Entries for month: January 2010
How a Florida library's value calculator might translate to newspapers
29 January 2010 · By Earl J. WilkinsonNewspapers often have difficulty communicating value to consumers. We have paid newspapers, free newspapers, and now our free web sites are flirting with paid models.
I just ran across a personal savings calculator from the State Library and Archives of Florida, attempting to show library users the commercial value of their services. Titled “What Is Your Library Worth To You,” it's a graphical interface asking how many books borrowed, magazines borrowed, museum passes borrowed, how often you use a meeting room, and so on.
It seems like this is a simple idea for newspapers. How often do you read a newspaper left on a table? How often do you view a newspaper web site? How often do you call the newspaper for a question? And I'm sure there are more. It would be fascinating to generate a dollar value for the “free” stuff newspapers provide. It would be fascinating to calculate that over the course of those “free”' experiences.
In any event, click here to view the Personal Savings Calculator in Florida. Let me know how this could be applied to newspapers.
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At Apple e-reader’s birth, remember to respect the platform
27 January 2010 · By Earl J. WilkinsonI can’t recall the last time there was this much excitement among newspaper publishers about, well, much of anything. Yet the announced launch of the new Apple e-reader – with its promises of colour, video, audio, iPhone-like interface, and more – has publishers positively giddy.
Yet as Obama might say, there is a “learning moment” at this Apple launch that can’t be ignored.
Market value for content providers is generated by the clever integration of audience, content, and platform.
Not all audiences are the same.
Not all content is the same.
Not all platforms are the same.
Slicing across all three and finding the synergies is where money can be made.
The value of the Apple e-reader, at launch, will not be the same value in a year.
Start with the audience and work your way backward. This will be a tech-savvy audience with loads of disposable income, information-hungry, and gadget-starved. Probably dominated by men at first. The device’s high price tag guarantees a tiny audience. It’s not clear whether the platform is a mobile device on steroids or a shrunken laptop, so it’s not yet clear whether this is a device for long narratives or some new multi-media hybrid. Yet marketers and researchers need to figure this out quickly. Not all content at the newspaper’s disposal should be dumped into the e-reader format. Segment and target, segment and target.
Then, watch the audience morph in the next 12 months as device prices drop, second-generation devices and updates are introduced, a better understanding of how the device is used emerges, new device uses are invented, and more. Newspapers will tweak the content for the device. We’ll experiment with ways to generate direct revenue, encourage transactions via the device, or create a sticky experience for advertisers.
Value equals audience plus content plus platform. Remember this as the Apple story unfolds.
Keep your company's foot on the transformation pedal
20 January 2010 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
What's more important to publishers today, transformation or maximising what you have?
I'm getting a vague sense, this the third week of the New Year, that many newspapers are awakening to this question.
Newspaper executives accustomed to their still-generous holiday schedules – yes, some still haven't returned to the office as of this writing – are feeling the full effects of 18 months of downsizing.
Two and three jobs have been crammed into one, yet the same amount of work is expected to be produced. The New Year always produces a rush of activity in newspaper offices, and the 2010 rush is burying many offices.
Where do we get the mental bandwidth to squeeze in time to think about where our business is going? Or is that something we ponder in a serene moment during the next family vacation or overly generous holiday?
As precipitous revenue declines evolve into smaller revenue declines, I sense a retreat from transformation strategies at newspapers. Ask the CEO, and he'll engage you quite properly. But desperate times bred thoughts of new business models, new initiatives, a new way of looking at our industry. Time got carved out, even if much of that got centralised at corporate offices instead of using newspapers as ideas centers.
It's as if we've taken our foot off the transformation accelerator. Good times are returning soon, and we simply need to sell harder, market harder, work harder.
In the two most recent editions of Ideas Magazine, INMA members have been treated to two of the most profound looks at transformation – one with an eye toward the practicalities of transition and one with an eye toward how digital technology has turned upside-down other industries:
- Smaller may be better, long-term:
In the January 2010 edition, Guardian Media digital strategist Simon Waldman previews his upcoming book on creative disruption
by applying the lessons from the encyclopaedia, music, software, and consumer electronics industries to newspapers. Yet beware: the happy ending is full of innovation
and balanced business models ... and small companies.
- New approaches to circulation, advertising sales:
In the November/December 2009 edition, author James Gold discussed driving growth through strategic transformation.
In short, he says newspapers aren't build for the challenges in today's market and instead require fundamental changes to their organisational structures and how different
operations and company elements interact with each other.
Waldman shines the brightest light on Encyclopaedia Britannica which was devastated by competitors on CD and the internet. Yet the company reinvented itself across platforms to become perhaps more profitable on a margin basis than ever before. From a 1990 sales peak of US$650 million, though, their revenue declined 80% to an estimated US$130 million. Can newspapers deliver value 80% smaller than they are today?
Gold's road to transformation trudges through resource allocation theories and, ultimately, practically applying these to new approaches for circulation and advertising sales. Yet his road is the closest thing I've seen to a “how-to” road map at making sales operations more efficient and effective – a process that most newsmedia companies are loathe to invest time in.
We can't give up our focus on the transformation of processes and business models that this industry is built on. We need it at the local newspaper level, the corporate office level, and at the press association level.
INMA will keep pushing. Will you?
Paid content debate peels new layers in an industry torn by influence and profits
05 January 2010 · By Earl J. WilkinsonInfluence versus profits.
Sounds like an academic debate, doesn't it?
Yet as we usher in a new year, this simple stand-off is at the heart of agonising debates within newspapers about whether to put up barriers to content.
A publisher of a mid-sized daily laughed when I asked what business he's in. “Profit” – so put up the pay wall if that's what is necessary.
A senior executive at a major North American newspaper said his company is “absolutely opposed” to erecting barriers to content because their charter stresses they are in business to influence society. Said the executive of this Top 10 daily: “We'd be happy to make 5% margins and continue to influence. For that reason, we will remain all about volume, volume, volume.”
And now we peel back another layer of an industry we thought we knew.
These “academic debates” are being hashed out in very un-academic settings these days: board rooms of major newsmedia companies. This is not a staff issue or even a management issue. It's an ownership issue.
Everyone wants a profit. Everyone wants to influence. But what's the percentage? Is it 70% influence and 30% profit? Is it 50%-50%? I know newspapers that exist only for financial reasons – fair enough.
If you're an elite newspaper owned or controlled by a family or trust, cutting off Googlejuice may cut straight to the heart of vision and mission. Or perhaps you're a company with many newspapers, and you determine these name mastheads are influence brands and these are cash cows.
Cruel, but true.
What the industry debate has revealed is that not all daily newspapers are the same. Different visions, different missions, different reasons for being.
And the reason for being goes straight to the heart of how brands get marketed.
