Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw and Kirk LaPointe (Video)

We were very lucky to have the Vancouver Sun’s Gillian Shaw and Kirk LaPointe come to speak at the Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetup last night (pictures). They both did a fantastic job covering how the Vancouver Sun uses Social Media, How to get on the media’s radar and finally the future of news ans newspapers. It was a fantastic event with a crowd of over 90 real estate agents, mortgage brokers and professionals interested in this timely topic.

For those that missed the event, you can watch the entire presentation below:

A big thanks to everyone for attending!

For those that missed it and are interested in attending, feel free to RSVP for the next event.

(picture; L – R: Sarah Jagger, Gillian Shaw, Kirk LaPointe, Stephen Jagger)

(picture; L – R: Kirk LaPointe and Gillian Shaw)

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Video Transcription Below:
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Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetup
@Ceilis Irish Pub

Speakers:

Gillian Shaw- Digital Life Writer @ Vancouver Sun
Kirk Lapointe – Managin Editor @ Vancouver Sun

Topic:

– Getting on the media’s radar
– The Vancouver Sun’s use of Social Media
– The Future of news and newspapers

Sponsor:

Ubertor.com
Video Focused Real Estate Agent Websites

Alright can I grab everybody’s attention. We’re gonna get things underway here. There you go.

For our first number.

Stephen Jagger:
So i just want to thank everybody for coming out. My name is Steve Jagger, I am the co-founder of a company called ubertor. This is our, we’re now on our third year of running this, what we call the real estate technology meet up. We’re upstairs tonight because monday night football kind of, pushed us out of downstairs. So, its a little bit of a different venue for us, but everything should be alright. A few changes that Ceilis have made. I want to touch on first, you guys will probably notice that there’s a new signage and stuff. Some beers called fullers and Ceilis have sort of decided to help sponsor the meet up, so they’ve come up with a plan to do burger and beer for $10 plan for all these meetups which is very helpful from Ceilis and Fullers. Somebody was asking me earlier if Bryan is here from Ubertor and Bryan is here from Ubertor, so if anybody does have Ubertor related questions or questions in general, just go ask Bryan. What we’re gonna do is get started tonight, we’ve got two fantastic speakers coming to talk to us. We’ve got Gillian Shaw and Kirk Lapointe from the Vancouver Sun. They’re going to talk to us about three different topics. The first one is how to get on the media’s radar. The second is how the Vancouver Sun uses social media and the third is the future of news and newspapers. Maybe the future and present of news and newspapers. Hopefully, there’s going to be a lot of questions for them. They’re going to talk a little bit about those three topics and we will roll into question and answer. Thank you for coming and welcome.

Kirk Lapointe:
Thank you, and for our first number we would like to do some slow blue. It’s actually raining on us here, but that’s okay.

Gillian: It’s just a metaphor for our work.

Kirk: That’s right, exactly, we would be moving down the drain if that was a metaphor for our work.

