Noventa por ciento

The Economist, 2 de mayo de 2020. Podría ser de Jaime Serra.

El negocio de periodismo no era para volverse rico

Apareció en la sección United States de la edición del 23 de junio de 2018 de The Economist. Lo curioso es que quien exageró la muerte de los periódicos fue The Economist el 24 de agosto de 2006, quizá por eso la sorpresa...

Small-town American newspapers are surprisingly resilient

Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated

JAY NOLAN surveys his media empire from a shed-like building outside London, Kentucky. On his desk is a stack of eight newspapers, including the Berea Citizen (“established in 1899”, circulation 4,511), the Mountain Advocate (“since 1904”, circulation 4,500) and the Pineville Sun-Cumberland Courier (“celebrating 109 years”, circulation 1,646). 

Each paper is under local management, with its own publisher and editor, but Nolan Group Newspapers owns a majority stake in all of them and prints them at its press outside London. Together, the eight papers have a combined circulation of about 25,000 and employ a dozen journalists and nine ad-sales representatives. They bring in around $2m in revenue, perhaps $3m in a good year, with a profit margin of about 10%, says Mr Nolan.

The local-newspaper business is not going to make him rich. Which is why he also owns J. Frank Publishing, which undertakes contract printing work for other newspapers and commercial clients, and produces banners and signs where margins are juicier. Mr Nolan, a third-generation newspaperman, took over the business in March, when his father retired to Florida. It is not a role he planned. After a stint in the army, including deployments abroad, he returned home, initially taking a job in finance in California. “I can make a lot more money in the sign business,” he says, but local newspapers are important. “If journalists aren’t here, Kentucky will become as corrupt as Afghanistan.”

This is a worry that animates discussion of local news in America. Circulation and ad revenue have been shrinking for years, as has the number of newsroom staff. Papers have become thinner or shut down altogether. America has lost a fifth of its newspapers since 2004.

Media-watchers worry about “news deserts”, or areas without any newspapers. The mere presence of reporters at city-council meetings can help keep them straight, says Al Cross, the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky.

Yet look beyond the headline figures, and the health of small-town newspapers may not be as bad as it appears. Fully 61% of weekly papers and 70% of dailies that have ceased publication since 2004 are in counties with more than 100,000 people. Just 20% of weeklies and 11% of dailies disappeared in counties with fewer than 30,000 people, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC). The number and variety of newspapers that continue to exist—in tiny towns with populations in four figures, at gas stations in poor rural counties, and in villages clumped near each other—give hope to even the most pessimistic observer.

There are two main reasons for the resilience of small-town newspapers. The first is that size matters. Businesses in small communities know that every reader of a local paper is a potential customer, and advertise accordingly. Newspapers in bigger cities do not enjoy this advantage. Nor are they representative of the industry. Although much attention is lavished on newspapers in metropolitan areas, they represent less than 2% of all American newspapers, according to a paper entitled “Despite losses, community newspapers still dominate the US market”. Community dailies and weeklies, by contrast, account for 60% of all the papers sold.

Second, small communities rally round their newspapers in ways that bigger ones do not, with rates of loyalty twice that of readers of national or regional papers, according to research by Penelope Muse Abernathy of UNC. The Shawangunk Journal, published from Ellenville, New York and serving the region around it, was on the verge of shutting down when its publisher tried a new tactic: a subscription drive with an annual price of at least $55 a year and as much as subscribers could afford to give. Some people contribute as much every month, says Amberly Jane Campbell, who describes herself as “publisher, distributor, managing editor, and everything else”. The paper is now back in the black. Asking for donations is an increasingly popular business model.

Small papers are not relying on goodwill alone. They are experimenting with the same things the big papers are trying, including digital advertising, events, sponsored content, glossy supplements and magazines, and price increases. Some, such as the Sentinel-Echo in London, are even expecting modest growth, mostly from online.

