By Philip Meyer, USA Today, March 21, 2000
Copyright USA Today Information Network
 

Don't worry too much about the big media mergers such as last week's $6.4-billion purchase of Times Mirror Co. by Chicago-based Tribune Co. The real battle for media dominance, the one that affects ordinary readers and viewers like you and me, is happening at the local level.

More than two decades ago, when the effects of new technology were just beginning to be discerned, Harvard Professor Steve Star told a gathering of newspaper managers, "In the long run, it will not pay you to be in a market that you do not dominate." His aphorism is still
true, except that today it applies not just to newspapers but also to the convergence of media forms that is taking place.

A local news medium is basically a marketplace like a village square or medieval bazaar. Buyers and sellers go there because each group expects to find the other, and it doesn't pay to have more than one such place for exchanging ideas, information and goods. If you want to buy a used piano or find out who's running for mayor, you are likely to go to a source that has worked well previously for that purpose.

In the few places that still have two newspapers, you can predict which will survive by looking at the classified sections. The one with the most advertisements is winning, and neither buyers nor sellers are likely to provide sufficient support to sustain the runner-up.

When media forms combine, either through joint ownership or through the pooling of reporting efforts, figuring out where to go and whom to trust gets more complicated, but you can do it. And whether media managers realize it or not, your trust is what they need to survive.

One media manager who understood this most clearly was Hal Jurgensmeyer, who died in 1995. He had left a promising career at IBM to apply his talent for analyzing systems to the business side of The Miami Herald and later the corporate headquarters of Knight Ridder Inc. A newspaper's product is not just ink on paper, Jurgensmeyer said then. And it's not just information. Its main product is influence -- societal influence, which is not for sale, and commercial influence, which is for sale in the form of advertising.

The beauty of this business model is that it gives media an economic incentive for treating their end users with respect and honesty. If they pander to advertisers and let them influence editorial content, the public will notice, and both the medium and its advertisers will suffer in the long run because of the loss of trust.

As mergers and partnerships bring different media forms under single management teams, you can expect some confusion while different business models are tried. The New York Times and ABC News broke new ground last week by combining forces in an investigation
of deceptive home-lending practices. The Times story ran the morning of March 15 and ABC's 20/20 carried its version that evening.

Because television excels in getting our attention, and print is better at supplying depth and interpretation, the partnership might have worked better if ABC had gone first. However, a third element in the equation, the online follow-ups, helps those who found out about the story on TV and wanted more.

The online version offered by ABC (abcnews.go.com) is the friendlier of the two. It includes the transcript of the broadcast and a hyperlink to the complete text of The Times' story at no charge. Viewers who try to get the story directly from The Times' Web site are asked to register and pay a $2.50-per-story fee for a downloadable version.

A more seamless blending of online and traditional media is developing in Raleigh, N.C., where WRAL-TV is gaining trust rapidly by becoming the dominant source of weather information in its market.

When the Jan. 25 snowstorm hit North Carolina, newspaper subscribers looked out their windows in the morning and realized that the paper wasn't likely to make it that day. Radio and television, if heeded with enough patience, eventually would get around to the specific school or business closings that an early riser needed, but there was a better way: WRAL's Web site had the list, neatly alphabetized. There was also an up-to-the-minute story on the effects on the area, and live pictures of key intersections and highways.

Newspapers did not do nearly as well. The News & Observer, preoccupied with moving its staff and its trucks through the snow in Raleigh, was slower to update its Web site. At 7:39 a.m., it continued to lead with the old news of Al Gore winning in Iowa the day before. "We still move at newspaper speed on a lot of things," admitted executive editor Anders Gyllenhaal.

WRAL's Web site drew 1.5 million page views that day, its second best after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, according to John Conway, director of new media.

Under old technology, media companies defined themselves by their delivery systems. Print products were created to move on wheels; broadcast signals rode the airwaves; the telephone used copper wire. Now their delivery systems are converging, and they need something else to make themselves distinctive.

There is no mystery about what that something else will be. What the new media forms need to capture is the favored position in our heads as the trusted source. And if your head is like mine, there's not going to be a lot of spare room there, so the battle should be fierce.
 

Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He also is a consultant for USA TODAY and member of the newspaper's board of contributors.