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Death of newspapers, failure to emphasize key advantage, the internet, failure to brand, core customers are dying off, Wall Street Journal, real estate ads, Craigslist
Interesting article today about how 30 major American dailies are on the block, none with any apparent buyers on the horizon.
What are your theories on the death spiral of newspapers? Before you say, "Well, the Internet, you dummy," I would agree with that partially. At the same time, I think the biggest problem has been that newspapers have utterly failed to adapt over the past 35-40 years to a rapidly changing media environment. It's no coincidence that the circulation of daily newspapers peaked the same year that CNN went on air.
Having experiencing trying to market newspapers, let me offer my list.
1) The Internet, Of Course. Today, you don't have to wait 24 hours for the day's headlines to be delivered to your door. You can have it on your computer within milliseconds of the first bulletin. Yet, there are other problems with newspapers....
2) Failure To Emphasize Its Key Advantage. For national and international news, the Internet clobbers the local newspaper. For opinions and editorials, the same is true. However, newspapers have been utterly blind to the one area where no other news source comes remotely close: Local news. As in what goes on in one's own city, and how important that is to the readers.
3) Failure to Brand. Even now, newspapers continue to use the same tactics over and over again: Promote, promote, promote with their $13.99 subscription offer. The problem is that you could sell a year's subscription to the newspaper for a nickel and you wouldn't get many takers, because newspapers have failed to invest in branding their product--instead treating themselves as if they were a public utility. It says something about the industry that they're still talking about branding as a radical new development in marketing, even though Coca Cola has been doing it for the past 130 years.
4) Failure to Understand The Business They're Really In. Are newspapers in the business of delivering a rolled up bundle of papers to a subscribers' door, or are they in the business of delivering important information to the customer? Instead of making their internet sites the core off their business, newspapers have instead treated internet as an added convenience for their readers--never thinking that it could be a powerful vehicle for advertising and classified advertising. Instead, most newspaper web sites function as if it were still 1995, rather than 2008.
5) The core customer is dying off. I'm 46 and I read two newspapers a day, my local paper and the Wall Street Journal. However, I am the exception in my age group. Until the newspapers start marketing their content (Which, again, is not the rolled up bundle of papers that gets tossed into the driveway daily) to the under-45 crowd, the lights will start going off in newspaper offices around the country in the next 5-10 years. So, this Sunday, you should buy a copy and put it in a vacuum sealed bag, so your children and grandchildren will know exactly what a newspaper was like.
And that makes me sad, for the local newspaper still has an important role to place, particularly in understanding the workings of local government. Yet, because of newspapers' own innate stupidity it will soon go the way of the dodo.
Way way way back in the early days of cable TV when I was in college I took a course from one of the journalism profs. It was a generic "marketing concepts for all" type class but the guy was a hard core newspaper man and he used a lot of stuff from newspapers.
I distinctly remember that he said CLASSFIED ads were the life blood of newspapers. Many newspapers BOUGHT OUT the "freebie" type car/boat/motorcycle ad papers to defend their classified turf. Ditto for REAL ESTATE ADS.
Somehow they were asleep at the switch when it comes to stuff like CRAIGS LIST -- they could SO outdo the rinky-dink, scam and spam filled ads. If they had a little gumption they could do a full blown "ebay" style system of bidders / payment systems but with a LOCAL focus. I cannot believe they do not do that!
I love newspapers. There are some they DO a great job delivering content electronically {LOVE the WSJ via Blackberry!) but too many newspaper just seem like they are content to wear a concrete block around their necks and get tossed off the back of mafia fishing boat -- if they do not deliver NEWS that people care about they will cease to exist and that will be a VERY BASD THING for many many reasons.
Great point about Craigslist's effect on classifieds. When we had to post a job opening we used to use the Inquirer (Philadelphia) which was packed with jobs every week. As the section shrunk over the last few years, though, the price increased to a ridiculous amount, something like $600 for a 10-line ad on Sunday. We moved on to Craigslist and professional message boards and had better results. Now the Sunday job section is down to less than a quarter of its former size and the type size and column width has nearly doubled. True, some of this is economy, but people just don't use paper classifieds any more. Furthermore, instead of focusing on the local connection for online ads, they have teamed with Monster, which we never found to be effective.
As far as the rest of the paper, I still enjoy sitting down and reading the Sunday paper, and I'll buy a daily if I'm sitting in a cafe for lunch or something. But the Sunday paper has been shedding sections for years to cut costs, contributing to a catch 22 - fewer features = fewer readers = fewer features, etc.
ya, i talked to both the local papers down here a week or two ago to run an ad for a friend. we still have an older demographic down here. one of the guys actually came out and said, listen, people buy our paper for the sunday classifieds. that there whole circulation was based on saturday and sunday sales. he said during the week people go on the internet. told me i could save money if we just ran the ad on the weekend.
i never realized how severe the situation was. pretty interesting. maybe ill talk to some people about the website you mentioned, lol. try it on a small scale and see what happens, lol.
thanks for the idea *laughing all the way to the bank*. haha j/k.
The real reason newspapers are dying is because they are CHARGING something I can get for free via television, radio, and the internet (well, the internet is not exactly free)... when you compete with something that is equivalent in value and CHARGE for it.. you are going to die... you cannot compete...
The real reason newspapers are dying is because they are CHARGING something I can get for free via television, radio, and the internet (well, the internet is not exactly free)... when you compete with something that is equivalent in value and CHARGE for it.. you are going to die... you cannot compete...
Actually the newspapers produce most of the real reporting that is used on the internet. Many other sites post links or editorialize off the information developed by newspaper reporters. If the papers go away, so do the reporters. That's the real risk.
As a society we need a vibrant free press. We used to have a model of paying journalists using revenue generated by printed ads in the paper. That model has been broken by the internet. We need to find a way to replace that or the reporters will go away. I'm no big fan of the state of journalism today, but that would not be a good thing for our democracy or society in general.
The lifeblood of newspapers is advertising. The amount of news they run is driven by the amount of advertising they have to pay for printing. Subsriptions, news stand sales are important only because ad rates are based on number of readers.
This isn't a cynical statement but is based on 20 years of experience working for daily papers, including some of the biggest, reporting, editing, going to daily editorial meetings and doing layouts.
Newspapers didn't jump on the Internet bandwagon until they could make it pay with advertising.
They've been predicting the death of newspapers since the day of the linotype machines. They're still around. And as long as they've got advertising, they'll survive.
They aren't healthy, but they're hanging on.
Check out Editor and Publisher for an indepth look at the industry.
EditorandPublisher.com - Information Authority for the Newspaper Industry (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/index.jsp - broken link)
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