10 Ideas for Newspaper Survival

After a yo-yo of hope and no hope, now we move to the only discussion that really matters: What to do about it. Edward Roussel, head of digital at the Telegraph in London, writes an inspired essay telling newspapers what they should do - if it isn’t too late.

The best approach for battle-weary media executives may be to let the fire run its course—however counterintuitive that might seem. That’s partly because there is little the newspaper industry can do to stop the advancing flames. But it’s also because today’s obsession with saving newspapers has meant that, for the most part, media companies have failed to plan adequately for tomorrow’s digital future. The economic downturn has added to the urgent need for a change of direction….

He makes 10 strong suggestions (my links added):

1. Narrow the focus. “…[M]edia companies need to invest more money in their premium content—editorial that is unavailable elsewhere but that is highly valued by readers. Go deep, not wide.”

2. Plug into a network. “…Media companies will increasingly see themselves as part of a chain of content, as opposed to a final destination. Journalists will act as filters, writing with authority but also guiding readers to sources that add depth to coverage. The future of journalism is selling expertise, not content.”

3. Rolling news with views. “Newspaper deadlines suit publishers, not readers. News is a continuum…. It’s not simply about serving breaking news—the AP and Reuters can handle that. The role of a newspaper company on the Web is to add value: look at a story from a number of angles, engage your audience, add multimedia.

4. Engage with your readers. “The explosion of blogging and social media Web sites has created a culture in which consumers of news expect to be included in the news publishing process….”

5. Bottom up, not top down. “The reporters on the ground are closest to your readers. They are therefore best placed to conceive, create and nurture community Web sites….”

6. Embrace multimedia. “Train editors to see video, photo galleries, graphics and maps as equal storytelling forms to text….”

7. Nimble, low-cost structures. “About 75 percent of newspaper costs have nothing to do with the creation of editorial content…. Newspaper companies are bad at technology, so a digitally minded chief technology officer will be able to get cheaper and more effective services by outsourcing. Newspaper sales teams don’t do particularly well at selling ads on the Internet; too often they sell ads that are irrelevant to a reader’s interests in an era when Google has made relevance key. If your sales team can’t beat Google, then outsource to Google.”

8. Invest in the Web. “Don’t try to suck too much revenue from your fledgling network. Your Web site needs investment before it can fly… A Web revenue-growth model cannot simply be a mirror image of the decline in your newspaper sales.”

9. Shake up leadership. “…If the people who run your newsroom aren’t passionate about your digital future, it’s certain not to materialize.”

10. Experiment. “…Don’t be afraid of failure. Try new projects, see what works, and build on success.”

Comments

[user225084-...:]

How about QUALITY, RELEVANCE and TRUSTWORTHYNESS?

The reason I no longer subscribe to a newspaper is mainly related to the quality of the content.

After the national media essentially gave George Bush a free pass before the 2000 (and 2004) election, as well as showed their utter cluelessness or menace in allowing uncritically the lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq war, I no longer trust any of our major newspapers with the job of informing me about the world.

It is that simple.

Instead of printing balanced and critical news reports, the papers were i busy prattling on about the endlessly rising housing market and pandering to their advertisers from the National Association of Realtors.

Those are good enough reasons for me, and they are just the tip of the iceberg of omission, incompetence and misinformation that has been passing for 'news" the last 20 years.

The papers

1. Missed the Iraq war fraud
2. Missed the housing and economic bubble entirely

Does anyone need additional reasons not to subscribe to the newspaper?

2008 Dec 26 10:23 AM

[Reader Ray:]

And what's your alternative? Television? Radio? Or how about Wikapedia? Ha! Ha!
The truth is, everyone gave Bush a pass and everyone missed the financial crash - not just newspapers.
So, this person's response is to take MORE resources away from our Last Best Hope. That's not a solution; that's escapism.
If newspapers fail, our democracy fails.


