How the digital-first approach can succeed at making money

I have blogged this week about various aspects of digital-first journalism. For any of that to succeed, digital-first must succeed as a business approach.

It will. It is. I’m not going to explain that in detail in this post, though. I’m going to shift to curation (an important process and skill in digital-first journalism), because lots of people have already explained the business aspects of the digital-first approach well.

John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media (and Journal Register Co. and MediaNews Group) explained the company’s business approach better than I would (which is good, since he’s the CEO) in his June address to the International Newsroom Summit in Zurich: How the Crowd Saved Our Company. His recent post on news media as medium and messenger elaborates, including the slide below. His September post announcing the formation of Digital First discussed some of the results of the approach so far (and we’re just getting started).

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5 years later: Newspaper Next didn’t change the news biz, but it changed me

Newspaper Next did not succeed in transforming the newspaper industry. But it transformed the career of this journalist.

N2 attracted great curiosity in the newspaper business five years ago today with the release of its Blueprint for Transformation report.

For the next year or so, the American Press Institute project was the talk of the newspaper business. My API colleagues and I made more than 100 presentations to  several thousand executives, sales reps, managers and journalists at industry conferences, seminars and workshops.

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

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Newspapers don’t need new ideas; here are lots of ideas for new revenue streams

Alan Mutter documents the no-longer-surprising fact that newspaper advertising revenues continued to fall for the 20^th straight quarter in the first three months of 2011.

This decline comes at a time when the economy has been growing for nearly two years, turning around declines in broadcast, magazine and online advertising. Mutter closes: “Clearly, newspapers need new ideas. They need to develop a broad array of targeted content and advertising solutions to serve diverse audiences across the web, mobile and social media.”

Actually, newspapers don’t need new ideas. They need to unshackle themselves from their old advertising-and-circulation model and start serious pursuit of the dozens of ideas already presented for developing new revenue sources. Here are some ideas (not all mine and not new here, but not yet in wide use, at least by newspaper companies):

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Engaging your community

I led a discussion of community engagement today for the Conference on the Newspaper Business at Yale, a gathering of college newspaper publishers, ad managers and financial managers.

I discussed the Complete Community Connection and mobile-first strategy.

I told them that young people are still getting jobs in this business (I hired a bunch last year). Even though lots of newspapers and other news organizations have cut jobs, others like TBD, Bloomberg Government and Patch have been hiring journalists. I recommended my advice for pursuing jobs in digital journalism.

Below are my slides from the presentation:

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Mobile strategy is the path to a successful future

I will be discussing mobile-first strategy today at the Reese Felts Digital Newsroom at the University of North Carolina. My slides are below. Here are some previous mobile-first posts that may help participants in the workshop:

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My blogging themes for 2010: job change, Twitter, business models …

Reviewing 2010 on this blog:

My job change to TBD was a major theme of the year here. My most-popular post of 2010 shared tips on job-hunting, from my own experience finding a new job and hiring the community engagement staff at TBD. That’s my second most-read post in two-plus years writing this blog. Other posts among the year’s leaders dealt with my job change as well: Pursuing a new opportunity in Washington, Wanted: vision for community engagement and Our community engagement team is taking shape. Another post relating to the job change took a longer view, discussing how I have twice redirected and rejuvenated my career. I also told how TBD’s launch prompted my first foray into public relations and brought back memories of an earlier launch. I explained why we need a director of community engagement, even though engagement should be everyone’s job. I have blogged as well for TBD, writing about our commitment to accuracy and transparency, and about why and how we chose TBD as our name.

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Resources for fighting the local battle

Today I’m a discussion leader for the American Press Institute’s Digital Delivery seminar. The morning program I’m involved in is The Battle for Local: Crowded, Competitive, Hyperlocal. I’ll be mentioning several resources for the seminar participants, and I’ll share them here.

Of course, I’ll be discussing TBD at some length.

Of course, I will be talking about the Complete Community Connection.

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Entrepreneurial journalists should pursue several revenue streams

Entrepreneurial journalists make a mistake if they think advertising is their only potential revenue stream.

Our entrepreneurial journalism class at Georgetown University will focus tonight on exploring possible ways to make money beyond display advertising. I doubt that many organizations would want to pursue all these possibilities. Particularly if you’re a small organization or an individual, you will need to pick your shots carefully and decide which have the most potential and which are worth the time and money it would cost to try them. Some of these opportunities are tailored for the sole proprietor. Others work better for a larger organization or at least for an entrepreneur or team with specialized technical skills.

Here are some revenue streams we will discuss in class:

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For journalists: It was the worst of times, it was the best of times

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

With apologies to Charles Dickens, who wrote one of the greatest leads of all times, that is the theme for my presentation leading off an APME NewsTrain seminar at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth this week. (The two-day seminar breaks the group in half, with each half following a different track each day, so I will open the same program for a different group each day.) The seminar organizers asked me to give a big-picture overview of the changing media landscape for the frontline editors who will be attending. This is a blog version of that presentation.

It was the worst of times. I won’t spend much time on this, because everyone at newspapers (my primary audience at the seminar) knows how bad things are. So I’ll just review quickly:

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C3 presentation for the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association

These are slides and links relating to my Oct. 2 presentation on the Complete Community Connection for the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association:

You can read more elsewhere in this blog in my posts on the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, on mobile-first strategy and on resources for journalists using Twitter. The slides are below:

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Time for a new blog name: The Buttry Diary

Mimi has been after me to change the name of my blog. So starting today, with the launch of TBD, my blog becomes The Buttry Diary.

I’m still hopeful that many news organizations, including TBD, find and demonstrate the value of the Complete Community Connection. Pursuing the Complete Community Connection was the right title for this blog when I adopted the title last year. And I’ll be pursuing the innovation ideas that started there in my role with TBD. But I’m ready to move to a new blog name and I like the initials of this one.

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I respond to criticism about obits from LancasterOnline editor

When I posted Newspaper charges for reading obits online: double-dipping on death, I invited Ernie Schreiber, editor of the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era, to respond. I posted his response as a separate post, because I think it’s fair to give him his say uninterrupted. But he raised points that demand or merit a response on my part. So I respond here, republishing his email to me again in full, this time with my commentary interspersed:

Steve,

It’s disappointing to learn that when you left the newsroom, you left behind fairness, the bedrock of credibility in our profession.    As you well know, an ethical journalist reaches out to the subject of a story before publication of that story, not afterwards.  And an ethical journalist does not engage in silly name calling.

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