Gillian: Submerged

Kirk Lapointe: I’m Kirk Lapointe, that would be probably easy to figure out which one of us is which. I’m the managing editor and I’ve been there since 2003 and before that I ran CTV news for a while, which explains the grey hair. I was Llyod Robertson’s boss for a couple of years and I helped start National Postal a little time back and edited some papers and hosted a television show and doing all that and as I like to say to gatherings like this, when there’s a little bit of new media savvy to you. I am old enough to remember when water was free and you paid for your music. I’m going to do kind of a, principles of new journalism, and future of it and Gillian iI think is really going to be the one to explain a little bit of what we do. I’m going to set up 5 principles of what I consider to be the new journalism. The first one is a little bit of an obvious one, which is that, it’s more of a conversation than a transmission now. So the notion of it being kind of 1 entity to many , or 1 to a few or 1 to 1 or us telling you what you need to know. That is now of course, a very different thing, that’s a many to many now, situation. It’s a situation of sharing content. So, we’re not the pure creators we’re collaborators with people, there’s a pro-am quality to what we’re doing, so we’re employing more and more people who have expertise in the community to augment what we’re doing, in a sense they’re amateurs but they’re experts and so we’re using them as professional journalists as full time people to supplement in a lot of ways. I think they will help lead the charge as time goes on. I think what’s going to happen, first of all, right now, we’ve got a situation where we no longer have a monopolized situation involving media. Everyone’s a journals now, everyone in this room, everyone has the capacity to do it and that’s a good thing in many ways. It also means that they guy who used to steal my chocolate bar in grade school and you know, steal it from my lunch bag and then you know, start chewing and going “chocolate? How come I have no chocolate?”. That guy is also a journalist and he has the full capacity. He has a printing press, he has a radio station, he has a television network all at his disposal. So, we’ve got everyone being a journalist, there is now a very significant role in there, still for the editor, for the curator, for the person who is going to somehow aggregate all of this content and bring them together. I think that what we’re seeing is that we’re going to watch, maybe a diminution in the number of full time, well-paid journalists. So, we’re going to see probably, over the next ten years, its going to be a messy time. I think we’ll see that there will be fewer full-time journalists, they will be lesser paid and there will be more part-time hobbyists, and experts who simply want to make an occasional contribution and they will be better paid than they are right now. Right now, we are largely grabbing their information freely, and we’ll have to start paying for that and so I think that’s where we are going to see this, some kind of flattening out, of the distance between the professional and the amateur and I think that what we’ll see is that rather than measure, strictly on the basis of things like, newspaper circulation or radio listeners or television viewers or even page views on websites. I think engagement is going to become the new metric. So the ratio of stories to comments to sharing to tweeting to somehow Wikiing of all these materials, that’s going to be a big deal, how much of you engage your audience in commenting on the content and in somehow improving it, but inside all of that is this sense of authenticity and reputation and that’s not going to go away. Craig Newmark, the guy who founded Craig’s list has largely eaten lunch of a lot of legacy media around classifieds you know? I think he’s got a good line, he says “Trust, is the new black”. Everyone’s gotta wear it, everyone’s gotta wear it all over the place. So, second point, it’s an always on environment . I no longer think about my newsroom as generating a newspaper at the end of the day. I no longer even think of the newsroom as generating web content throughout the course of the day. I think of the newsroom as this, always on entity where it’s not only a question of what it is we are producing but how it’s being shared, how people are responding to it, what we need to respond to the most. So there’s a de-emphasis that’s taking place now in journalism in editions and there’s more of an emphasis on iteration on the next steps of all these things that are going to happen, and that can often mean things like starting a twitter, going to your blog, back to twitter, over to your blog, enlisting in comments, trying to help with helpful suggestions, people who are going to essentially improve the content of your piece and then eventually, by the end of the day, once you’ve done all of the things that you need to do in the digital environment, produce video, done all kinds of other things, the newspaper comes along, and the newspaper is going to become and if it isn’t already the final edition of the website and that’s how it will shake out. There’s often this little myth about journalism that we publish the truth right? It’s a myth. The reality of it is, we pursuit the truth. We pursuit the truth all day long and then we publish what we believe in our hearts is true at deadline. The struggle now is that we have no real deadline anymore, our deadline is now and so we will be publishing insensibly. Third point, story telling, is fitting the platform now, it’s not the other way around where the platform needs to fit the story. As a result, when we start discussing things in the Sun newsroom, we’re largely thinking of where will that play out best. Where does the idea find its best home, In what platform. It’s no longer simply saying, we’re going to write this story, now let’s see if we can adapt it for the web or let’s see if we can do a video from that great story. It’s more on the lines of, maybe the story is the video and maybe there won’t be a text version of it, maybe there won’t be anything else. So, you’re watching newsrooms now, we’ve all been in that direction and in a lot of ways, the article, which used to be the single most important thing inside a newsroom in the 30 years that I’ve been in the business. The article is no longer the center of action, it’s the topic. And the topic is what is going to somehow be the organizing factor. So, when your thinking about how it is that your going to get into us. You no longer need to think of, Hey, why don’t you write an article on it. Instead its, I’m going to bring you an interesting topic. It has the opportunity to involve a bunch of different assets across different platforms. The fourth point, journalism as an entrepreneur and not as an employee and by that i mean, every journalist now is an individual brand. I’m lucky to have a great brand on our staff but Gillian is her own machine, her own brand and I think now, I teach a little bit out of UBC and I tell the students, if you don’t own your own URL your crazy, it’s your digital calling card. You should be building your brand, building your network, using all the devices that now helps us aggregate audiences, and go from ground zero to a significant force, a kind of a self-contained business. Even though you may not be attempting to monazite it, it is a business somehow. It has commerce to it. It has all of the ingredients and perhaps the difference that you haven’t necessary tried to make some money off it, but you will and you can. So now, what I basically say is that the relationship between employer and employee is very, dramatically changing. The days when you could graduate from a school and go on work at say the CBC, the Globeandmail or the Vancouver Sun and expect that you’ve get a lot of lateral and maybe upwardly mobile moves and maybe get fired a couple of times and then relocated then restructured, those days are done. Now, it’s a world of contracts, projects, individual skills, several different employers at once and your own brand, thats far more important to you than any other well being. And so the last thing that I want to leave you with and then Gillian will give you more intelligent detail is, in all of this, no matter how fast we’re going, no matter how accelerated the pace is inside all of it. Writing, matters more than anything else. I got it, this will be a good point to do a commercial for viagra. So, writing matters more than anything else and editing matters even more than writing but largely, no matter what your doing, it’s going to matter that you communicate very well, because suddenly, no longer in an environment of 50 or 60 writers locally but an environment of 50 or 60 thousand and so, your capacity to communicate, as a journalist, as a contributor, or as a blogger, whatever you are, is going to be of fantastic significance. So my hierarchy is this, writing matters, editing matters more, curating somehow gathering the materials so that people look at it in a way that they look at a great art exhibit or museum exhibit, so that it has some rational organization to it. We’re all really busy someone needs to somehow curate and be a bit of a tour guide and then trust matters even more and then I think in the end the spoils in this whole new shift and I believe the next decade is going to be the messiest one I’ve seen in my business because obviously our business model is very much changing and the new revenue will not probably come in fast enough as the old revenue starts to dissipate on us. The spoils I think are going to go to the people and to the entities that understand the significance of context that is all of this information and I think that if I were starting again. I would get myself into understanding all of the critical faculties that go into what involves context and if i were in anyone’s position, attempting to bring media attention, I would start not with the sense of what the event is, because the event is kind of important to pitch to journalist or journalistic organizations but I would actually say your more important message is, what’s the meaning of this event? Whats its implications? How does it connect to a larger picture? And that I think is where the big money is going to be made, is in context, so Thanks,