On Dec 26 10:23 AM user225084-justme wrote:

> How about QUALITY, RELEVANCE and TRUSTWORTHYNESS?
>
> The reason I no longer subscribe to a newspaper is mainly related
> to the quality of the content.
>
> After the national media essentially gave George Bush a free pass
> before the 2000 (and 2004) election, as well as showed their utter
> cluelessness or menace in allowing uncritically the lies and propaganda
> that led to the Iraq war, I no longer trust any of our major newspapers
> with the job of informing me about the world.
>
> It is that simple.
>
> Instead of printing balanced and critical news reports, the papers
> were i busy prattling on about the endlessly rising housing market
> and pandering to their advertisers from the National Association
> of Realtors.
>
> Those are good enough reasons for me, and they are just the tip of
> the iceberg of omission, incompetence and misinformation that has
> been passing for 'news" the last 20 years.
>
> The papers
>
> 1. Missed the Iraq war fraud
> 2. Missed the housing and economic bubble entirely
>
> Does anyone need additional reasons not to subscribe to the newspaper?

2008 Dec 26 02:06 PM

[Robert Ivan:]

The Biggest Problem with these suggestions is that they are content ideas. Even if they succeed, there is no revenue model here.

Where is the revenue model?

Traditional newspapers relied on advertising, but advertising is being replaced by internet marketing. Why place a crummy $1800 ad in a paper or $1cpm on a general interest newspaper site when the business can create it's own website? A site which is freely listed and found via Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Yellowpages.com, search engine searches, etc.

Newspaper need to remain relevant to readers as well as businesses in order to survive.

In all of the Tribune news, Detroit news, and now NYTimes news, I never hear of Strong revenue models being attempted. Instead we get completely useless features like an emailed e-edition. wow.

Point 9.Shake up leadership - touches on this, but no one is yet willing to attempt it in any meaningful way.

2008 Dec 26 04:18 PM

[Reggie:]

Can you imagine the number of newspapers NYT would have sold if it had a 10 part series on why investor Bernie Madoff is a fraud. AND, if it ran the first 10 days of January 2008.

Yes, it could have been done. There were plenty of people who would have stated how the "Madoff strategey" just couldn't work.

I would once again be a NTY subscriber.

But, alas it wasn't done and in-depth journalism simply means partisan journalism.

So, you can find 20 or 200 ways to improve papers. But until they once again serve the public's interest, they'll continue their journey to irrelevance.

2008 Dec 26 05:38 PM

[David H. Deans:]

That's odd. The exact same column was posted the day before. Deja Vu?
seekingalpha.com/artic...

2008 Dec 27 08:45 AM

[Old Wizard:]

It would be a breadth of fresh air if news reporting were objective, truly investigative with verified sources and the writer knew something substantive about what he/she was writing about. I believe current news reporting is blatently biased, incompetant, largely insufficiently substantiated, and in many cases naive at best and at worst nothing more than repetition of rumor or someone,s talking points. A return to the kind of reporting that our four-fathers had in mind when they guaranteed freedom of the press would bring back the readership regardless of the means of reporting.

2008 Dec 27 11:07 AM

[notsosmart:]

life goes on. i havent bothered with the nyt since they endorsed castro back in the eisenhower years.i did ok. all the major papers will eventually vanish as the younger generation for the most part wont or cant read them. locals might survive for ads,obits & school sports. its a buggywhip situation.

2008 Dec 27 12:04 PM

[CLH:]

Old W---Newpapers have always been biased. No one exists who is objective although most people think they are.

For a paper to be sucessful they most give the people what they want. The only media that is sucessful is talk radio.

2008 Dec 27 01:05 PM

[Roger Knights:]

It's been said that the most popular section of the newspaper is the comics. So here's a not-so-crazy idea: Why not give people more of them? IOW, why not have a four-page or six-page or eight-page comic section every day? There'd be enough value in that section, for comics fans, to justify paying the price for the whole paper. And the cost could be low, if comics syndicates were to offer papers substantial volume discounts. They could be talked into it, if a newspaper chain stated that it would buy ANY comics from a syndicator only on the condition that it offer a substantial quantity discount.

There are a lot of talented independent cartoonists whose work appears only in "alternative" weeklies. Some of them could be recruited at a low cost also.

It's worth a trial run, anyway.

