There is a future, and a strong one, for newspapers
The Christian Science Monitor published today a commentary by myself and Alan Bauer, general manager of Elauwit Media. You can read it by clicking here. The gist of our piece is that there’s only one side of the newspaper story being told — the doom and gloom side. The fact remains that there are solid prospects for a re-engineered business model for the newspaper industry. It’s built on giving away the news, offering total market penetration for the advertiser and creating hyper-local products. It’s what we do at Elauwit Media.
While the major media have been focusing on the big newspaper meltdowns, I believe that the success stories (and we’re just one of those stories) aren’t being addressed — or even mentioned. That was the impetus for the piece Alan and I wrote for the Monitor. When we did some research, we found that the business model has gotten some discussion in the blog space (for instance, this lengthy and thought-out post by Aaron Renn). But there hasn’t been much recognition that some folks are actually executing on a new, worthwhile model.
My issue with Renn’s analysis is that the newspaper business doesn’t need such totally inverted change in order to work. We just took a big leap in a few areas (such as mailing our newspapers for free to the entire markets they are designed to serve). It’s not unlike what Toyota did after World War II with the “kaizen” concept. It’s big change in small areas that makes a business model work. (You’ll be hearing more about kaizen and the newspaper industry from Alan and I soon.)
In sum, I think the tombstone for newspapers is being chiseled way too soon. The business will evolve — and is evolving. It isn’t going extinct.
May 6th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Thanks for the link. I should point out that I’m more or less focused on the major urban daily. Community newspapers do seem to be hanging in there, but I’ve seldom seen a community newspaper do the type of investigative and watchdog journalism that people are worried about. Instead, they do things like publish death announcements. When my grandfather died recently, it was quickly put into the paper and a huge number of people showed up at the funeral home because they saw the announcement in the community paper. That’s an important function, as are things like reporting on the local high school basketball team and such. They help build and bind a community together. But that won’t do anything to keep an eye on statehouse shenanigans or to give the context around the big issues (immigration, the decline of the auto industry, etc) and what it means to the local area.
Or perhaps you have a different notion of community newspaper than I do?
May 6th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Aaron: You make a good point. And perhaps I was a bit unclear. I believe most of your ideas are solid. I just believe they go much further than necessary to sustain a strong newspaper industry. To wit: If The New York Times abandoned the revenue and the cost and aggravation of the controlled subscription model of their print product and instead delivered the paper to everybody in their target demographic, they could increase circulation greatly and increase the depth of the market they can penetrate for their advertisers — thus charging more money. It’s the model we use, and it works.
Also, your point about the death notices is taken well, too. Our papers fit somewhere between the two. We provide in-depth coverage of the communities we serve, but not so much the statehouse. Perhaps a bunch of us community papers could get together and subsidize that coverage.
In any case, thanks for noticing. And thanks for caring enough about our industry to think about it and intelligently write about it.