New Year's Resolutions for the Newspaper Industry

In his "Game Plan for Getting Through 2006," Steve Outing explains how newspapers should become "podcast gods" that aren't afraid to "wiki." And with all the money they're going to make from free classifieds, they may even be so bold as to ease up on Web site registration barriers and finally figure out how to publish where the young people are.

By Steve Outing
As another year is nearly upon us, it's time to craft those ritualistic resolutions. Mine will include exercising more, finding better balance between my work and home lives, cutting down on sugar and overall improving my diet, and keeping ever closer watch on media trends.

I think newspaper companies should settle on some New Year's resolutions, too, for 2006 will be a year when serious discipline will be required to make it through and still feel prosperous by the end. So to save you the work of coming up with them all on your own, here are my suggested resolutions.


1. "I will discuss more, talk less."

What's the Internet all about? Is it just another publishing medium for top-down content? Of course not, and 2005 made that abundantly clear. A real opportunity in 2006 will be in supporting the global conversation that is the Internet. It's about allowing groups of people with shared interests to find each other, gab, and play and work with each other.

Think about Rupert Murdoch, who in 2005 purchased the social-networking site MySpace.com, which has around 40 million users with personal pages and is running at about 17 million unique users a month, for $580 million. None of his News Corp. Web sites gets even close to as many monthly uniques as that!

There's opportunity for newspapers to get into this space. How about if in 2006 local newspapers work to figure out how to become the primary social-networking venues for their communities. That would mean giving every user of a newspaper Web site a personal profile page and supporting communication between them. Figure out a way to allow those community users to network with each other based on interests, neighborhood, etc.

This might best be applied at the niche-Web site level, rather than for the core news site. For example, a youth-oriented local-entertainment portal site published by a newspaper would be an ideal venue for MySpace-like personal pages.

(For a hint of what this might look like for a newspaper-run Web site, see Bakotopia and Northwest Voice, two sites of the Bakersfield Californian that are experimenting with giving all of their users a personal presence online. Not only do users benefit from such social networking, but the publisher gets to collect all sorts of useful information about its users' interests and preferences, a la MySpace. That can be mighty useful for targeted-advertising purposes.)

2. "I will dare to wiki."

2005 was the year of the wiki; by now, everyone is familiar with Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can write for and/or edit. Yet in the newspaper industry, only a handful of wiki experiments have been tried. Let's resolve not to fall further behind Internet culture in 2006, and initiate some significant experiments with wikis.

The industry learned a lot this past year. We now know that citizen-submitted content to a wiki can be as accurate as professionally edited content. A study released in December by the journal Nature discovered that science pages in Wikipedia matched that of Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of number of significant errors. And Wikipedia bests Britannica when it comes to its information being up to date and of much greater breadth.

Many (most?) newspaper editors allow themselves to be freaked out by the wiki concept. Avoid turning to wikis for topics like politics; focus on content that is factual and mostly without competing factions who will war with each other over the content, and then you may have something good.

I'll toss out an example of that: Create a local trails database and allow citizens to post descriptions, photos, maps, and their reviews. You've got yourself a living reference Web site to serve your community. Another: Create a wiki-based site that profiles all schools in your coverage area. Encourage parents, teachers and students to participate.

3. "I will be more interactive."

This is a repeat resolution, because you should have been doing this in years past, of course. So let's resolve in 2006 to get over any lingering fear of public participation online. My concrete resolution for you is to add an open comments thread on top of all content published on your news Web site. That means that for every story you publish, there's an easy way for people to post their feedback, questions, etc. Add this to every article, every photo.

I know that many newspapers are doing this, but it's still surprising how many don't yet (including some newspaper Web sites that I otherwise consider to be progressive). I consider this to be the lowest level of participatory media. If you can't even open up to the public enough to allow an open feedback mechanism, then I'd say you're still at odds with the basic tenets of the Internet.

And yes, I realize that open feedback can be problematic, which is why I recommend a system that does not permit anonymous comments by readers. Make people who want to post a comment to an article register and provide their names and contact information.