Gillian:
Thanks, Kirk I agreed with everything except that editors are more important than writers. Thanks very much for having us here tonight. It’s great to be here. I would like to just share with you a little bit, and feel free to interrupt us with questions. We’ll talk a little bit about how we as social media, well are not so well at the sun and also some ideas for getting on the media radar. Although there are people in this room who are very successful on that and should probably be sitting here and telling you exactly how they got our attention and they have a full page story, pictures, videos, photo galleries in the sun, but I’ll tell you a little bit from our side. And first up, I need to enlist your help because I’m working on a big year-end project and Kirk is my editor and it’s due at the end of the week, so I have a problem if you would just back me up and say, listen she was really busy on monday night, so she couldn’t be writing. That’s the thing we’re on deadline all the time, so Kirk talked about our 24/7 operation. If it ever seems that it’s difficult to talk to a writer or get our attention, I just have to apologize in advance, that’s not by design, it’s sometimes just by the fact that we’re either writing a story or talking to people about stories. We do want to listen to people, and so if we don’t pick up the phone the first time or answer the first e-mail, it’s not deliberate. We do want to hear from you. I’m going to share with you a note that I wrote for people in our business using twitter because twitter came into our newsroom and everybody in the newsroom is like everybody in all businesses and some people said. This is great, we’re going to start using it and we’re on twitter and we’ve got networks and it’s great. And then there are other people that said. You know what, I don’t want to read what people had for lunch. They signed up for a twitter account and then got lots of followers because journalists get followers but then they never tweet. So I wrote sort of from the perspective of why we’re using it. but I wanted to share it sort of an internal memo, just thoughts that I share with colleagues. I didn’t actually share them. I shared it with Kirk who sent it out to my colleagues who then dubbed me the twitter think of the newsroom. So, just keep that to yourselves. The thing that stood out for me and stands out for me with all social media is that, for us it’s a chance to meet readers where they are and so, if your looking to find the media, they’re very easy to find on the web. I didn’t bring the websites to post tonight but I put them on a post today. There are media all over the web and there are a lot of media people listening and they are out there engaging in conversations. So, if you have a story to tell or if your trying to meet this people rather than just calling up when you want them, or e-mailing them when you have something specific to say it’s more about building community and building those networks, it’s more likely. I think it’s easier to get your message across. This is something that all businesses are finding and this is why they’re moving to social media and using it because to be out there and part of the community gives more credibility and puts you in the space where people are at. A couple of examples, last week I wasn’t actually writing about this but I was car shopping and I was looking at hybrids and I tweeted that I was deciding whether to buy a hybrid car or not, and within 10 minutes an e-mail landed on my inbox from GM offering me a Hybrid Malibu to drive for a week. you know I didn’t need the car but I had to give them real points for being on top of their social media and knowing that this was a journalist from the Vancouver Sun and was talking about Hybrids . Oh, wow, lets get her to drive one for a week. They said like, no strings attached but obviously if your writing about it, possibly, it’s something I might end up writing about, although I have to say I got another kind of car, but I won’t go into that because they didn’t tweet me. I bought a car from another manufacturer even though they didn’t tweet.

