bill melnick, partner

Newspaper Datapoint of the Day

While the unabated decline in revenue and circulation is well understood, I have to disagree that the newspaper industry as a whole is doomed if the owners undertake a major shift in business strategy. The major metro daily has some distinct advantages that are not being fully exploited because of serious strategic misteps. These misteps include:
1. Failing to understand their real competition for readers and advertisers.
2. Failure to appreciate that marketwide coverage both in circulation and content does not meet the needs of the marketplace. All local media that provides marketwide coverage is in decline including TV and radio.
3. Failure to leverage the equity in the brand and bring that competitive advantage to bear inside a new business strategy that recognizes that the center of gravity for most metro readers is no longer downtown.
4. Failure to rationalize a fixed cost structure to more efficiently serve their local readers and more importantly their local retail advertisers who constitute some 85+% of ad revenue.
5. Overinvestment in their online product in a world of oversupply of online impressions and a collapsing CPM environment.
6. Failure to create and deliver products that are bottom up based on their constituents needs but instead deciding what readers should have and thereby not serving their advertisers well.
7. Blameing the internet and the economy for poor decision making.

We at Brand Idiomatics have what we think is the understanding and business ideas that will show newspaper owners how to restructure their business inside their current circulation footprint and how to make their products align with their stakeholders needs.
Contact us at brandidiomatics.com for a no obligation no cost introduction.