4. "I will seek out 'citizen advertisers.'"

The core of newspaper advertising is the sales representative, whether it be selling display ads or recruiting and taking calls for classifieds. But as Google so aptly demonstrates, the real future is in automating the advertising marketplace. I'm not saying to fire all the sales reps. But I do think there's much to be gained by automation used to attract new advertisers to the newspaper brand.

Newspaper Web sites can be and have been used to attract advertisers who previously have had no relationship with the newspaper. Lower ad prices to reach audiences online have opened up the newspaper brand to local merchants who previously found newspaper advertising too expensive, or who only wanted to reach a small segment of the community.

"Citizen-journalism" oriented Web sites represent a particularly good venue for small advertisers. At Morris Communications' Bluffton Today in South Carolina, which combines professional reporting with contributions from community members, the company sees opportunity in targeting ads and will be chasing that, according to Morris Digital VP Steve Yelvington. He hopes to see an expansion of the base of advertisers through low-cost automated ad-placement mechanisms.

Perhaps we can call these small businesses -- the shops in strip malls, the car washes, etc. -- "citizen advertisers," as Yelvington suggests. Just as "citizen journalists" are being encouraged to use a simple Web form to submit their articles and photos for online publication, citizen advertisers can use Web forms to post ads and coupons aimed at specific audience segments. (And they can do this at 3 a.m. if they want to.) Yelvington estimates that well over 60% of businesses in most towns where his company publishes don't yet advertise; automation could lower than number.

5. "I will learn to turn free classifieds into money."

I think that 2006 will be the year when we begin to see a wholesale change begin in the newspaper classifieds business. The big threats to the traditional classifieds model are lined up to give classified managers some sleepless nights. Craigslist is becoming a significant threat in more metro markets, obliterating revenues that newspapers used to take in from people paying for ads. Google has launched a service called Base that anyone can use to sell merchandise, a car, a house, or post a job opening. And Microsoft in 2006 will debut its free-classifieds service (thought by analysts to be a counter to Craigslist).

In 2005 we saw the beginning of the newspaper industry's reaction: Knight Ridder lifted fees for placing ads in its online classifieds for merchandise-category goods in 22 of its 27 markets. The San Diego Union-Tribune started offering free three-line ads online and in the print edition for goods valued at under $5,000. We'll see more of this within the newspaper industry in 2006.

The shift, of course, is from classifieds as direct revenue source to classifieds as content. I don't expect a complete transition to the latter to occur overnight, but 2006 is the year when you should be figuring out how to make money when the transition becomes complete in a few years.

Making money from free ads is not as crazy as it may sound. (Indeed, many publishers outside of the dailies have done that for years.) Publishers of daily newspapers may well keep some categories as fee-based advertising -- just as Craigslist is free but charges for job listings in a few cities. They will figure out how to get money from people who place free ads by offering paid "upsells" that improve a seller's chances of success, such as premium placement, enhanced photos (slide shows, larger images, etc.), video, etc. They will sell advertising around the classifieds "content"; for example, for classifieds search results on household appliances will be paid ads for appliance retailers and repair shops. And they will learn how to make money from the transaction itself between buyer and seller.

The money will still come, but from different sources than in the old, dying model. I hope that in 2006, you figure out how this will work for your newspaper operation.

A good source of information and advice about making money from free classifieds is the Classified Intelligence consultancy, which recently published a (not cheap) report called "Free Classifieds: They're all the rage, but where's the money?"

6. "I will publish where the young people are."

We all know the "problem" with newspapers: Young people aren't picking up the habit of print readership, because they're too distracted by the Internet, cell phones, Playstations and whatnot. So let's resolve to reach them where they are: on the Web, on instant messenger services, on cell phones, on Playstation consoles, etc. (A recent report from a colleague, Monique van Dusseldorp, noted that Playstations have become news devices. Take a look at this funny TV commercial from Belgium.)