Taking the First

The survival of small-town newspapers in America is far from guaranteed. The towns they serve are growing older and thinning out as working-age Americans migrate from small towns to cities, often never to return. Mandatory advertising by local government, a significant source of revenue, is increasingly under attack as state legislatures try to save money. Tariffs on imported Canadian newsprint have raised costs. Another worrying trend is of local owners selling to big media companies as the industry consolidates, robbing local newspapers of the very thing that makes them valuable. Yet they may be “in a stronger position than their metro cousins”, according to a recent report by the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism. That is crucial. As Mr Nolan puts it, “We have to have a free and vibrant press in America to be great in America.” That is as true of little towns in the hills and hollows of Kentucky as it is in Washington, DC.

La ley del embudo

Artículo publicado por The Economist, con todos los derechos reservados, que respeto citándolos, en este medio que no cobra por leer textos que valen la pena.

The Future of Journalism: Funnel Vision
How leading American newspapers got people to pay for news

Sometimes it feels like the 1970s in the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms: reporters battling each other to break news about scandals that threaten to envelop the White House and the presidency of Donald Trump. Only now their scoops come not in the morning edition but in a tweet or iPhone alert near the end of the day.

Their experiences offer lessons for the industry in America, although only a handful of newspapers have a chance at matching their success. A subscription-first approach relies on tapping a national and international market of hundreds of millions of educated English-language readers and converting a fraction of those into paying customers. With enough digital subscribers — Mark Thompson, chief executive of the New York Times, believes his newspaper can get to 10m, from 2m today — the subscriptions-first model could (in theory) generate more profits than business models dependent on print advertising used to. Such optimism is hard to summon after two decades of accelerating decline. In that period American newspapers lost nearly 40% of their daily circulation, which fell to 35m last year, estimates the Pew Research Centre. Annual ad revenues have shrunk by 63%, or $30bn, just in the past ten years (see chart). Newsrooms have shed 40% of reporters and editors since 2006. High returns on equity turned into single digits, losses or bankruptcy.

Like Detroit carmakers before the arrival of the Japanese, in pre-internet days newspapers flush with profits from a captive market grew lazy and complacent. Some big-city papers, like the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Baltimore Sun, splurged on foreign bureaus and fluffy suburban sections whether or not readers wanted them; classified ads alone covered these costs many times over. Now such newspapers are struggling to remain relevant to diminished readerships. A tier below, hundreds of local ones are dying or turning into advertiser sheets; newspaper chains, some managed by investment funds, have snapped up many of them, maintaining high profits by sacking journalists. 

From the ashes of newsprint 

The Times and Post have been buffeted by the same forces. But now each is in turnaround. The Times has doubled its digital-only subscribers in less than two years; the Post has managed the feat in ten months, and now has more than 1m. Both have staunched losses. Revenue at the Times had fallen by more than 20% in three years to less than $1.6bn in 2009; this year they are on pace to climb back above $1.6bn, led by digital subscriptions. (Return on equity still fell, to 3% last year from 37% in 2001.) 

The Post had also been losing millions before Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, bought it in 2013. The newspaper is now privately held and does not disclose revenues and profits, but Fred Ryan, the publisher, says both are growing and the newspaper is on track for its most profitable year in a decade. The Wall Street Journal added more than 300,000 digital subscriptions in the year to June, but a sharp fall in advertising crimped revenues by 6% at Dow Jones, the division of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, that houses the newspaper. How have they done it? Early attempts by newspapers to put up digital “paywalls” floundered, and met with derision from critics and competitors vaunting the internet’s ability to generate huge audiences for free content. How could anyone hope to attract paying digital customers when they could go elsewhere online for free?

The Times hit upon the answer in 2011, when it introduced a metered paywall, something the Financial Times was also trying. Visitors to the website could read a few free articles a month, after which they would be asked to pay. This approach is now standard across journalism (including at this newspaper), but it was controversial at the time. At News Corp Mr Murdoch erected a hard paywall at all his newspapers in the belief that giving away his product online would cripple the more profitable print editions. Those suffered anyway, and he later dropped the paywall at the Sun, a tabloid, and has allowed some flexibility at the Journal. Softer paywalls have created funnels to suck in customers. 

