Dear Mr. Newspaper Publisher,
I don’t know if you have noticed but I am not the only one who no longer subscribes to your newspaper. I don’t know when this happened exactly but one day it just wasn’t on any of my neighbors’ doorsteps any longer. It would seem that you are now in a bit of a jam and in case you don’t know how you got into this unenviable position I’m going to tell you.
Newspapers committed suicide long before the Internet grew up.
I’m going to skip all the stuff about Craig’s List spoiling your overpriced classifieds goldmine and Yahoo winning over your once-loyal advertisers. I’m going to enlighten you about something fundamental. Years ago adults had this mythical thing called free time. People actually woke up in the morning and read the newspaper at a thing called a kitchen table while they drank their morning coffee. Forty-five minutes later, the kids went to school, and the adults drove fifteen minutes to work. When you got home at 5:30 some lucky adults had about an hour and a half to kill before dinner was ready so they plopped down in their easy chair got the paper and watched the news at the same time. Somewhere along the way the world got busier, traffic got worse, kids had soccer/ballet/kung fu practice every day, people ate standing up, and both mom and dad had to have an income. Free time evaporated and along with it time to sit down and get newsprint stains on your fingers. Times changed but The Times (and the Tribune) didn’t.
Now in case you are now thinking you are just another sad victim of circumstance and progress, read on. At the same time as the world changed, your costs got larger or you got greedier which meant that the ads got bigger and the news got smaller. Soon there was more news coverage in the comics section than on your home page and when people missed reading your paper for a few days they realized they were just as poorly informed as before so why re-subscribe unless you were house training a dog?
The average Joe, easily distracted by shiney things found that TV news filled in the gap perfectly well until this amazing new thing call the Internet appeared in people’s homes. That may be the final nail in your coffin since it’s obvious that you don’t know how to compete with anyone who understands giving people what they want when they want it.
Now don’t step off the ledge yet or throw yourself into the printing press (which probably isn’t working anyway). I have some suggestions for you.
- Admit that the Internet is not going away. Yes say it aloud in the board room. It’s therapeutic and necessary. Gear your business towards it and consider print a specialty section of the company.
- Learn that news is your content and stop hiding it behind ads that get in the way. Forget pop-ups, interstitials, and (GASP!) pop-unders. Reading anything online with such things feels like swatting flies at a garbage dump.
- Think local, sell global. Do your best to represent your home market. Forget AP, it’s everywhere. What people need is for your to expose the crooks at city hall, not tell them about the calf born with two heads in Bangladesh. People know where to get that news and it’s not from you.
- Print only for home deliver and really charge for it. Sell the service and convenience aspect. Some people really want a paper delivered to their house and would be willing to pay a premium to get your great content.
- Come up with a Newspaper Printing Stand. Instead of printing a huge soon-to-be-pulped stack of papers for a newspaper stand on every corner come up with a stand that prints a paper on demand and place them in a few strategic corners of the city. It could always have one or two printed and ready to sell so people don’t have to wait. Put them in large office buildings, connect them to the internet and always print THE LATEST NEWS! (in all honesty I saw this one on Moobag.com)
There. Five ideas is enough for right now. I’m busy just like everyone else and you can’t expect people to spend a lot of effort rescuing you when we are so busy rescuing the banks, the auto industry, auto suppliers, mortgage lenders, healthcare and on, and on, and on…
Sincerely,
An Ex-newspaper Reader
