This is my column for Monday’s Gazette:
Even investment wizard Warren Buffett is giving up on newspapers.
“For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” the fabled billionaire told stockholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, Saturday at the annual meeting in Omaha. Buffett owns the Buffalo News and part of the Washington Post, so he’s speaking about his own investments. Newspapers, he said, “were only essential to advertisers as long as they were essential to the reader, and that is changing.”
On my blog last week, I published a vision for how media companies can become more essential than ever to our communities, A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.
The blueprint describes a company much different from the company this community has known for years, publishing The Gazette, broadcasting on KCRG-TV9 and serving a variety of niche audiences with other products.
If you’re interested in the future of Gazette Communications, I invite you to read the blueprint. It’s a 38-page pdf or a long series of links on the blog, too much to publish in The Gazette, but I want to share some of the main points with our print audience.
The plan has been praised in media blogs as ambitious, and it’s too far-reaching to promise that we will accomplish it all soon. But we wanted to share the blueprint with our staff, community and our industry for a variety of reasons. We want our employees and community to understand our long-term goals as we make changes and launch new projects.
We also want our peers to pursue the same vision, if they think it has value. We’re a small company with limited resources and we won’t be able to pursue all aspects of this vision immediately. If some other companies can pioneer some new ways to connect their communities, we would love to learn from their experience.
The blueprint encompasses current products such as The Gazette, KCRG and our web sites and other publications, but it doesn’t focus on products. It focuses instead on a new relationship with the community in an increasingly digital world, a way to become essential again.
To consumers, the blueprint says, “we will be their essential connection to community life — news, information, commerce, social life. Like many Internet users turn first to Google, whatever their need, we want Eastern Iowans to turn first to Gazette Communications, whatever their need.” To businesses, the Complete Community Connection “will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money.”
Newspapers and televisions make their money by selling mass audience to advertisers. The more people we gather to our audience, the more we can charge for ads. That model has served our business and community well for a long time. But it isn’t the most effective approach for the digital marketplace. The Complete Community Connection calls for a new revenue approach, where we provide new services for business customers, including direct sales and local search.
News (enhanced by using digital tools and interactivity) remains at the heart of the content we provide for the community. But the C3 Blueprint also calls for development of new types of content providing entertainment, helpful information about the community and personal-content opportunities giving the community opportunities to tell stories about big personal news such as births, weddings and retirements.
Even if you just read The Gazette and watch KCRG, our blueprint for the future will affect what you read and see, because we are working to secure a prosperous future for this company.
Updates: I mentioned in an earlier column that my nephew Patrick was undergoing treatment for leukemia. He was released from a Boston hospital Friday after seven weeks and a bone-marrow transplant. He will continue outpatient treatment and remain quarantined for months, but he is recovering.
Mimi and I have made a couple weekend day trips, following the suggestions of readers answering my request for advice on places to enjoy in Eastern Iowa. We have visited Backbone State Park, enjoyed tacos at Obie’s in Maquoketa and sampled and bought some Iowa wines at Tabor Home Winery outside Baldwin. Thanks to Chris Galligan, Carolyn Kohler and Katie Karsten for the suggestions (and to others whose suggestions we’ll follow in coming weeks).
Congratulations: To The Gazette’s outstanding copy editors who won recognition this past week from the American Copy Editors Society for their outstanding headlines during last year’s flood. We won honorable mention in group headline writing, the only newspaper recognized besides the winning Los Angeles Times entry.
[…] I’ve spent the better part of five days reading and thinking critically about Steve Buttry’s blueprint for the Complete Community […]
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