On a whiteboard in Mr Thompson’s office at the Times is a diagram to illustrate the approach. At the top, where the funnel is widest, are all those who visit its digital site. (In September 104m people in America did so, according to comScore.) At the narrow end are its 2m paying digital-only subscribers (plus 1m print subscribers). Mr Thompson’s main preoccupation is to tweak the “geometry of the funnel” to shift more people from free to paid. At the Post, Mr Ryan is also busy funnelling. 

The job of funnel mathematician did not exist at newspapers six years ago. Now it is one of the most important functions a digital site has. The Times and Post conduct numerous tests of different ways to trigger the paywall, for instance if a visitor returns to the same columnist. It is A/B testing like at a technology company, Mr Ryan says, except it is more like “A to Z testing”. The Post has settled on three site visits a month before hitting the paywall, which means 85% of visitors will not encounter it. The other 15% are asked to subscribe at the introductory rate of 99 cents for the first four weeks. 

Both newspapers sift through data about what visitors do just before stumping up. The Post looks at the “month zero” of a reader’s pre-subscription activity on the site. Mr Ryan credits the effort, which began a year ago, with helping to convert more visitors to subscribers this year. 

Another factor has helped the two papers: Mr Trump. Since his election they have revived an old rivalry, vying for sensational scoops, sometimes several in a day. Mr Trump’s attacks on both newspapers — “the failing New York Times”, “more fake news from the Amazon Washington Post” — have almost certainly helped their bottom lines. His presidency has created an urgency around news that has made old-fashioned journalism more in vogue than it has been probably since Watergate. Fake news shared on social media has reinforced a feeling that real news costs money. 

Trump bump 

The newspapers’ bosses agree Mr Trump has been good for business, but add they were ready for the moment. As Mr Bezos is fond of saying, “you can’t shrink your way to profitability”. He invested in the Post after buying it, hiring technologists to improve its digital presence. He has also added reporters (the Post now has 750 newsroom employees and counting). Marty Baron, editor of the Post, added a rapid-response investigative team of eight people this year. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, has expanded the Washington bureau twice since the election. (The Times paid for new reporters in part by cutting dozens of other editorial jobs.) 

The subscription-first approach justifies adding reporters. By increasing the quality of the product, newspapers hope to lure subscribers. But it is not clear others can replicate that virtuous circle so easily. Many regional papers are nurturing digital subscribers — they all have their funnels now, too — but are doing so on a much smaller scale. They will have to come up with other ways to make money to survive. “They have to do everything,” says Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University. 

By “everything” media experts like Mr Rosen mean ending a reliance on two traditional sources of revenue: ads and subscriptions. At regional papers, unlike the national ones, prospects for both are limited by the size of the metropolitan market. Savings from printing fewer copies are small — printing and distribution costs are mostly fixed — so they must either cut staff or find other ways to make money. This may include staging trade fairs, offering memberships with perks, even e-commerce partnerships. Such sidelines help to ward off staff cuts; to be a community hub, newspapers must also cover communities effectively. They may forgo costly (and wasteful) foreign and national bureaus. But to attract local readers, they must provide relevant coverage of city halls, courthouses, police precincts or schools. 

Take the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, a privately owned newspaper which has managed to keep the newsroom humming along. Almost annually Mike Klingensmith, the publisher, and a few of his senior executives meet with their counterparts at the Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe and one or two other independently owned newspapers. They sign non-disclosure agreements and then share ideas about how to make money. In the past year Mr Klingensmith has adopted three of them, adding several million dollars in revenue: organising an advertiser fair to attract new clients; putting on a consumer travel show; and starting a glossy quarterly print magazine. 

The Star Tribune now sells digital subscriptions (nearly 50,000) and adverts; delivers a thick Sunday paper full of features (which accounts for 54% of print ad revenue); and is expanding the Saturday print edition. It conducts in-depth investigations that wins awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and makes podcasts and daily videos. Several reporters cover city hall. In the past year an additional one was dispatched to Washington. Mr Klingensmith and Rene Sanchez, the editor, believe quality is key; nearly 20% of the budget goes to the newsroom, which has kept a headcount of 245 for seven years. 

