Midwest Newspaper Summit provides diverse views on challenges and future

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:

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Yes! New Business Models embrace new relationships

I am excited about the New Business Models for News project.

Not that I think they got it right. My first two comments on their site after they released their models and spreadsheets of financial figures for the first three years were critical. But what they do have right is the approach of openly consulting with the industry, responding collaboratively to critics and thinking differently about where the revenue for future news business models will come from. I’m hopeful that they will get it right.

I don’t like yesterday’s post, New Organizations, New Relationships, because it quoted me and linked to my blog, though I appreciated that. I like it because of the collaborative approach and the open mind. I like that it  advocates new relationships with businesses that go beyond selling advertising.

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Buttry’s Big Idea: Change the relationships

Here is the one-page summary of C3 that I gave colleagues at the Poynter/McCormick Big Ideas Conference today.

The central point of my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection is that media companies need to change our relationships. We need new relationships with our communities and with businesses. Here’s how I explain it in the blueprint:

For consumers, 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. For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money. We will become the Complete Community Connection.

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C3’s business services: communication and marketing

This is the third and final part of the business section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

In addition to offering advertising and direct sales opportunities at a host of niche and communitywide sites, the Complete Community Connection should offer a wide range of services to businesses of all sizes:

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C3’s business-service opportunities: Local search

This is the second part of the business section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

With this year’s launch of iGuide, we have started providing a solution for local search. We need to make this more than a business advertising vehicle. We need to make it an indispensable place to connect with businesses and organizations throughout the community.

This is an important example of how we can develop content (and revenue opportunities) based on evergreen use, rather than focusing on our current model in both print and broadcast of selling slots on a particular day or a particular time. Starting with the database already loaded into the iGuide, we need to expand the iGuide and build an audience for it through aggressive promotion on several fronts:

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C3’s business services: Direct sales

This is the first part of the business section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

I am convinced that media companies could have avoided the disruption we are facing today if we had seized 15 years ago upon the possibilities for direct sales online. They are the logical way to do business in the digital world and we have already lost billions of dollars in sales and an opportunity to develop a new business model by standing idly by while Amazon, eBay, Ticketmaster, hotel reservation systems and hundreds of other vendors bypassed us and figured out how to sell directly to the consumer online.

But our bread and butter has always been local businesses and many local businesses in our communities and every community are still struggling to catch up in the digital marketplace, just as we are. A media company that can provide a digital marketplace for its community and help guide local businesses to success in that marketplace still faces tremendous opportunities.

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C3’s business connection services

This is the eighth section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

The Complete Community Connection needs to become a one-stop shop for businesses and community organizations in the communities we serve to connect with customers and other people they serve. Traditional advertising in print, broadcast and online will remain part of that. I won’t address traditional advertising here, just as I won’t address traditional news coverage in the section on enhanced news. We know how to do traditional advertising and we need to continue offering that service. But our growth opportunities lie in our ability to develop new ways to serve businesses:

• Direct sales
• Local search
• Mobile opportunities
• Business communication and marketing services

Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with C3’s business services: Direct sales.

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