Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Fixing the Newspapers

With rare exception, newspapers throughout the United States are losing subscribers.

Pretend that you have been called in to advise newspaper management in a major city on how to turn their paper around. Some points that may come to mind:

  • Upgrade the caliber of your editorial team. Don't employ anyone who is not extremely knowledgeable and who lacks common sense. Avoid the tokenism of hiring quotas on the basis of sex, race, or ethnicity and instead seek intellectual diversity.

  • Keep the editorial slant out of the news stories. Don't think we haven't noticed how some stories are covered and which stories are never covered.

  • Initially, try doing at least one thing well instead of many things poorly. People might subscribe if they know the local coverage is extraordinary; indeed, that may be the main reason why they will subscribe. In many newspapers, the international/national coverage is a joke and the local coverage, sports scores, movie times, and ads are the only reasons to subscribe.

  • If you can't compete with cable news or the Internet when it comes to national and international coverage, go around them by hiring correspondents who can provide deeper coverage. Michael Totten is a blogger who has posted some fascinating pieces from the Middle East. Why haven't you hired him or his equivalent? Whatever happened to the concept of newspapers having war correspondents?

  • Consider providing versions of your paper that go beyond the common practice of having different sections for different parts of the city. Instead, let subscribers choose if they prefer a politics-heavy version or a sports-heavy version or others emphasizing travel, finance, entertainment or local news. By having specialized sections, you can attract advertisers who want to target their ads. Your research may reveal that your readers [make that non-readers] would prefer a smaller paper of higher quality that is tailored to their interests instead of one filled with stories they don't want to read.

  • Others?




3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent post, Michael. Here are some more items to think about.

Use your paper, email, and web site as cross-promoting channels. Nothing can beat email or text messaging for alerts. Nothing can beat the web for in-depth coverage with pointers to resources. Nothing can beat the physical paper for ease of use and a display of the range of important stories of the day or week.

Think mobile. What can you do to make your information product available no matter where people are?

Think audio. How can you use podcasts or other audio to enrich your coverage? The New York Times, the Economist and Business Week all do this a little differently. Pick one or combine as needed.

Think about ways to make money besides subscriptions and ad revenue. Can you create products and sell them, online or elsewhere? Can you create specialized subscriptions (see Michael's point on different editions)?

Try out a new version of "investigative reporting." That's just an updated form of muckraking. No investigative reporter gets front page space, a byline or even a pat on the head for investigating an issue and determining that things are good. How about investigating issues in ways that you provide your readers with suggestions that will make life better?

Finally, here's something to forget. Forget the last century. If you had a newspaper franchise for most of the last century you could be as dumb as a box of rocks and still make carloads of money. Those days are gone. They are not coming back in either of our lifetimes. Get over it.

Anonymous said...

Enjoyed your piece and agree with most of your suggestions -- might argue the feasibility of the hiring one, but that's for another day.

I would also suggest including be a presence in your community. A newspaper can't claim to be the local newspaper and local expert and then hide behind their office door or in their remote headquarters.

Michael Wade said...

Wally and Yoni,

Thanks you for your thoughtful comments. I fear that the newspapers will want to keep on doing what they've been doing - only more of it - and will keep on getting what they've been getting.