That gives the Star Tribune’s funnel mathematician a product to sell. Patrick Johnston, a digital executive poached from Target, the retail store, and his boss Jim Bernard, a former executive at Marketwatch, a business-news website, explain how a local newspaper’s funnel vision is different. They are, like the big papers, interested in the visitors who they call “intenders”, people whose browsing behaviour suggests they may be ready to subscribe. But whereas many visitors to the Times and Post are potential intenders, the Star Tribune can dismiss about 50% of its online traffic — the “grazers” from outside Minnesota who clicked a link — and focus on the other half. Reducing friction is vital; they have got 25% more intenders to subscribe since installing PayPal as a payment option. 

Hold the presses 

The downside to the ease of online subscriptions is the ease of cancelling them. Newspapers guard their rates of digital churn closely because they are so high — despite an all-out effort the Star Tribune keeps only one in two subscribers after 14 months (the Times and Post numbers are better, executives there say, without giving figures). A subscriber’s early days are essential. Keeping a visitor engaged with the site is similar to getting a “guest” on Target’s website to put another item in their basket, Mr Johnston says. It also means competing with ever more rivals for people’s attention: bigger fish like the Times and Post, but also Netflix, Spotify or Candy Crush. 

The virtue of digital subscriptions is that they build a deeper relationship between readers and newspapers than when distribution meant throwing broadsheets onto doorsteps. Newspapers nowadays know a lot more about their customers’ tastes. That lets them tailor the experience to readers individually, with the aim of keeping them around longer. It can be, as Mr Thompson says, an annuity for the newspaper. But the newspaper has to be worth the cover price.

Cuando el argot de las redacciones aleja las audiencias

Apareció en The Economist con el título Journalese (el argot de las redacciones).

Journalese
The many pitfalls of language as used by journalists

EVERY trade is also a tribe, and journalists are no exception. One way that tribes, from teens to programmers, signal membership of the group is through language. Hacks do the same. They write “hed” for headline, “lede” or “intro” for the first sentence in a story, “graf” for “paragraph”, “nut graf” for the core paragraph that gives the story’s main idea. The last line is always the “kicker”. 

But journalists should not be obscure. After all, the whole point of the job is to make things clear to readers. Yet readers are often baffled by the first words they see in a newspaper: headlines. In Britain, a broad range of national newspapers compete on nearly every news-stand. So the tabloids, in particular, put a premium on getting as many short, emotion-grabbing words in the biggest font possible on front page—often at the expense of making sense. A recent headline in the Sun, Britain’s bestselling tabloid, declaring “LOVE ISLE SEX DRUG SHOCK” did not carry any information about who did what to whom; note the lack of a verb. But it did include just about as many jolts to the British id as are possible in five words. Rupert Murdoch, the Sun’s owner, is often considered the father of the modern tabloid, so it is no surprise that his New York tabloid, the Post, copies this style. Possibly the most New York headline ever was “MOB COP SEX FURY”. 

Even where headline-writers are more sober, as in the broadsheets, they try to get as many content-rich words in as they can. Keeping the font big means omitting many of those little function words: “the”, “a”, “and”, prepositions and the like. But these words, despite their small size, have an outsize importance: they convey the who-did-what-to-whom of the content words by providing structure and context. Omitting too many of them gives rise to headlines like “Services For Man Who Refused To Hate Thursday In Atlanta”, raising the question of who exactly does hate Thursday in Atlanta, or “Patrick Stewart Surprises Fan With Life-Threatening Illness”, which would seem a pretty cruel thing for Mr Stewart to do, if read with a certain tilt of the head. 

In the main text, journalists tend to the opposite sin. Instead of being obscure, they make prose feel so drearily familiar that the reader wonders if the paper came out last month—or even last year. A satirical piece in the Washington Post covered the white-nationalist marches in Virginia as though written by a hack foreign correspondent, describing “tribal politics” and “flashpoints” in which the “Trump regime” sided with the “ethnic majority”. Good editors have a list of clichés that they strike from their pages with zeal. 

