A speaker at the recent Mississippi
Press Association winter convention stirred things up by telling
the gathered editors and publishers: “You all need to find new jobs
within 18 months.”
“The audience turned on me,” the
speaker, Alan Jacobson, CEO of Brass Tacks Media, told me after the
convention. “They didn’t want to hear that the Internet is here,
even in rural Mississippi.”
Jacobson, of course, is not the first
to forecast for the demise of ink-on-paper newspapers, just the
most recent. “Sixteen-thousand newspaper jobs were lost last year,
and over 100 newspapers of all sizes closed.” He said the profit
margins are shrinking, “and when the expense line crosses the
income line, papers get shut down.”
“They all said that once the recession
is over, things will be good – but it’s not coming back. This is a
secular change,” Jacobson said.
My predictions are nowhere near as
dire as Jacobson’s. I think that newspapers that quickly change and
modernize can survive by earning both substantial print and online
revenues.
I saw an Arbitron report back in 2003
that alarmed me: When a household moved from dial-up Internet to
high-speed Internet, the daily time spent reading a newspaper fell
from four-tenths of an hour to just over one-tenth of an hour. The
same report said that people with high-speed access nearly doubled
the time they spent online. Since high-speed was generally seven
times faster than dial-up, that meant users were consuming 14 times
more media than with dial-up.
Now, virtually everyone has access to
high-speed Internet at work, home, coffee shops, libraries and fast
food restaurants – even in rural Mississippi. Many more people have
“smart phones” and other easy access to the World Wide Web.
The Web isn’t the only problem. It’s
all about data.
After the invention of the telegraph
and news wire services, newspapers were king of media as they
delivered content that was produced elsewhere –
national/international news, financial data, sports, features.
Radio broke the data-delivery
monopoly, beginning in the 1920s. But as late as 1935, newspapers
sold more than 45 percent of all advertising in the United States.
By 1995 – the beginning of the World Wide Web – newspaper
advertising had fallen to a 22 percent share. That’s the same year
TV passed newspapers with a 23 share. Daily newspaper readership
fell from 80 percent of Americans in 1964 to 59 percent in 1995
(pre-World Wide Web.)
Research by Zenith shows newspaper ad
shares still ahead of Internet advertising share. Zenith projects
Internet advertising to pass total newspaper advertising sometime
in the next decade. Every other media besides Internet is in a
steady decline.
The research predicts print newspapers
will remain a major advertising play – behind only all TV
(broadcast and cable) and slightly behind all Internet
advertising.
So the trick isn’t – as Jacobson
suggests – for all publishers to find new trades. The trick – in my
opinion – is to be the local source of combined print and online
advertising.
Critical points for survival:
- Maintain control of the rights to local content generated by
the newspaper. This includes knowing who is re-using your content.
This means doing as much as your can to protect your copyright
privileges, and barring unauthorized scrapers from using your
content.
- Create a dominant local Internet product that features content
that is different from your print product. The days of simply
“shoveling” the print content to the Web need to end. Your Web
product should rely heavily on video, audio, user-generated and
other content that is not print-centric.
- Have a trained sales staff that knows how to help your local
merchants advertise and market in this new world. If your sales
team is properly trained – and if you have the right online and
print products – the local newspaper franchise should fare well
from many years to come.
It’s a tough struggle – but it’s a
battle that can be won with dedication, good local content, a
willingness to embrace new technology, good strategic thinking and
a well-trained staff.
P.S., Alan Jacobson says he’s probably
going to stop going to press association conventions. I, on the
other hand, am looking forward to attending conventions for many
years to come!
(Marc Wilson is general manager
of TownNews.com. He’s reachable