainly move in that direction. At the moment, though, your reviewer's comment is really the first time someone has really suggested that they'd rather pay than see the ads.
It's actually quite easy for us to do that. We could take off all the ads tomorrow and say 'Pay us a dollar a month' or something but I don't really see that as a viable business model in today's news world.
VIP: I think one of the reasons our reviewer had that reaction is because we review content products that are premium pay sources. Our audience is expecting to pay for resource, although they are starting to shift somewhat now as they are seeing more pressure on their budgets to evaluate free options, and advertiser-supported options.
PS: And what you heard in the conference today is that a lot of publishers who were using an advertising-supported model are now investigating paid subscription models. Anything's possible, but I don't think it's likely that news will move into paid subscriptions. Only The Wall Street Journal is effectively charging for news. It doesn't seem to be a model that is dominant or likely to become dominant, but hey, we're happy to do it if that's where the industry goes.
VIP: The overall approach of Newser reflects a thoughtful perspective I've seen discussed in depth at the Poynter Institute on the future of journalism. And some of the columnists at Poynter have expressed the opinion that the requirements of journalism has shifted from reporting and disseminating the news to contextualising and enabling commentary on the news. Do you think that's something Newser fits into this model and particularly as local or regional newspapers are struggling to survive? Is something like Newser what might replace them?
PS: What's happened first, driven by Google and Yahoo and others, is that the distribution and dissemination side of journalism is now the dominant part of the business. There is a lot of angst and hand-wringing about who's going to write the stories and whose going to report when all the local newspapers are dead. Which they will be, actually, shortly.
But I think there are a lot of interesting experiments going on. We summarise and link to stories published by a new news service, Global Post. And increasingly we link to bloggers like Henry Blodgett, for example, who is increasingly becoming the voice of his particular part of an industry. So I think we are not going to lose out on any of the reporting or any of the in-depth information we have customarily gotten through newspapers.
For Newser to make money, we have to get about 5 million readers. We'll be there by the end of this year. The economics are the same if you're running a news site in Chicago: You have to get 5 million readers. We don't have that many readers of anything in all of Chicago, so that's what makes the economics of local news sites so challenging.
You have to figure out how to have a platform that you can do in San Diego and Chicago and Cincinnati out of a central system, yet not lose that local touch. Nobody's figured that out. How are you going to create exciting, engaged local news and how are you going to get people who can afford to do the investigative journalistic kind of reporting locally? It's really a brave new world now.
VIP Magazine publishes an in-depth review of Newser with the April 2009 issue. Subscribe today at http://www.vivavip.com/order/
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