Kirk:
I told Gillian that she should’ve said that she was really fascinated with the Lamborghini and wondering whether to.

Gillian:
That will be my tweet, my next tweet, I’m thinking of buying a Lamborghini. Kirk e-mailed that to me and I thought that was very funny, and I said to him I made the wrong tweet. Why didn’t I tried the chevy but you know, that’s a good point and I would’ve actually, if I’d had time, but one thing that GM did get out of this is, i am writing a story on business use of social media and effective use of social media and they sky-rocketed right on the top of my interview list. And that is in fact, was in fact for me, that was the priority at that time was to find, that’s not why I tweeted about buying a hybrid but I was on the lookout and I’ve been watching and collecting examples of companies using social media very effectively. So the minute they e-mailed that to me, it became a part of that story and so GM, maybe we will run a picture of their Malibu I don’t know. Anyway, they’re not in the paper yet but they will get into the paper by that simple 140 character.

Audience:
Why didn’t you try it?

Gillian:
You know what, I didn’t have time and I already had my heart set on a Honda. That was it, I think it was out of my price range too, But I didn’t say. you know, I wasn’t sure about that, but anyway. That was just an example of a company doing it really well and getting in touch with us and getting in touch with us really quickly. I was sitting one day in a blends typing working on a story and then all of a sudden my computer lost power so I tweeted that I was at this blends and they should have more power outlets because I couldn’t plug in my computer and about like, 2 minutes later George Moan who is the CEO of blends tweeted back and he said, we’re going to get right on to that. So, in meeting people where they are, we are not the only people doing it. I think it’s really important and for us, it’s just another way of answering our phone. So, if your on a network, I find e-mail is decreasingly useful because we’re just flooded with e-mail. I’m flooded with e-mail with everything, from the viagra ads to subjects that are totally outside of what I write about. But if somebody sends me a direct message in twitter I’m reasonably sure that they know what I write about and what I might be interested in. So, those direct messages plus they’re limited to 140 characters. So those direct messages are liable to go to the top of the impile faster which is an important thing if you’ve carefully crafted your press release and you’ve put a lot of time and effort into but nobody opens it, that is a bit of a problem, but if you can zero in on the people that you want to talk to and your already on their network it’s a way of having your story heard more. In fact,there are people in this room while John Chow was when I wanted to, I was just watching some stuff that John Chow was doing and I thought, that is really interesting to write about what he’s doing and how he makes so much money on the web and maybe we can learn something here. And he was talking at an event, we were both speaking out about making money off his tweets, so, I just asked him, We went back and forth about arranging a time to get together and did that and the story ended up on the paper. Of course the other of that is that is I’ve had a lot of e-mails from that time I didn’t tell you, I had people e-mailing me and say How can I find John Chow, which indicates to me we have some readers who don’t use Google, We have to remember that there are those readers. I had a woman asked me today to give her some information about some tech thing I wrote about and I said give me your e-mail I’ll shoot you an e-mail with the information and she said e-mail? I don’t have an e-mail. It’s kind of meeting your readers where they are and finding journalists where they are. I’m not going to go through an entire ten because I want to leave you time for some questions but the other point is that I raised and for people talking to us, it’s a way where we have a 24/7 dialogue with people in our community, and that’s the people we cover and it’s readers and it’s just people who we share with the community both the local community and the broader community with and that’s the key and it’s key for you being in the business and the business that your in to be part of that same community. In fact, there was a real estate agent who answered a tweet that I sent out on an entirely different subject. It wasn’t a tech tweet, sometimes we have some reporters who are looking, If we’re doing stories on specific subjects, we might be looking for left-handed single dad, born in a month with an r in it or some very specific kind of person that we’re looking for their opinions or stories and I tweeted out this kind of request for somebody who wasn’t a Canucks fan at a time when everybody was all fired up about the Canucks. Well, some very enterprising real estate agent tweeted back that he fit that description exactly and ended up interviewed in the newspaper. And as they say, as long as they spell your name right, any press is good press. So, it’s a way of connecting. It’s also a way of getting pretty instant feedback and that’s despite my earlier, earlier point of when your trying to reach us, social media is a great way to get through to the assignment editors and all the other layers of the newspaper and there are layers but mostly, the writers are out there like me, and other writers and we have editors and we’re getting stories from all kinds of sources. So, if you can get to the right person with your story that gets you through a whole lot of hurdles right there. because you might be off trying to pitch your story to an editor who has got some other things on their mind and has other priorities for their section but if you zero in on exactly the right person, that is totally a way to get on the radar and to get your story told I. When I have time and I think other people do it in our business, if you come to me with a story that’s not something that I can do, I’ll try to find the right person for you. And sometimes I pitch stories on behalf of people, I’ll go to my editors and say, Well there’s a story on business something that I wouldn’t talk about or I won’t be writing about but I think it’s a story worth covering so I’d actually pitch on their behalf. And finally, we put out our own stories, we put out information about what we’re doing so, if there’s a real opportunity for people who are following. We put out our twitter list so you can actually just follow and see. You can find out what’s happening in the newsroom, so it’s not a big mystery. Somedays, I’ll have people call me up and say G, are you writing a Tech Christmas Gift Guide? and I’ll say yes, it was in the paper yesterday. So, it’s important when your trying to get your story out, that you know what’s going on. the audience in this case our newspaper, if your trying to get out attention it’s important to know what we’re working on and I often hear from people. After the fact they say, oh, we heard you were doing a story on such and such, and we’d really like to be interviewed for it. Yeah that was great and we really would’ve lilted to find you. So, the two, we don’t always meet. And one way we can meet is through social media you’ll often find that we’d talk about things that we’re working on. I mean, Kirk goes on and other editors goes on, on our website during the day. There’s sometimes a video about what we’re working on for the next day, some of the major stories. But even on the smaller stories, if you follow the reporters, they will tell you I’m following the story of, I’m following the story of the latest Canucks injury, I’m following the story of you know, what I’m doing, I’m writing my tech gift guide, or today I was writing a story on multitasking and I actually had people come back to me and say, Have you seen this? have you interviewed that person? So, it is a conversation and it’s on all the time and I’d really like to be a part of it with you.