Only a journalist finds “fresh” a fresh synonym for “new”, so that the reader hears of “fresh clashes” or “fresh elections”, or in one grisly example, “fresh bodies” washing up weeks after a tsunami. Only in the papers do time periods “see” this or that: March saw major demonstrations, April saw fresh clashes, and so on. Overused words like landmark, historic, crisis, watershed, make-or-break and the like give the impression that the writer does not trust the facts themselves to convey any drama. The inexperienced writer may find these clichés and overused words rushing to the fingertips. It is tempting to write like many of the journalists you have read, to show that you have mastered the way it is usually done. 

Whereas this might work on a lazy editor, it is no road to distinction. George Orwell once wrote: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Where most writers find themselves talking about people rushing to something “like moths to a flame”, Orwell had them doing so “like bluebottles to a dead cat”. Though known best as a novelist and essayist, he was also a master chronicler of the things he saw as a journalist. 

Orwell’s concern was not just stylistic. It was that hackneyed writing betrays rushed, automatic thinking, rather than slow and critical reflection. Of course, it is hard to be reflective when working to a deadline. Every newspaper, including this one, will feature some verbiage that is the equivalent of the ubiquitous flat-pack Ikea furniture, chosen not because it inspires, but because it is quick to assemble and gets the job done. Yet crafting fresh language, for all the time and effort it takes, is the first step in producing stories that will not only be published, but be read with pleasure. Tribal language may be useful for insiders, but most outsiders just find it annoying.

Las portadas con raíces de The Economist (2)

16 de enero de 1999

14 de noviembre de 2009

26 de septiembre de 2013

Algunas más en Las portadas con raíces de The Economist en PaperPapers, 29/04/2012

Hugo Chávez recibe el tratamiento Benedicto XVI en portada

La excelente portada de Correio Braziliense sobre la muerte del presidente de Venezuela Hugo Chávez. No es original, pero es muy buena, aunque el titular está más visto que carracuca. La hizo Die Tageszeitung hace dos semanas para la renuncia de Benedicto XVI. Veálas.

No podía faltar en Esta Casa la portada/tapa del Órgano Oficial del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba. Como órgano oficial es perfecto. Como periodismo, no tanto:

Uno no ha podido evitar el recuerdo de esta fenomenal primera de The Economist, cuando Fidel Castro se retiró. El arte de decirlo todo con inteligencia:

The Economist pregunta, Time responde

El hallazgo es de la gente de Kiosko.net.

Draghi fastidió la portada a The Economist

The Economist cierra los jueves por la noche y cuelga su portada/tapa para acceso de sus suscriptores. El jueves a mediodía, el presidente del Banco Central Europeo, Mario Draghi, dijo que actuaría decisivamente para garantizar la supervivencia del euro. Esa mera insinuación alivió la tormenta financiera, hizo caer la prima de riesgo española y propulsó las bolsas.

The Economist hizo todo su diagnóstico (España deberá ser rescatada antes de que termine 2013) sin poder incorporar el "efecto Draghi" a su análisis y su texto –sobre todo sus pronósticos– parece ahora un tanto desproporcionado, pasado de frenada. Ni siquiera les dio tiempo a introducir su clásico remoquete "as this newspaper was going to press" para dar condicionalidad a su información, prueba de que estaban muy seguros de lo que decían.

Uno alaba la actitud valiente y más en asuntos macroeconómicos, volátiles como la meteorología. Sin embargo, la lección es esta: el "timing" –la publicación oportuna– lo es todo. En esta época del ciclo de noticias 24/7 que no se detiene jamás, la inoportunidad transforma cualquier texto en una completa impertinencia y de ahí a la irrelevancia van dos pasos. No es algo que deba preocupar al semanario inglés ahora, claro. Pero veremos en qué queda su pronóstico de esta semana.