News organizations have been grappling with the concept of convergence for many years. But in 2005, a clear trend emerged: Some newspaper companies have begun to incorporate online and print operations into one, breaking down the walls that have existed between print (old) and online (new) for the last decade-plus.

The New York Times provided the classic example. Its newsroom initiative introduced in 2005 went far toward the vision of the Times becoming a news company that publishes cross-platform; its reporters work with the goal in mind of feeding multiple channels, where everyone works on it all. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. described the newsroom initiative in a speech last October: "This eliminates the distinction between newspaper and Web journalists and thereby creates a new environment that integrates Times tradition with the most innovative online practices."

The same thing happened at USA Today, which recently promoted online editor and publisher Kinsey Wilson to the position of executive editor of both the newspaper and its online operations.

I think we've reached the point in the evolution of the news industry where online is equally as important as print. Indeed, I think that in another few years, print will be seen as the weaker sibling -- once the transition of readers and advertisers to digital is further along. 2006, then, is the year that newspaper companies should begin restructuring (if they haven't already) in order to operate under such equality.

7. "I will devise a better Web site registration scheme."

OK, I know that lots of people will debate me on this one, but I truly think that newspaper forced-registration is a problem for the industry, because it annoys many Web users. So for 2006, let's get put this dog to sleep and figure out something better.

Better doesn't mean abandoning registration, because it's a useful thing -- to both publishers and users. Useful to publishers for collecting audience preferences and interests, which can be used to deliver more intelligent advertising that users will find worthwhile because it matches what they are interested in. Useful to users because Web sites can deliver better-matched content and services to users that they know well -- ergo, a better user experience.

Here's what I think you should do: 1) Require registration only on things where it is necessary -- such as e-mail delivery of content; public submission of content or advertising; commenting on published content or posting to discussion forums; creating custom content feeds; viewing newspaper archives; etc. 2.) For content and services where user registration isn't necessary, provide incentives to encourage people to register. Give people a choice instead of forcing them into something and you'll nearly always get a better response.

I'm not sure that it's a bona fide trend yet, but in 2005 both the Houston Chronicle and the Toronto Star dumped mandatory registration to read articles, but retained it for the types of things mentioned above. I expect to see more newspaper Web sites follow their lead in 2006.

8. "I will become a podcast god."

In the dozen years since I left print newspapering to work on the Internet, I have not seen a new "thing" take off as fast as has podcasting. The speed with which podcasts have captured a mass audience is startling.

While the Internet world at large has gone podcast-crazy, newspapers have (as usual with something new) been tepid in catching on. A few papers' Web sites, like DenverPost.com, have developed early podcast programs, and WashingtonPost.com even has dived into video podcasting ("vodcasts"); both those news Web sites have found paying sponsors for their podcasts.

This ties in with item No. 6 above: Newspapers need to publish where the young people are -- and increasingly that's listening to their portable music players. So let's resolve to produce more podcasts in 2006; indeed, let's create a serious podcasting program of content from our newspaper staffs.

But let's not restrict podcasting to employees. Podcasting is just another form of blogging -- an inexpensive way for anyone with a computer and Internet connection to broadcast worldwide. It's a democratization of broadcasting. So with so many new voices podcasting -- certainly there are lots of new podcasters in your community -- it's a smart move to invite local podcasters to be part of your Web site. Just as many media Web sites aggregate community blogs, the same can be done with local podcasters. Or find the best local podcasters and bring them on board under your brand; they might get paid a little, or maybe just offered wider exposure.

9. "I will not become complacent; I will remain alert."

The speed with which the media world is evolving and changing shows no signs of slowing down; indeed, it may just be picking up again in a second Internet boom. Let's resolve to keep on top of what's happening in the Internet culture. Let's not get left behind the next time it turns in yet another new direction.

***

E&P welcomes your feedback. While we don't (yet) have an automated comments function, we invite you to send your thoughts via an old-fashioned e-mail. We promise to post letters in this space as quickly as humanly possible.
Steve Outing (steve@poynter.org) has covered the online news industry for E&P since August 1995. He is also senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

source: www.mediainfo.com