Kirk:
So we have some time for some questions, specially some easy questions.

Stephen Jagger:
I have a microphone too, we can pass it around.

Question:
Do you use all the different social medias?

Kirk:
Absolutely, oh no, i mean Gillian is kind of ahead of where I am on twitter. I think today I was up to around 2850 in terms of followers here, and your (Gillian) probably around 4,000, somewhere there.

Gillian:
I don’t count since I found out that John Chow makes how much per tweet, i just think it’s hardly, you know? I just don’t count anymore.

Kirk:
I think the thing is to explain on this one is, social media is no longer simply promoting a matter of what your creating it’s at its start point, i’m thinking of doing this, I need your help. So you use your followers to then, and some of them actually reTweet to find for other flung help for you and as the day goes on, it becomes that collaboration and then at the ned of the process you can actually say, thanks to all of you, this is what we’ve all been able to create. And so then, from our standpoint at the Sun, it becomes an important distribution channel, and it’s a bit of a long-tale channel. And it’s amazing how we can take a look at the referring domains and take a look at how long sometimes a tweeted headline with a link to a story will stay alive out there. It would be sometimes 8 – 10 days where people are still consuming the content and to us that’s all monetizable because it serves the (BAZ) at the same time. So we, can look at something that might get, on the first day, 5-10,000 page views and by day 10 still chugging along at 4-5-600 page views and that’s still, it’s worth the exact same money as the first day. Unlike the newspaper which has basically, a 1 day shelf life to it. So, we’re looking at it as a great distribution channel that the way that facebook, dig, delicious any number of the ways to share our content in. But, that’s only half of the issue, the bigger issue is how do we get people get engaged to help us, how do we have them engaged once we’re creating it. I was taught in the beginning with journalism, that my job is to get people to talk to each other, that’s what it is, it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t changed with social media, what we do, I hope, gets people to engage with each other, talk to each other.

Gilian:
Well, one thing that I’ve known for warning people. Don’t put anything online you don’t want to see on the front page. Because it has and can and has happened

Kirk:
I am mostly in agreement with you. But the fact is that there’s also a very disruptive factor in there. There’s a couple of other things that’s going on. If as a researcher, you we’re to look at government documents you would that actually, the reverse has taken place. That the arrival of the electronic age, has permitted governments to overwrite documents and to no longer give us the pathology of a public policy in the way that I used to understand when I got into the business. So, that’s pretty corrupt, it’s bad. The second part of it, of course, there is also an amazing amount of fakery and duplicicist behavior that’s out there. So, it becomes a challenge for you and this is where I think the journalist is still separated from other creators. In that, we still possess, because of our training and because of our experience what I call the discipline of verification. We generally can figure it out in a number of different ways, on what’s real and what’s fake. And so, I’m not so worried about the fact that it’s got longevity. I in fact, enjoy that. Although a number of people will call us from time to time to say you know, you guys did a story on me online, charges were against me and the charges we’re withdrawn and I’d like you to take the record off. To which I say well, actually man, it was 15 years ago somebody could march in into any public library and take a look at all the micro-features that contained our content. It’s no different, it’s just a little easier. You know what, I want to look at the facebook page of a perspective employee. I want see to look at everything that Google or Bing or anything else has produced on that person. i think it’s actually healthy for our democracy that way. What I don’t think is healthy is the part where, people have somehow, cheated the system and really made it less easy for us to exercise our right to know.

