The Midwest Newspaper Summit confirmed my view that the Complete Community Connection offers the best path to a prosperous future for news media companies.
I heard some good ideas discussed at the meeting, and the best possibilities for generating new revenues were ideas at the heart of the C3 approach.
The summit, sponsored by seven state press associations, drew more than 250 people to the Grand River Center in Dubuque. I can’t remember the last time I attended a newspaper industry meeting where they had to set up additional chairs, but they did. Jo Martin and Jennifer Asa of the Iowa Newspaper Foundation deserve great credit for planning, promoting and presenting the program. I posted more than 100 tweets from the summit on Thursday, so I won’t try to recap here. Instead, I will give my views on how the key points of each speaker will contribute to that search for a prosperous future:
Alan Mutter. This was my first time to meet the Reflections of a Newsosaur blogger, whom I have been reading (and tweeting and blogging about) for a few years. Mutter is certainly one of the leading commentators on our changing news business. He cited some high-value niche products (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Packer Insider) that are succeeding as paid content. He showed an interesting spider-web graphic (I looked for it on his web site and didn’t see it) showing what he sees as the best opportunities for paid content. He sees greater benefit in content with business, rather than personal, use. And the content must be unique. While he is more optimistic than I am about the prospects for revenue from such “interactive fees,” I was pleased to hear his discouragement of general paywalls, calling the effort to protect print products through online paywalls a “losing proposition” over the long term.
What I liked most about Mutter’s presentation was his call for our business to be more aggressive in developing mobile applications, direct transactions and local business directories (the links are to my previous posts on the topics, all key parts of the C3 approach).
I also applauded his call for news organizations to become the best resources in their communities to help businesses master search-engine optimization and search-engine marketing. The fact that this won’t be easy might be best illustrated by the fact that Mutter felt he needed to explain the difference between those two terms to a newspaper audience.
Mutter cited the tremendous advantages newspaper companies have: great advantages: brands, credibility, content-creation capabilities, large local audiences, cross-media marketing impressions, advertising relationships, rich cash flows. Even with those advantages, he warned, news companies need to change to reflect consumer behavior “or you will be roadkill.”
While Mutter gave attendees plenty of food for thought, one of the most notable things was what he didn’t say: He didn’t mention ViewPass, the payment-data-collection tool he announced plans for earlier this year. Mutter wrote Monday that ViewPass wasn’t drawing the industry investment he had hoped for. As I have written, I like the data-collection approach of ViewPass, but I thought it would be a better tool for handling transactions for business customers, rather than handling paid-content fees. Several of us at Gazette Communications saw a demonstration of ViewPass. We thought the user experience needed some improvement and I encouraged a shift from the paid-content approach to direct transactions for business customers.
Karen Feldman. Feldman presented research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, pointing the direction marketing is taking with the “end of advertising as we know it.” As one who has called for the news industry to move beyond advertising, I was interested in the research.
I got an interesting reaction when I tweeted that her research showed that, just as many young people don’t bother with landlines (ditto for this middle-aged person), younger adults are increasingly getting Internet access but no cable television in their homes. Two young people quickly tweeted back at me that they no longer had or watched TV (or watched online).
Feldman showed how roles are blurring among advertisters, agencies, media, device manufacturers and networks in the rapidly changing marketing/information/entertainment ecosystem. If media companies don’t get good at playing new roles (developing mobile apps, helping businesses with various needs beyond advertising, etc.), our relevance and success will continue to decline.
Richard Doak. Doak (a former colleague at the Des Moines Register) gave a luncheon speech about nostalgia for the good, old days of newspapers. I share his love for the heyday of newspapers and am pleased that I was privileged to work for the Register at such a glorious time. But nostalgia isn’t a business model and Doak didn’t offer any meaningful solutions to help journalism find a prosperous future.
Mary Peskin. My former American Press Institute colleague shared results of a study conducted for API by Belden Interactive and ITZ Publishing. The most stark findings were the huge disconnect between what publishers and the public thought. Publishers (68 percent) thought people would have difficulty finding other news sources if the newspaper’s web site wasn’t available, but 52 percent of visitors to their web sites said it would be easy to find new sources. Three-quarters of news executives said people would turn to the print edition of their newspaper, while only 30 percent of their web visitors thought they would turn to the print edition.
Peskin showed a slide listing missed opportunities and current opportunities for newspaper companies. I worry that the industry’s current focus on paid content will result in a longer list of missed opportunities at coming industry meetings.
Marty Kaiser. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editor (and president of the American Society of News Editors) led off a panel discussion by noting the value of professional journalism. Even with staff cuts, he said, his organization has made its mark in the community through “enterprise reporting no one else can provide” on important topics such as drunk driving.
Jennifer Towery. The local president of the Newspaper Guild at the Peoria Journal Star gave an intriguing pitch for a new ownership structure she hopes to pursue to buy the Journal Star from GateHouse, the low-profit limited liability corporation, L3C. To work, the L3C approach needs more enabling legislation and an Internal Revenue Service ruling that newspapers are a suitable public purpose for such a corporation. Public service would be a higher purpose than profit, but low profits would be allowed, freeing the organization from some restrictions of non-profits. I’m not sure whether it’s the best path for the future, but it’s an innovative approach and I hope Towery or someone else tries it so we can learn more about it.
Chuck Peters. The Gazette Communications CEO, my boss, was the third panelist in this group, reviewing some of our efforts to address the obstacles of culture, organization and technology. “We have to fundamentally change our business model,” Peters said. He noted that our core business is not publishing newspapers or operating a television station, but “building community and easing commercial transactions.”
Roger Fidler. This was my second time during the week to hear the program director for digital publishing at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. I had attended part of the RJI E-Reader Summit Monday and Tuesday in Columbia, Mo. I didn’t tweet or blog about it at the time because I was exhausted from the weekend travel and funeral and wasn’t concentrating as well as I’d like. I also was in Columbia for another meeting, so I joined the summit in progress.
I love my Kindle and I think newspaper companies should seek to connect with our community through a variety of devices. So I support newspapers’ exploration of e-readers. But I am troubled that newspapers’ interest in e-readers reflects our wish that we could somehow cram our beloved newspaper into the digital world somehow without actually innovating.
I moderated the final panel, in which three young people in our business shared observations about what we need to do to reach a younger audience. Thanks to Chris Snider of the Des Moines Register, Thomas Ritchie of the Sioux City Journal and Chris Rhoades of Enterprise Publishing in Blair, Neb., for sharing their insights, particularly about the importance of social media and multiple media sources for reaching young adults.
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