El tema del toro en las portadas de The Economist viene de antes. En noviembre de 2008 publicaron un especial de 14 páginas sobre España titulado, significativamente, "The party is over" (Se acabó la fiesta). La ilustración con que se promocionó era esta:

"What does the future hold for Spain?" El toro caído era el pronóstico del periódico británico. La fotografía es de un quiosco de Barcelona, donde el semanario se vendía con una solapa promocional con otra variante del toro, esta vez con el cuerno roto:

Para esta semana, el portadista ha unido al toro otra de sus referencias gráficas típicas: la caída. Le dejo acá otras portadas/tapas con ese asunto:

18 de junio 2005

11 octubre 2008

31 octubre 2009

5 noviembre 2011

Si lo dice The Economist…

Esta es la portada/tapa de The Economist de esta semana. Trata sobre el cártel de bancos que manejaba a su convenciencia el Libor, una tasa de interés interbancaria usada como referencia para millones de operaciones en todo el mundo, como hipotecas, pagos con tarjetas, etcétera, etcétera:

No es un tratamiento nuevo. Ocurre que gracias a esta portada ha pasado de ser un asunto del mundo del cómic marginal (este es solo un ejemplo brutal) o de pirados conspiracionistas (otro ejemplo) a tomar carta de naturaleza entre los que tocan las teclas en este mundo. The Economist: muy grandes. Acá les dejo unas muestras:

Clic > Amplía

Dice DZ que le referencia visual de esa portada/tapa es la película "Reservoir Dogs", de Quentin Tarantino. Es verdad. En el paseíllo de gánsteres al principio de la película.

Dedicado a El Gran Carlos, que siempre tiene razón, especialmente cuando parece que no.

El momento de las revistas

Aquí tiene la nota de The Economist. Y esto es lo esencial seleccionado en el tumblr de Eduardo Arriagada:

“[A]mong magazines there is a new sense of optimism. In North America, where the recession bit deepest (see chart), more new magazines were launched than closed in 2011 for the second year in a row. The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) reports that magazine audiences are growing faster than those for TV or newspapers, especially among the young.”

Aunque ahora nos dice que print is not dead, The Economist mató a los periódicos hace seis años y no un par como dicen que se dice por ahí (abajo la portada del 26 de agosto de 2006 y aquí la nota completa). Los números de Price Waterhouse & Coopers parecen contradecirlo hasta en Norteamérica, donde la estimación para el futuro próximo de los periódicos empieza a subir de a poquito.

Pero la pregunta es otra: ¿Será el momento de las revistas? Yo estoy seguro de que sí.

Golpee su cabeza acá

Si le gustó la portada de The Economist sobre la crisis del euro le gustará la de Bloomberg Businessweek, aunque tiene menos enjundia:

Cómo The Economist piensa desconectarse de la rotativa

Andrew Rashbass, CEO de The Economist, explica cómo van a trasladar los activos de la publicación del mundo analógico al digital sin destruir su periodismo y mejorando su cuenta de resultados. En otras palabras, cómo se desconectarán de la rotativa en cinco años y seguirán ganando dinero/plata:

   

Y usted ¿ya tiene hechos sus planes para desconectarse de los hierros?

Más que cien mil palabras

No siempre es cierto pero esta imagen vale más que mil palabras:

Y si se aplica bien vale más que cien mil palabras:

La foto sale de aquí. La portada viene de Guerra Eterna. Me ha recordado esta publicidad de un especial de The Economist acerca de la crisis española de hace año y medio, cuando no estaba tan claro que España fuera el nuevo enfermo de Europa:

The Economist: portadas con raíces

Esta semana, The Economist viene con esta portada/tapa:

Tiene sus raíces en otra primera provocadora y gamberra de octubre de 2006:

Este es un fenómeno que el periódico británico (digo "periódico" porque a ellos les horroriza que les llamen "revista") viene cultivando desde hace más de una década. Le dejo unas muestras. A la izquierda tiene una primera de octubre de 2008 y a la derecha otra de octubre de 2011:

Ahora viene otro par con con una distancia aún mayor. A la de la izquierda es de enero de 1999 (no la encontré mejor) y la de la derecha de noviembre de 2009. Hay que tener memoria:

Tampoco les importa fusilar portadas de otras publicaciones si sirven a su propósito. Para esta del 21 de marzo de 2009 homenajean otra muy conocida de Steimberg para The New Yorker del 29 de marzo de 1976 [clic > amplía]:

Como bonus les dejo otras tres míticas primeras de la cosa. De arriba abajo: la del 16 de abril de 1987 ("Especial Presupuestos: no ha sido nada". Ya. Traducida así no tiene gracia), la legendaria del 10 de septiembre de 1994 ("El problema de las fusiones") y del 20 de septiembre de 2003 ("Las encantadoras conclusiones de la cumbre de la OMC en Cancún"). Un show:

Una portada inteligente, muy inteligente de The Economist

Esta noche The Economist (edición europea e internacional) se publicará con esta portada, cuyos referentes no tienen nada que ver con los del diario protagonista del post anterior. Vea:

Luego me criticaran por pedir más cerebro en las portadas de la prensa y por ser tan pesado con eso de la Cultura de Portada/Tapa. Bien. Ahora dígame si tengo o no razón.

