Sorry to disappoint the pundits, but newspapers survived the storm

Reading through the inevitable year-end looks back at 2009, it's amusing to see how the pundits have just now “discovered” that the worst economic pounding in eight decades didn't actually kill newspapers after all.

That hardly makes newspapers a growth industry. That hardly means there aren't more cutbacks to come. That hardly means we shouldn't double and triple efforts to regain key advertising categories. That hardly means we shouldn't shift budgets toward business-building activities such as sales, marketing, research, and digital. That hardly means it hasn't been one hell of a ride.

Yet it does mean that what INMA has repeatedly said this year has proven true:

There is no pending death of the newspaper industry.

Second-tier newspapers in the best of times would die in the worst of times.

Debt-laden corporate parents stole the headlines, while the newspapers they owned quietly scaled operations and maintained profitability.

Newspapers with generic missions positioned in the ...[more]

Role of audiences in corporate strategy will determine publisher success in decade ahead

In the past month, INMA has released two reports I authored:

“Recreating Value for News Content In an Age of Abundance.”

“Newsmedia Outlook 2010: Last Minutes of Danger, Last Minutes of Opportunity.”

What ties the two reports together is the raging discussion at most newspapers today about the role of audiences in corporate strategy.

Audiences are atomising. Instead of one big homogenous audience for general-interest content delivered in print form, technology is opening up new options for content sources and style while simultaneously creating new ways to access that content.

The result is a mad dash to understand the new audience segments and maximise the new value formula of “audience + content + platform.”

This would be happening regardless of today's recession. Yet the recession – and subsequent acceleration of key advertising categories to the internet – has intensified the need to monetise content outside the traditional publisher model. And the only ...[more]

E&P's demise a sober lesson for newspapers

The Nielsen Company announced last week that it would close Editor & Publisher (E&P) magazine by year's end after 125 years of reporting on the U.S. newspaper industry. No official reason was given, though one can guess the lack of growth prospects and tepid profitability were the culprits.

As of this writing, there remains a distant hope that a “white knight” will save E&P. There's been an amazing outpouring of support and sentiment in the past few days. Whether that can be translated into the preservation of this institution is unknown.

In any event, the events of the past week provide lessons to be learned for publishers.

Let me start by saying the Nielsen announcement profoundly affected me. It was the equivalent of a relative dying. It literally stopped me down for several hours. From what I can see online, others had a similarly emotional reaction.

 ...[more]

Applying a popular remedy to the audience cauldron of big regional dailies

Two broad demographic trends are bearing down on newsmedia companies:

Working-class consumers and general-interest regional newspapers are separated and nearing divorce. News – on paper or digitally – is less relevant for this stagnant part of society, publishers are no longer focused on their needs, and fewer advertisers want to reach this demographic.

Upper-class consumers are consuming more news than ever before, yet are multiplying their platforms beyond print to smarter and faster versions of the World Wide Web via computer internet and mobile.

As the veil lifts higher on newspaper demographics, long-time fissures are being exposed through segmentation.

The newspaper industry is often portrayed as a one-size-fits-all industry. It's not. There are several kinds of daily newspapers in the world, notably:

“Quality” national dailies.
“Popular” national dailies.
Regional dailies.
Financial dailies.
Sports dailies.

The regional dailies make up the majority of the 10,000+ dailies worldwide and a majority of the newspaper circulation worldwide. ...[more]

Life after newspapers

Have you ever seen the History Channel series “Life After People”? The idea behind this series is that if people suddenly disappeared, what would happen to the Earth? In sometimes graphic detail, the series looks at what happens to animals, plants, cities, and the ecosystem.

Similarly, an entire cottage industry has emerged to ponder “life after newspapers.”

On the one hand, you have those who believe people will walk around uninformed, presumably running into walls with stupidity. On the other hand, you have those who believe in a better world in which all information is free and people share so much that we're all better informed.

What the History Channel series teaches us is that natural law trumps all. Without people interfering, nature runs its course. Buildings crumble, animals evolve, deserts eventually become river beds, and so on.

If newspapers disappeared tomorrow, the functions they serve in society would largely be taken over by two groups:

Bloggers, amateurs, ...[more]