The Mark 2010

In the internet age, it’s the talent that matters, and nobody manages talent better than sports franchises.

It seems to me that the conundrum facing newspapers is even greater than we think. There was a time when we could pretend that columnists in the Globe actually had 300,000 daily readers (400,000 on Saturday). But that was when we couldn't actually measure readers. We just pretended (as we still do) that each newspaper gets read, sometimes multiple times.

It reminds me of the memorable opening scene from Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It by Ken Auletta, described by Erick Schonfeld below:

The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t.

The internet has fucked with the magic of newspapers. And that's scary for anyone who grew up under the old model. Forget about the advertising. What about the ego bash and job justification crisis of suddenly being able to see exactly how many readers looked at your piece and how long they chose to stay? What if you discover that that number is nowhere near what you've been telling yourself for years?

The era of magic is over. The Globe has an average weekday circulation of 330,145, The Star's is 446,493 and The Post's is 209,211 Of those that are actually opened, most readers probably skim the paper, reading one or two of their favourite columnists, plus a news story or two that catches their eye. In short, I suspect that the best national columnists are read in print by no more than 60,000 people – and that's only the best. We don't really know, because there are no good metrics.

Online, the world is different. Editors know exactly who is getting read and who isn't. No ifs, ands, or buts. Suddenly your value to the newspaper (financially speaking) becomes very clear, very fast. Valuable columnists and reporters attract what website people call "uniques" (e.g. a unique person visiting your website – each unique visitor may click on several articles and thereby generate a number of pageviews). Advertisers care about these unique visits, as 100 different people seeing an ad is worth a lot more than one person clicking around the site 100 times and seeing their add over and over again.

And what attracts lots of unique visitors? The same things that drive everything else on the internet – reputation and, thus, brand. The most successful writers (or bloggers) are those who develop a following – people who wake up every day saying, “I want to read her!”

This is even truer today when there is so much content being created that most readers simply cannot separate the noise from the signal (even with the use of Twitter, which is probably the best tool). Having a strong brand is essential. This should be good news for newspapers and media companies since they have established brands and so, in theory, should have a leg up on bloggers like me.

The problem is, I suspect, that the brand that matters doesn't reside solely, or even primarily, with the newspaper. People need someone to connect with. A newspaper is a nice filter, but it offers no connection, no intimacy. It’s the personal brand of columnists and journalists that will likely become equal to, if not more important than, the newspaper.

This doesn't mean newspapers are dead – they just need to know how to manage talent in an era where that talent's brand is more and more important.

Fortunately, we already have a model for that: sports teams.

For years, sports teams have increasingly had to balance their team brand with the brand of the players. The rise of the sports superstar has altered how sports franchises operate in much the same way the newspaper biz might be changed.

So, the bad news is that the talent is going to consume more of the value generated by news organizations. The good news is threefold. First, good newspapers have always managed talent, so there is some skill and process already in place around this. Second, newspapers now have real tools by which to measure the popularity of their columnists. Third, there is a much deeper talent pool to draw from. Not only are there local and niche community papers to look at, there is also an army of bloggers (many of whom aren't that good, but what they lack in talent, they make up for in sheer numbers). And successful bloggers come with established audiences.

Every managing editor should pick up a copy of Moneyball stat. A good newspaper is going to have its senior talent – its stars if you will. But it also needs to have a mix of people it is grooming for later – in case a star gets injured or is just too expensive to justify.

None of this should shocking of course. In a world where human capital is increasingly the most important asset and where personal brands are more easily established, maybe every organization is going to look more and more like a sports franchise.