Question:
How do you deal with the monetization of the immediacy? Meaning you could have a great story with a lot of scoops and you could keep it for tomorrows paper but you can go and post it online tonight and maybe before everybody else but make a lot less money with it.

Kirk:
A lot less money. The sad fact is,that advertisers has not yet gone on to, or maybe they’re just pushing for some kind of the reckoning in side media both print and broadcasting. But I don’t understand why it is that an advertiser can actually know more about the person who is consuming the content than ever and yet be paying about 15 cents on the dollar for the same person to consume that content in print or broadcasting, to me, that is crazy making. So, the challenge in monetization goes in a couple of different directions. We still derive about 95% of our revenue at Pacific Newspaper Group from print. Online is still a very tiny sliver of it. We’re trying in some respects, to put a little bit of a barrier there, so that not everything, not every last thing that we do, is available online. But at the same time I want a culture in my newsroom that says, we have to get the information now and we have to put it out there. or we at least have to create it in such a way that we can then decide, if we go offline or put it online right away. As you know, a lot of our newspapers is not available online, from us. We still subscribe to a raft of different international services, photo services and they don’t give us our electronic rights, they hold it themselves. So, it’s a bit of an issue to go around, but the fact is that, over half of our traffic now, comes to us through search engines. So, when i say everyone is a journalist, part of that journalism is a personal journalism of search. You know, where your not dialing up the Vancouver Sun, your saying I want to see a Vancouver Canucks story and it just so happens that because we’re rather adroit at it. We get a decent Google page rank, because of our search engine optimization tactics. And so, in the end, that monetization is being done and a scary thing about it is, it’s being done, story by story, you know? One of our real issues next to the while is that, because of both broadcasting and print we’ve been able to somehow aggregate the public. So I can tell you in good faith that the Vancouver Sun has about 480 thousand to 520,000 readers a day but the fact is that I’ve aggregated all of those people. So, that’s everybody whose read every part of it. That’s quite a pacemaker you’ve got their sir. But what happens when you no longer go from selling advertisers to this big audience but to selling an advertiser on a single person. Who may just come for one story and just go. It’s no longer someone whose going to trek through 80 pages of the paper but just go for one story and leave, that’s a real challenge. So we’re having to redefine our public and we’re going to have to redefine after that what the subsidy is, of that public, across each other. That’s really hard. As my wife always tells me, your job is not to solve the business model, just try to do some decent journalism once in a while, cut it out, stop pretending your an economist.

Question:
I’ve got the microphone, I win. I have a question. I have a client who was reprinting Vancouver Sun articles on their website

Gillian:
I hope they’re giving me attribution, at least.

Question:
They gave full attribution, linked back to the website, and they got a cease and desist order and then they are no longer allowed to publish Vancouver Sun articles. So in the spirit of social media, and sharing and perpetuating stories and helping you drive traffic to us and vice versa. Why would you put cease and desist orders on people?

Kirk:
It’s not socialism media. It’s our creation, if the idea is that you want to link back to it, I don’t think we’re adverse to that of course. But, if it comes up in your frame and your serving up your ads against our stories no, not on. It’s copyrighted material, anymore than if we do it to any other organization that creates the content. And it’s possible, that your an advertiser with us and I don’t mean to, I certainly, in this day age. In fact, I’ll wash your car. But I mean the point is that, that’s not like a total tick at the ride. you have got to be able somehow to respect intellectual property. We do it every single day, we get ourselves in a great ringer when we grab an image or a story that doesn’t really belong to us. So there are ways to share, there are ways, I mean the link back is where you see, I am a big believer in the link economy. You link back to us, we link over to you, we scratch each others back. But I’ve seen a lot of places kind of take the content, cut and paste it put it on their thing, and their getting all the audience and therefore all the monetization next to it, and I’m sorry you know, we cry when that happens. Openly, and if you ever see a journalist cry, it’s really not a fun view.

Gillian:
I see it all the time, I mean, I can only speak as a writer from that and because as a writer who also quotes other people and links to other stories and is a big believer in cheering and that we are all publishers in a way. And so, I’m not so proprietorial but I wouldn’t take somebody’s entire story and put it, but I certainly would link, I quote them, just as I quote people in my stories with full attribution.

