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The problem with: newspapers

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Newspapers used to solve two problems:

  • How do I stay in touch with what’s going on in the world around me?
  • How do I reach people and tell them about what I have to sell?

Their problem now is that both those problems have been solved better, faster, cheaper, by other people. Readership of newspapers have declined because people get their news from Facebook. Advertisers have reduced spend because of this, and because there are now better, faster, cheaper ways of reaching audiences. Newspapers themselves have developed digital businesses focussed around their traditional classifieds businesses. Realestate, automotive, jobs, personals, have all been introduced in an attempt to either grow market share, protect market share, or block market entry by competitors. As a result, these businesses arguably do a better job of solving one of the core problems that newspapers traditionally solved and as a consequence, newspapers have seen their business’ revenue decline rapidly – losing $7 of print ad revenue for every $1 earned online.

So what’s the solution?

Many solutions to buoy an ailing industry have been tried in recent years. Some have been provided a glimmer of hope (e.g. paywalls or auto-refresh) but ultimately they’re all bound to fail because they aren’t solving a problem better, faster, or cheaper than the new dominant competition, and they aren’t refocussing on broadening the problems they solve.

Paywalls, in particular, hope to increase people’s sense that the content is “only available in a vacuum, without easily accessible alternatives“. Which as we know, is both unlikely to be true, and I suspect, unlikely to be compelling at a scale large enough to sustain the businesses it aims to support.

But when your business is “leading and shaping public opinion on the issues that affect Australia” one feels like you’re not particularly focussed on the needs of either your readers, or your advertisers. You’re probably more focussed on the importance of your own ideas and influence. In other words, you aren’t solving their problems, you’re solving yours.

How to innovate?

The solutions to innovating these businesses lie in tapping the production strengths of the organisations concerned, and harnessing the distribution and logistics networks used to bring a (formerly?) daily paper to market and reconfiguring them to solve new problems better than the competition.

Some ideas

  • Go niche – If there’s anything the web has proven is that there’s always a market for evergreen content around specific topics of interest. Plumb those niches, and make them available easily and for a longer period of time.
  • Issue timelines – For want of a better name, link your stories under themes, headings, issues, etc. Go back years or decades. Become an effective, interlinked, and living history of the communities you publish for. Tap the long tail.
  • Build better utilities – Those utilities you developed like a realestate site, an automotive classifieds site, or a personals site, they’re viable business on their own not just an extension of the print publication. Stop constraining their growth by anchoring them to the old world.
  • Use your data – The piles of data you gather around the individual browse behaviour of your online readers, combined with their profile data can be used to deliver a customised content experience. Do it. If you do it right, your readers will thank you.
  • Drop the mastheads – Not completely, but realise that the paradigm of the masthead can be broken so that your existing content can reach a new audience in more impactful ways. You’re not a daily newspaper anymore. You’re a content pool which can be exposed to audiences in a thousand different ways.
  • Start conversations -
Who should we watch?
  • Facebook – As they become more and more commercialised they risk becoming less and less effective in solving the problems that made them popular in the first place. However, right now, they’re still the main news source for a large portion of the internet-connected world. The news they bring covers activity of friends and family, associates, your community, and areas of special interest.
  • Guardian/New York Times - Continually re-inventing the way they engage with their audiences, trying new things, and investing in the future. These are the clear leaders in the game of reinventing traditional newspapers.
  • Huffington Post – A new model of digital journalism and news aggregation. It remains to be seen if the radically different model it deployed in it’s early life, can continue to evolve under it’s new owners AOL.
  • Gawker - is a standout blog network. No doubt these networks have pushed the envelope of journalism in the past, however it remains to be seen if they can stay relevant and continue to innovate as fast as they once did.
A final word
Innovation is hard. Particularly when you operate in an industry that has been stagnant for decades. The path from here, to the ideal point in the future is fraught with difficulty. Balancing the need for short term revenue with the need to ensure a long-term future, the changing nature of the skills required within the organisation, and the pain all of that can cause are too difficult for some organisations to deal with. No doubt some of the ideas above can’t sustain the same size, skill base, or structure as the businesses currently have. It may be that the newspaper organisations of the future are a fraction of the size that they are today. That’s ok. There’s no doubt that they’ll be vastly different, driven by a different set of values, with revenues from different sources from today.
So how should newspapers get there? The process of migrating from one point to another is individual to each business and something we’ll discuss further in this blog. The need for these businesses to innovate rapidly and dramatically is clear. We just hope they’re genuinely innovating though, not just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Note: while researching this post I came across this and found it very interesting indeed.

 


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