Shaping the Future of the Newspaper
The newpaper publishers are even more !@#ked than I thought they were if what I witnessed today was the best thinking the World Association of Newspapers could come up with.
I’m through the first day of our 2-day Media24 conference. Pretty interesting overall, with standout presentations from Steve Pacak (for shoot-from-the-hip straight-talking), and Sophia Stuart (for a snappy presenation and great nuggets of mobile wisdom).
For me, the shocker of the day was Martha Stone’s presentation.
I’m not going to knock her style or her slides here, it’s really the content that I took issue with.
Martha is the director of “Shaping the Future of the Newspaper” at the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. From Wikipedia, “The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization made up of 76 national newspaper associations, 12 news agencies, 10 regional press organisations and individual newspaper executives in 100 countries. …the association represents more than 18,000 publications on five continents. ”
She delivered a long and winding presentation, full of figures that painted a frightening picture for newspapers in developed markets, and a moderately interesing one for developing markets. I think the figure quoted for North America was a 24% decline in the last year.
No matter… we’ve all seen the horror stories about the lay-offs and daily papers closing.
For newpapers, it’s pretty grim out there.
So what do do about it? Amongst the many approaches, I picked up these clangers:
- Listen to your customers, find out what they want. You think? Wow. How long did it take to think of that one?
- E-Readers. sorry, Amazon’s got you by the short hairs on that one. Won’t do better than a 70/30 split in their favour plus you lose the redistribution rights
- Create a digital download version of the newspaper, and then get your readers to print it out at home on their own inkjet printers
- Create hyper-niched, local, subject-focussed papers, like a newspaper for people who love a particular breed of dog in a particular area. We’ve already got ‘em – they’re called ‘magazines’ and they are in almost as much trouble as newspapers
- Create super-niche publications, and then get souped-up logistics guys in vans to drive around dropping off particular papers to particular people on particular days. So you suggest we courier newpapers to individuals? And that’s a scaleable model for the future? Better than the internet? Better than wireless?
- Head for the super-high CPM rates ($478 I think the slide showed) up at the end near “direct mail”. Avoid the internet down in the couple of cents CPM on the other end of the graph. You can’t build a business on a market inefficiency in the age of digital media. It won’t last.
- Have a ‘voice’, tell ‘stories’ instead of repeating facts. Sorry, the bloggers own this one. You can’t beat passionate amateurs writing their stories for free. Free.
These were just the ones I remembered. To her credit, Martha did say that micro-payments are not going to work, which is correct. She is obviously speaking to a lot of smart people and listening to some of them. The bit that blew my mind was the near-sightedness with which she tackled the challenges facing newspapers.
Driving vans around is not a workable strategy in an age when the Kindle and others are getting content over wireless digital networks.
Asking people to download and print newspapers at home is ridiculous – that’s what we all use the web for right now.
Without using any paper.
And the hyper-niche market is well served by Google and the internet at large.
Any weird niche or fetish I care to explore is only a search term away.
In related news, the world’s largest manufacturer of newsprint recently declared bankruptcy.
Leave me a comment – what does the future hold for the tree-killers?
How will we line parrot-cages in the future?
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You seriously can’t listen to a word that comes out of WAN… they’ve been clueless for years!
They should really let dead trees rest in peace and get over themselves…
You would think that someone actually sat down and thought hard about this. While reading it I actually thought, is this a joke or what.
Robert, that’s the truly frightening thing – they’ve given this a lot of thought over a number of years, and they still can’t get past the idea of printing on paper and driving trucks.
Hi Tim, dont worry, the AP has a plan lol. DRM! Now what does that remind us off?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/media/24content.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Hi Tim
Something many people need to do is take a step back and see the wood for the trees (excuse the pun here). More and more, people and businesses are having to look at the bigger picture of life on Earth and the history of human evolution to get an idea of making decisions that impact everyone.
I’m sure that when better materials were found to make paper, papyrus manufacturers either fought hard to keep what they knew or moved with the times and learnt new skills. When TV was discovered, teams of celebrities known for radio theatre either changed their vocation in despair or trained to act behind a camera.
In the same light, at a time when consumption of goods by mankind (like paper) has such a huge global impact, and somehow (esoterically speaking) the answer to this crisis just happens to have been discovered within the last few years, these corps should really wake up to new possibilities while they can still do it at their leisure. There’ll come a time when they won’t have a choice and the change will hit them hard.
After all that rambling (thanks for reading) I just want to say… parrots should not be kept in cages anyway
Go well.