Tag Archives: newspapers

What might have been (and might be) for newspaper industry

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In his final Stop the Presses column (for Editor & Publisher), Steve Outing revises history with a look at how things might have gone for the newspaper industry. And –since they didn’t– what to expect next. From the HTMHG list:

1. In 1994-95, newspaper executives recognize that the Web is something with the potential to rock their world, and increase R&D budgets significantly in order to plan for and begin building new businesses based on fast-developing new technology.

2. Learning from media history (e.g., TV started out as radio with a video image of the announcer speaking into a microphone), newspaper leaders decide not to repeat it this time around. They direct new-media R&D staff to design new online services that create original content and new utilities — things that are not possible in print but are online.

3. Fat and happy with enviable profit margins, newspaper companies’ leaders take note of the wave of Internet start-up companies in the late 1990s. Business development executives with technology experience are brought in from outside the newspaper industry to identify the most promising trends and start-up companies, and begin making acquisitions and/or significant investments, in a big way.

You get the idea. I do dread the day I read a similar “what might have been” about the broadcasting industry.

Newspaper ads: Bought or sold?

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I don’t think I’ve ever met a newspaper advertising salesperson. Given that (until recently?) newspapers are jammed with ads, doesn’t that seem odd? During my Radio Years, I wrote countless commericals and it was common to start from an ad torn from the local newspaper.

My sense back then was that businesses “bought” newspaper ads rather than having to be “sold.” A grocery store HAD to have the weekly specials in the local paper.

I suspect far more time an effort went into the layout of the ad than the selling.

If we have any current or former newspaper sales people reading this, leave us a comment. I’d love to know more about the sales process and how it has changed or is changing.

Obits on TV

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We’ve been fiddling around with the Internet for about 15 years and tried lots of different ideas. Streaming audio of debate from the state legislature; oral arguments from the state supreme court; online database of accident reports format he state highway patrol; and –as the say– the list goes on. One idea could never get off the ground was Obits Online. This was back in the late ’90’s as I recall.

Funeral homes would log in to our online database and post funeral announcements. The public could search by name, date, city, etc etc. We pitched the funeral home associations in Missouri and Iowa (maybe some other states, I don’t recall).

The idea never got off the ground because most funeral homes were still trying to figure out their fax machines and were convinced the people in their communities were not using computers and were unlikely to do so any time soon.

I bring up this stillborn digital baby after spotting this story (AdAge.com) about a TV station in Michigan that’s running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region’s four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week.

obt-screenshot“For $100, the station will run the deceased’s name and photo on-air and publish a full-length obituary on ObitMichigan.com. Full-screen graphics listing names of people who have passed away are broadcast during the local station’s morning and noon shows Monday through Friday, as well as on weekend morning shows. Viewers are pushed to the website for more information about the deceased as well as funeral-services information.

The station’s owner, Meredith Corp., expects to roll the concept out to its other stations and says it is also in licensing discussions with other station groups.

At $100 an obituary, it’s not clear that WNEM or Meredith has really tapped a massive vein of cash. Revenue from obituaries “is a teeny subset” of overall newspaper-classified revenue, said Mort Goldstrom, VP-advertising at the Newspaper Association of America. Fees charged by papers can range from as high as $1,000 for a major metro to a few hundred dollars for a midmarket paper. And many small community and weekly newspapers still run obituaries for free.

WNEM started running obituaries in August at no charge, to get people familiar with the service and to work out any software bugs. Since launching as a paid service in early September, executives said, the station has over 700 obituaries in its system.

The new obituaries are also prompting a change in the way people go about their daily routine, he said. “The biggest issue that we have is the elderly people that don’t have the ability to pay for internet access or don’t have a computer. Now they see it flash on TV and those that don’t have a computer can call the funeral home and ask for information,” Mr. Luczak said.”

Having the TV station to promote and leverage the idea is an important component. I hope they make some money and provide a useful service.

“Mass Roots Marketing”

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Interesting post at AdAge.com on hyperlocal media and how one big media company –in this case NBC– is attempting to play “at the intersection of advertising, marketing and programming, potentially creating new kinds of content in the burgeoning local arena.”

“We’ll explore what the best solutions are to connect across all platforms. Maybe it’s finding a great blogger who lives in that community who becomes an on-air personality. It’s creating things for people to feel more connected to their community.”

“Local media is going to be the intersection of utility and entertainment and everyday life. As things are globalizing, local becomes even more vital. You have the same brands, the same food, etc., wherever you go now. Local is what makes things different; it gets to what people love about their neighborhood, why they decided to live there.”

“You start with an event or something that happens in a small community in one locale and you’re looking at it to amplify out from that. NBC Local is well-placed to help big marketers to put those new kinds of programs in place. You’ll still have people buying local 30-second spots, but more and more also putting together programs that make an impact on a very local level and have that radiate out in significant ways.”

Uh, isn’t this what local broadcasters and newspapers are doing? Or should be doing? Or used to do? Are the Big Guys planning on doing “local” better than local media?

Stay tuned.

Bomb shelters or spaceships

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If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast)

In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes?

Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials?

What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online?

Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task.

Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do.

But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order)

What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary.

As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones.

Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out.

“The audience is being assembled by the audience”

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NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky on the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. On the advertising-based business model of journalism:

“Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”

On the death of the home page:

“The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”

You can listen to Professor Shirky’s talk here.

Digital marketing no longer experimental

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At Forrester Research they “…interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection.”

That’s the way Josh Bernoff explains it in a recent blog post that focuses on a five-year interactive marketing forecast. A few tidbits from the study:

“Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets will decline.

This is huge.

It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

It means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

And it means that social “media”, which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn’t even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I’ve learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you’re in advertising, you’d better learn to speak digital, because that’s the way the world is going.”

This was the point I was trying to raise in a company meeting earlier this year when I asked if any of the attendees could imagine a time when there was no advertising.  That “advertising” and marketing as we now know it would probably be unrecognizable at some point in the not so distant future. And are we ready for that?

Choosing what we don’t want to see

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“For the first time in our lives we were being exposed to more information than we could consume. In the age of newspapers we had to choose what we wanted to see. But in 2004 we had to choose what we didn’t want to see. This had a devastating effect on the traditional forms of information. In the past, you could get people’s attention simply by making something. People wanted more choices, so you simply had to give them another choice. But in 2004 this changed. People started to have enough, and now you actually had to make something better. It was not enough that it was different.”

From Thomas Baekdal’s Where Is Everyone? A brief tour of the history of information.

“The Newspaper & Radio Bailout”

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I’m a little fuzzy on whether the following description of the newspaper business model should be attributed to Warren Buffett or Eric Rhoads (Radio Ink) but the point is the same:

“Write the news, cut down millions or trees for paper, build massive printing plants to print it overnight, have a distribution model that pays people to fold and bag hundreds of papers and burn thousands of gallons of gas to go house-to-house throwing papers out of their car windows so people can walk out into the cold or rain in order to read news that is 12-24 hours old.”

Well, if you put it that way… And I particularly liked the line: “Do they really believe the Internet generation can be convinced to sign up for home delivery?”

Uh, I’m gonna say no.

Scott Adams: “Super-local news”

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“It’s not just news about your community, but also about your homeowner’s association, your apartment building, your kids’ classrooms, and the sports teams they belong to. Every family would have their own online local newspaper, assembled electronically every day based on that family’s log-in information. Your personal and super-local news would include everything from world events to school lunch menus for that day. Eventually it might even include your child’s report card. Obviously the schools have to be partners in this, and I think that could happen. Most school information is online already or heading in that direction. It just needs to feed to the newspaper’s site for aggregation.

The key is for the super-local information to come to the newspapers from volunteers. For example, every youth sport team would have a parent with a digital camera and the willingness to upload some pictures and write a few lines about the game. A simple user interface would make it easy to integrate the news about little Becky’s soccer game with news of the Lakers. They would have equal billing.”