2008 Dec 28 06:48 PM

[Mission Imp...:]

I thought the comments by David H. Deans on Dec. 25 (the first appearance of "10 Ideas") were insightful. I recommend that everyone see what he said then. [seekingalpha.com/artic...]

One quick note about the original column that inspired Mr. Jarvis ("To Prepare for the Future, Skip the Present" on the Nieman Reports website).

The author, Edward Roussel, stressed that he was offering "10 ways that will help newspapers make the transition to digital media companies." Now I'm sure that in writing his headline, Mr. Jarvis gave us "10 ideas for newspaper survival" where he meant "survival" in terms of "making the transition to digital."

But the headline definitely attracted my attention because I'm a newspaper marketer -- and that may just be the problem.

Newspapers may not survive in the internet; digital media companies will.

On Dec 27 08:45 AM David H. Deans wrote:

> That's odd. The exact same column was posted the day before. Deja
> Vu?
> seekingalpha.com/artic...

2008 Dec 29 05:01 PM

[Robert Osaz...:]

Newspapers should focus on leveraging their trusted brands to build local destination sites across print, web, and other platforms. Then they can go to their long time advertisers and give the more channels for reaching local customers with the same features, such as performance metrics and ppc, that make advertising on Google so attractive.

But "outsourcing" to Google is stupid. Google has content, therefore newspapers compete with them for eyes. Outsource instead to services that provide digital solutions without undermining you brand or training your longstanding clients how to advertise on content that competes with yours.

Relevance is important, but local relevance, not contextual relevance is where newspapers can win. When reading an article on a fitness festival at your local park, would you likely click on a promotional coupon your local gym, or a crummy adwords ad for getting rock hard abs? Newspapers have been local destinations for hundreds of years, digital media is not changing that, rather it expands the potential.

What is making it hard for papers is that the economics have changed. Investors still expect the profit margins a local monopoly provides, when expanded choices of content and advertising channels means that monopoly doesn't exist anymore.

Full disclosure; my company Verican.com is one of those companies newspapers "outsource" to, though unlike Google, we don't compete with our own clients. Your brand and roledex stay intact.

2008 Dec 31 02:50 PM

[Mad Hedge F...:]

Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle may be about to join the dustbin of history. The industry rag, Editor and Publisher, says that the privately owned Hearst Corporation has given the venerable paper an ultimatum to cut costs or close. The 150 year old Chronicle lost $50 million last year. Of course, this may all be a ploy just to beat up one of the last surviving unions, but they have made a similar threat to their paper in Seattle. Ironically, Hearst acquired the Chronicle and dumped the San Francisco Examiner in 2,000, which was then put on a crash diet and made profitable by its new owners. If the Chronicle goes it will join the Philadelphia Enquirer which went under last week, and the soon to be shut Christian Science Monitor. Google has been eating their lunch for years, and classified ads have migrated to Craig's List. It is tough to chop down a forest to make paper, get a union to print it, and manually distribute your product, and then compete against a one man email blast on costs. If the Chronicle goes it will be survived by a much smaller SFGate.com, one of the most successful web based newspaper portals out there. There could be a ninth earning save by a surprise buyer. But moguls willing to hemorrhage money just to promote a political view are a dying breed. Rupert Murdoch has been the only recent buyer of newspapers, and something tells me that a match with the Chronicle would not exactly be one made in Heaven. In five years there will probably be only two mass circulation papers left, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the Washington Post as an outlyer. Thousands of small, local, niche publications will take up the slack. As a long time print journalist dating back to the typewriter days myself, I am sad to see newspapers go. But you can’t exactly sit like Denmark’s old King Canute and order the tide to stop rising. Journalism is degrading into an army of guys banging away at the computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts. Trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste will be the victims.

Feb 26 12:29 PM

[rmmiles:]

Similar to your "10 ideas for newspaper survival," we at edit30.com offered four questions — and answers — that we believe are fundamental to newspapers' continued business viability. They are:
1. Is the current newspaper-in-every-hamlet model still valid?
2. Does every metro paper need to cover all of the world’s news?
3. Is the advertising-driven business model really the issue?
4. Are the newsstand and home-delivery channels still viable?
The link is edit30.com/?p=673.
RMM

May 20 06:02 PM