Kirk:
Snippets are ok, snippets are good

Gillian:
I do that out of respect for their intellectual property rights as I would expect them to respect mine and if I choose I have, I’ll use photos that are creative comments license and respect that license and the conditions that come with it. And I am happy to share those prints and to give link-backs and to give those people a space in our paper, in my blog, or on our news, on our site. But I think that not only newspapers, but I think everybody whose making content and putting it out there should be respectful of other people’s content.

Question:
Hi, I was just wondering what your demographics is, for the actual newspaper.

Kirk:
The average age is just a little younger than I am and I’m

Question:
29?

Kirk:
23. No, our average age I think is somewhere in the mid 40s. It’s pretty highly educated, on balance. Professional class, on balance. So, I think we blow-outed about 150 on indices for professionals, university education, household of a hundred thousand dollars. Our demo is quite good, our website demo is not massively dissimilar. Well, I think everybody thought, well, first of all, it was interesting that, maybe, you be the judge of this, maybe this isn’t interesting. Our readership hasn’t declined in the last 5 years, nor has our readership among people 18 – 24, its the same. It’s about 20% Its’ been the same since they got those new fangled gadgets. There’s a stability inside that, that’s just amazing. It’s not happening in the United States, I have lots of friends in the US that are really blown to hole in a hurry but in Canada, First of all pretty tolerant sophisticated media consumption country and we have a little bit more of a sense of pattern about ourselves. So, the ritual of reading the newspaper, actually has remained so, just as the ritual of watching the television of newscast has remained so. The declines in viewership for those nightly newscast is miniscule considering the number of available choices that have suddenly exploded up. We don’t have an audience problem, we don’t have any kind of an audience problem. We have an issue involving advertising and how it’s decoupling from some content and either going on it’s own deciding that it can directly market to people, and good luck, or it’s finding niches and experimenting with them because there are often lower costs and maybe, maybe, in some cases, highly successful but in you may also be drilling a lot of dry wells in a hurry. And we’re still hanging tough, we’re still a profitable entity at the end of it. In the US it’s not the case, but we haven’t had their losses or their spectacular problems. We’re very differently run than the papers I know in the US.

Stephen:
I do have a quick question. What do you guys think of Rupert Murdoch’s hate on Google? Is he going in the right direction?

Kirk:
You go ahead, you take that first one for five points.

Gillian:
I’m not running the newspaper, it wouldn’t be where i would go. I’m not sure how they’re going to end up making money on how our business is going to continue to make money. But I don’t think, the music industry has proven that trying to shut the barn door, after the horse has gone is a little bit tough to do and I think your not going to change technology and you have to learn to live with it and profit by it or do well by it and deliver your stories on-through it.

Kirk:
I get what he’s trying to do, he’s got a product in particular in the Wall Street Journal that has been pretty successful

Gillian: Successful, yeah.

Kirk:
But when I look at the New York Post, or some of his tabs in the UK or some of his product in Australia. So much of what he’s doing is a commodity and that’s the danger in this. If you really think you can monetize something that someone else will provide free, it’s not going to happen. Like I say, half of our traffic and therefore half of our page impressions come to us as a result of search engines. You’ve really got to be brave and think that you’ve got a powerful monetizable niche because it’s going to be a niche by the way, it’s not going to be a broad operation. But if you think you’ve got it, I mean, I look at our product right now, and I kind of wonder. What is inside there that people would pay for? I was reading something, ROYDERS? was saying that, the shelf life of a lot of his financial information is about a half second. Like one half second, because that’s the time between the alert that goes out and the computer that will respond on the trading floor to make a transaction to make money. So, he thinks that, that’s the life of his news in a lot of cases. And that’s where we have to wonder. What is it that we can sell in our market which isn’t really a geographic market anymore. I mean, we have way more readers online outside of Vancouver than we have inside and what is it that we can possible monetize that people would be loyal to and pay a certain amount. But you know, to be even more long-winded about this. People are actually paying now, per article a staggering amount if they actually thought about it. It’s a cultural thing, we think that we’re buying a paper and we’re paying about a buck and we’re saying “oh, you know, I would never pay a dollar for the online information that I got everyday.” but the truth is, when you go through the newspaper your probably reading maybe 5-10 pieces at length and you might be skimming another 10. So, if you do the math, would you pay for a nickel an article online? Most people would say your crazy, I wouldn’t ever do that. But your already doing it in print. You need to rethink that, or somebody needs to rethink it, or we all need to get a vulcan mind melt together and rethink it but we are already into that environment, we had been all along.