El cuadro original es "Almuerzo campestre" ("Dejeuner sur l'herbe"), pintado en 1863 por Édouard Manet [Clic > Amplía]:

Es un asunto sobre el que trabajaron otros antes que el pobre Manet, como Tiziano. Digo pobre porque a Manet le pegaron hasta en el carnet de identidad por este cuadro, que está en las raíces del impresionismo y más. Picasso tiene varias versiones de la obra del francés. Como esta:

Claro. Hay que tener una cultura y una cosa. ¿O cree que por ser periodista está exento de conocer los referentes de su civilización? Si piensa eso, estimada o estimado… se equivocó de profesión. Aunque no le faltarán medios, como el de la entrada anterior, que pueden darle trabajo. Total, para lo que usan la cultura…

Las cinco preguntas estratégicas del CEO de The Economist

1. ¿Cambiará el medio a los medios?
2. ¿Cambiará la relación de los medios con sus usuarios/lectores a causa de los nuevos intermediarios?
3. ¿Cómo afectará todo eso a la publicidad?
4. ¿Quién puede quitarnos el pan del cesto?
5. ¿Podemos cambiar lo bastante y lo bastante rápido? ¿Qué lo impide?

Son las cinco preguntas que se hace Andrew Rashbass, CEO de The Economist, que obviamente ya tiene un plan para desconectarse de la rotativa –y desconectar a sus lectores y anunciantes de la revista impresa. Es una conclusión personal, a la que usted también puede llegar si atiende a esta presentación…

…y lee atentamente estas dos piezas:

• Tablets responsible for the rebirth of reading.

• Andrew Rashbass: 'The biggest reason we're successful is that we are lucky'. (Es irónico, advierto. Ni harto de grifa cree Rashbass en la suerte. Usted tampoco debería).

Todos los dueños y ejecutivos de medios impresos del mundo mundial deberían estar haciendo planes concretos para:

• Desconectar su/s medio/s de la rotativa y a sus lectores y anunciantes del producto impreso: qué día será el primero en ver eliminada la edición impresa; en qué secuencia desaparecerán los suplementos y secciones; qué reorganización de procesos requerirá la redacción; qué tipo de formación precisan sus periodistas…

• Emprender nuevos negocios que ayuden a sostener su periodismo porque la publicidad no les bastará –como ocurría hasta hoy. No, el Estado tampoco. A propósito ¿qué porcentaje de su facturación (fac-tu-ra-ción, no resultados) destina a I+D+i?

En caso contrario, sepa que los días de su empresa, como institución y como negocio, están contados. Si no se ve con ganas, piense en dedicarse a otra cosa que le reporte menos complicaciones.

Es posible desarrollar esos planes. No pierda el tiempo: busque ayuda externa y póngase manos a la obra. No es propaganda de nada, es mero sentido común. ¿O piensa que a The Economist le va muy bien porque "tiene suerte"?

La que faltaba con Berlusconi

¿Será la última? Las anteriores están aquí mismo.

El cuadro que emplean de fondo se titula Les romains de la decadence. Lo pintó Thomas Couture en 1847 (Gracias, J*) y se exhibe en el Musée d'Orsay. Couture fue uno de los maestros de Manet. La reproducción a la que lleva aquel enlace se amplía y amplía clicando sobre el cuadro y se aprecian todos los detalles. Fíjese que la pareja del chiste, que en la portada se ubica abajo a la derecha, en el original está en el centro y más a la derecha. Si le da pereza clicar, vea acá el cuadro [Clic>Amplía]: