Battle Plans for Newspapers

By Sean Smith – Posted in response today’s article on The New York Times Blog

Unfortunately the editors’ comments left me wondering, “Why didn’t they answer the question? Where are the survival strategies? Where are all the new ideas?”

As a veteran trade press publisher, former publishing marketing director and current J school student at Georgetown, I have few ideas of my own.

First, let’s be clear about the problem. The Internet has caused shifts in:

1) Consumer expectations (free news) and habits (want it right now);

2) News distribution channels (search, push and viral); and

3) Advertiser demands (make money don’t spend it).

These changes have reduced significantly the profit margins in the newspaper industry. The business model that has sustained newspapers for generations is no longer sustainable.

To be sure there is no silver bullet, no single solution that will cure all that is ailing newspaper publishers. Below I have outlined a plan that addresses three of the underlying causes and actually answers the question, “What survival strategies should these dailies adopt?”

Here are four of my top recommendations:

Leverage your brand and your identity – Whatever brand you have built for your paper, you can leverage it on a local, regional, national or even global scale to monetize the value of your reputation, the quality of your content and the talent you have employed. To let that content go stale on your website because of low traffic and dropping circulation is a sin when far lesser sites and publications are pulling in traffic like mad. Whether you are The New York Times or The Daily Local News your brand has value. Businesses looking to build their brands and extend their reach for new business. They will pay for meaningful* opportunities to do that. Note: “meaningful” means doing more than banner ads on your site.

Sell embedded sponsorships and ads in articles – It costs a lot to create original quality content. Don’t stop; just find new ways to support it. Imagine if each article had a sponsor who was charged based on anticipated reach? For example, Paul Krugman’s column, women’s health articles and business stories could all have sponsors.

Sponsored article format:

Article Headline

Sponsor name/logo/link

Article byline

Article

License your original content – Just because newspapers publish their own stories doesn’t mean the content can’t appear elsewhere on other news sites, commercial sites (e.g., what if you could read The New York Times movie reviews on Fandango, AFI or even watch them on YouTube). Newspapers could earn considerable revenue through content licensing, partnering and distribution agreements. Content can be licensed by topic and keyword to well-chosen brand partners that have established web-based distribution channels that are stronger than their own. Hint – be “platform agnostic.”

Master search engine optimization (SEO) – When consumers want to know something, one of the first places they go is to search engines like Google. Even Google will admit that “search” is truly in its infancy and those sites that master it will come out the winners. Publishers of original content should have no trouble rising to the top of search results because the search algorithms essentially work by finding sites with:

1) the most original content on a topic (repeated keywords);

2) the most frequently updated content;

3) the most reciprocal links to related sites; and

4) some invisible coding that help the search engines find it.

We cannot turn back the clock nor should we wish to. A number of people have been suggesting that newspapers need to charge readers for online content in one form or another. The New York Times tried this before and quit. The Wall Street Journal only gets away with it because businesses are primarily footing the bill. Magazine publishers and even trade publishers are facing dwindling subscription revenue. The current economic climate will only drive this home. The idea that you can force readers to pay for news is absurd. It won’t work. They will drive around you like a bad neighborhood.

I can be reached at sms256@georgetown.edu.

Gay Media in Crisis

By Sean Smith

Is it time for the gay media to panic? It looks like mainstream newspapers aren’t the only ones struggling these days. Two reports this week suggest that the top gay media outlets are facing two major crises of their own.

The financial solvency of some of the leading gay publications appears to be in serious jeopardy. “The investment fund that owns the Washington Blade, the Southern Voice, Genre magazine, and other gay publications has been forced into receivership by the federal Small Business Administration (SBA), which will sell the fund’s assets and distribute the proceeds to investors,” according to a Feb. 6 article in the Gay City News.

Second, four major national gay and lesbian media players, including Out, the Advocate, PlanetOut, and Gay.com may soon all be owned by the same company, according to a Feb. 8 article from The Boston Phoenix. The pending merger has sparked charges of a gay media monopoly that would seriously endanger the variety of perspectives and independence of the gay press.

What is “the New Push Journalism?”

By Sean Smith

Extra! Extra! Read all about it… That’s what the newsboys of yesteryear used to yell in the streets as they literally shoved newspapers at would-be customers. Both newsboys and headlines would scream things like, “Child Murderer Caught by Cops” or some other hard-to resist bit of human tragedy, no doubt prompting the well worn newsroom phrase, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Successful marketers in all industries know how to promote their goods and service for maximum uptake by the audience. In the days of William Randolph Hearst, This was true for newspapers as well.

Around the beginning of the 20^th century, before the newspaper business was dominated by single paper monopolies, cities often had many papers competing for the top spot so they could garner the most advertisers. There were notorious “newsstand wars” where some newspapers like Hearst’s actually hired thugs to coerce newsstand owners to sell their papers (exclusively) and retaliated against those that didn’t cooperate sometimes resulting in beatings, burned newsstands and even killings. All of this was done to gain control of the distribution channels: the vendors, the newsboys and home delivery territories.

These were crude but successful examples of a key marketing strategy called push marketing or a push strategy.

Push marketing simply means “pushing” the products or services to consumer by promotional efforts and/or leveraging distribution channels to do so.

Take for example a vodka company that wants to launch a new brand or flavor of vodka. Clearly there is no market demand for something that people have never tasted before. So the company employs push strategies, based on the strength of their brand name, existing distribution channels (bars, restaurants, liquor stores and distributors) and available marketing budget to bring the product to customers and convince them to purchase it.

Over time the newspaper business cleaned up its act and reporters became journalists. While newsstand owners my be safer, the business seems to have lost much of its competitive, entrepreneurial spirit and will to fight. Even Rupert Murduch, a business man’s businessman, said passively of loss of the near total loss of classified ad revenue (that he used to call rivers of gold), “Sometimes rivers dry up.” Can you imagine what William Randolph Hearst would have done to Craigslist?

These days, it seems the very word marketing has become as distasteful to most journalists and editors as it used to be to other professionals such as doctors and lawyers. And that’s too bad because most of the top management at newspapers is made up of reporters and editors that worked their way up.

If you dissect a newspaper carefully you’ll find numerous low-tech push marketing strategies intended to attract readers, draw them in, hold their interest and keep them flipping through the pages. A reporter with USA Today once explained to me how his paper “tries to create multiple entry points to each story.” Such devices or entry points include:

• Headline (Color, font size, placement or prominence)
• Subhead
• Byline
• Dateline (city and/or date)
• Lead
• Bridge
• Nut graph
• Jump
• Photo(s), Graphs, Images
• Section headers
• Call outs and/or pull quotes
• Sidebars
• Related articles

So far, in the online publishing world newspapers have tried to do is replicate their once successful model and strategies with completely different underlying technology and it isn’t working. Doing more of the same isn’t going to change that.

It’s time for newspapers to PUSH back!

You have to ask yourself, “What would William Randolph Hearst do to or with the likes of Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Craigslist and The Huffington Post? He would push back.

These days, Google is first stop for nearly all internet searches. Billions of searches are conducted every month on Google on every imaginable topic by consumers hungry for useful information, entertainment and even news.

Newspapers need to master and leverage this distribution channel and that means search engine optimization (SEO). Most online newspaper content is poorly optimized for the Web. Headlines and content are still written for a print format utilizing the same tricks or points of entry employed by USA Today. Headlines need to be written differently for the Web using more commonly searched keywords rather than trying to be too cute by half. Keywords need be repeated early and frequently throughout the article to attract the search engines.

Additionally, the points of entry need to be expanded to include interactive media including videos on high traffic video posting sites like YouTube. Newspapers also need to develop searchable stand-alone online databases that help consumers find answers to questions as a point of entry to their content. Imagine if The Philadelphia Inquirer hosted a site that ranked area hospitals based on public safety records and each record pushed news likely to be of interest. For example, a site where you can enter your zip code and it tells which are the safest hospitals your area. In a sidebar there could be a online newsboy calling your attention to the Inquirer’s recent coverage about these hospitals. In another section there could be an online directory of doctors and medical service providers in your area (paid advertising—not silly banner ads).

People use the Web much differently than they read newspapers. Newspaper reading was a form of entertainment, relaxation and keeping up with current events, sports and so on. People tend to search the Web according to their interests, looking for names of movies, celebrities, sports teams, political figures, etc. For example, according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool the average monthly search volume on “Eli Manning” is 250,000 searches. No newspapers or magazines made page one of the search results yet The New York Times search results show that they have mentioned in him 12,500 articles. That’s quite a bit of content for Eli Manning fans going to waste simply because it’s not on page one of the search results.