Stephen:
Cool, do we have one last question here?

Question:
Read the book of Stephen Jagger called “Sociable!”. Just a little plug there. Question here, I guess when I talk to marketers into about why they’re moving they’re dollars online and I’m just going to kind of throw a statement out. One of them you know, kinds of talks about print is that online could be measured so well, I mean wow, by demographics, by clicks, to the fact that you can search something and you hit a website that lead is put into salesports.com and then they guy who calls knows what they we’re searching for, what type of day they looked, and do you think that, that type of metrics also why its making, there’s no mystery left for print ad, that’s why they’re not paying as much for it anymore.

Kirk:
There is a mystery still left and that’s the reading state. Just because your clicking through on something that doesn’t mean your reading it yet. I think we’re still a technological step or two away from really understanding the true consumption of that content. The fact that I’m prepared to click through on a headline but I won’t read more than 15 words of that story doesn’t mean that that story won over the day or that ad being served up is necessarily a successful ad. It’s true that you can target me like you’ve never been able to target me before as a consumer and I think that’s a great thing, I’m looking forward to that day when I finally get ads, like I’m just not in the market for beautiful women in Whistler, you know, I have a lovely wife. But if your going to get down to the point where you understand what my behavior has been online and what it is that I might be, in a predictive way, going to buy in the next little while, hey great I’m there with you.

Question:
I guess the challenge and I agree with that, a click does not mean anything, it does somewhat but it’s neither here nor their. I guess the thing is that the challenge that the print media has from the competition perspective is the ROI tracking. Like if I work for HOREMFRUIT? and I’m trying to figure out how well I did or if I went online and see if people downloaded a coupon that came in or even just downloaded it and I guess that’s the challenge, is there any way

Kirk:
Look, I mean, whats that advertising scene? what was his great line? you know. I know half of my advertising works for me, I’m just don’t know which half I’m still back to a couple of key points here. When you are flipping through a paper or magazine. There’s a serendipitous quality about the ads that greets you there. It’s not targeting you , as much as you are stumbling upon it and it is changing your attitude on the spot. So, the beauty of a lot of print advertising is that when it is in the context of a display of text and pictures is that, it permits people to never having thought that they might want a product or service to suddenly getting tantalized by it. And that I think has been, what has generated our business and what makes advertising work for us. You know, we’re not a charity right? I mean, advertising has to work. Otherwise, people won’t come back and i believe that, that has had a big part of it. Whereas these days with targeted advertising your really not opening up someone’s mind to a product or service that they haven’t somehow, been on the grid and gotten into this feedback clue. And I think that the whole surprise quality of media might go missing if we’re not careful. And that surprise quality of media is great on the editorial text side, you know, like there’s some really great things. The guy I know is the former publisher of The Chicago Tribune. He wrote once that, the story that appealed to him most in his paper, had it been the publisher? was a science story, how ice formed on Lake Michigan, formed up and down during the course of the winter, 2 pages. If you surveyed him to death and said, would you be interested in reading how ice formed he would’ve said, under no circumstances. This was the most important story he ever read and the advertising I think, the stuff that appeals to us, is the surprise. And that’s what I worry that’s going to be lost in this is that. We’re still going to have find a way in the context that all of this tailoring, directness and understanding that we have about people is that we still in the end, we don’t understand them, we just understand their statistics. We don’t understand their emotional qualities, their state of mind, their moods for the day, the people that they’re talking to, and the decisions that they might make. And when you can find technology that does that, great, bring it on, but we are nowhere near that. We are chumping if we think we are close to that. So, I would be very careful if I were an advertiser about putting all that stock into that, because your really getting essentially, I don’t know, your getting data 5″11″ 200 pounds, runs a 50 minute 10K. Great, but that’s not who I am. I haven’t thought of myself as that all day long, I’ve thought about very different things and that’s what advertising, the beauty of advertising. The things that draw me to go and make a sudden decision. It’s that serendipitous quality, I love the imagery, I love the sale, I love the idea that I might be able to do something in my life to rearrange what it is that I am spending, in order to make myself feel better or make my love ones feel better.

Stephen:
So, we’ll wrap it out here. Thank you very much for coming, thank you everybody here for coming. I hope you guys all enjoyed this, it’s fantastic. Next month is December, we don’t do normally speakers for our meetups we do meetups for meetups where seven or more meetups get together and do some of a, networking event here. Hope you guys can all come out to that but thank you very much for coming out tonight and thank you both for coming tonight.

Kirk:
Thank you

Gillian:
Thank you, thanks