The top three results were Wikipedia, NFL.com and ESPN.com. What if newspapers like The New York Times created innovative “brand partnerships” with sites like these to create new points of entry to their extensive content? What if the three most recent Times headlines about Manning scrolled on the screen linking back to NYTimes.com site.

No matter what anyone says, The Huffington Post is not a credible threat to newspapers. Arianna Huffington is neither a shrewd businesswoman nor a good publisher. Instead she is a dilettante and self promoter. The Huffington Post is not yet profitable and generates a paltry $6 million in annual revenue from ads. That’s nothing compared to what newspapers used to earn and nothing compared to the, as yet, untapped potential of the internet to connect buyers and sellers. The Huffington Post is a poorly organized, jumbled mess of commentary news bits with some “vanity” ad spots that probably do relatively little for their advertisers in terms of actual business or even brand building. It’s only a matter of time before she loses interest and moves on to something new.

Lastly, the steep losses in advertising revenue that newspapers have suffered over the past few years to the likes of Craigslist can be gotten back. It’s true; advertisers have changed their expectations regarding advertising return on investment (ROI). They want to know that the money they are spending is bringing them customers and building their brand in real terms. For years newspapers have taken money from advertisers without regard for the efficacy of their ads. So much so, that they seemed to view it as their birthright. Well its not.

In this economy businesses need to attract new customers more than ever. And consumers still buy things based on ads. Newspapers need to take a look around at the way others are using various tools including sponsored “news alerts” sent via email to deliver content to readers and leads to advertisers. It is not going to be easy for newspapers to reinvent themselves, but they going to have to try.

I can be reached at sms256@georgetown.edu

Are Newspapers Dying of Terminal Uniqueness?

If 7-Eleven were going out of business and a reporter were assigned to write a piece about why, I think it would probably turn out much better than most of the recent pieces I’ve read about what ails the newspaper industry today.

 

Everyone knows that 7-Eleven sells hot dogs, Slurpees, milk and cigarettes. That’s what makes the cash register go “ca-ching.” Likewise, what makes the cash register go “ca-ching” at newspapers is advertising sales.

 

Still, such venerated publications as The Economist perpetuate the confusion about what business they are in by writing that newspapers are in “the business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers.” That’s like saying, “7-Eleven sells patrons to dairy cows and milk to patrons.”

 

The New Yorker noted, “Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.” The article points to the rise of the Internet and Craig’s list as probable culprits (among others) but fails to ask why. Despite being 9-pages long, the article fails to explain satisfactorily what has changed, why it has changed and what the business owners and management are doing about it.

 

It’s no wonder The New Yorker has never made a profit.

 

Articles like these tend to agonize over the myriad of failures by newspapers to adapt to the new reality and consumer demands of online media. Yet seldom do the authors demonstrate more than a glancing knowledge advertising sales—the underlying business model of most newspapers—how it actually works and what has gone wrong.

 

Just once I would like to read an article in which the journalist ventured down the hall to the ad sales department and interviewed the people that are actually minding the store. And they could add to that by talking to other businesses that have faced similar challenges associated with technology shifts, changing consumer patterns or simply mature/declining product lifecycles to see how they responded.

 

“Newspapers could learn a thing or two from the model that successful online publishers have adopted,” said Sean Griffey, President of Fiercemarkets in a telephone interview. Fiercemarkets is a business-to-business (B2B) online media company, serving five vertical markets with revenue from advertising. Griffey pointed to other online media companies that are also making money from online ad sales, including Decision News Media and Tippit.

 

Despite all their navel gazing, newspapers are businesses just like any other. They have to adapt and change or they will perish. These are lessons learned a long time ago by many of their smaller cousins in the trade press. “Our member companies tend to be smaller more flexible (than newspapers),” said Patty Wysocki, former Executive Director of the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) and VP of the SIPA foundation in a telephone interview. “When something doesn’t work they can try or test something new and the internet makes that much easier and gives them immediate results,” added Wysocki.

There are plenty of resources available to help journalists and newspapers understand and resolve their current crisis but I’m afraid as long as they insist on seeing themselves as unique in their “calling” their really isn’t much hope for them.