Last weekend, my presentation for the "Other Future of News" in Minneapolis was focused a representing the "small newspaper" challenges. The event was co-hosted by David Brauer of MinnPost.com, and Taylor Carik of BringMeTheNews.com.
This event came on the heels of another Future of News conference with Minnesota Public Radio that had a lot of big dogs, very heavy solution discussions but didn't really get into the entrepreneurial spirit that is emerging. OFON I felt did that well. The best blog on it (while incomplete) is from Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the Pioneer Press
I had five minutes and couldn't completely cover even all that I was prepared to talk about so here is a little more of my presentation:
There is too much discussion floating around about the decline of news organizations taken solely from the perspective of the major news organizations.
The metros have the larger megaphone. They are laboring under a different set of circumstances than the non-metros. Metros have huge and isolated debt loads. They had (and still have) very high advertising rates as well as operating costs. They are limited in their ability to respond quickly because their size forces the creation of more "silos" in departments which means collaboration is minimized.
Non-metros, on the other had, are suffering from limited investments, lower salaries and a move for more centralization. However, they still retain the ability to move faster and more collaboratively within their own walls. They also are much closer to the communities they cover and subsequently have more emotion invested by readers and advertisers. Anything small news organizations try in a community will get you instant feedback. That's a plus.
That said, conspicuously missing from the discussions on the future of news is a representative voice from vast majority of community newspapers that are trying some innovation albeit on a shoestring.
At the Free Press, we don't have the most modern of equipment and we are hard-wired to our awful corporate online design from which we will be freed by late January 2010. My newsroom is slaving away with the old bubble iMacs operating on an antiquated OS9 system. To compensate for the lack of tools, we have peppered some PCs and laptops around the newsroom to give them access to what they need.
The evolution here is slow both in the newsroom and more importantly with our sales department. In the newsroom, I would venture that about 20% are fully engaged and, frankly, that's the segment I spend time with. We are encouraging moving to "mobile journalism" (mojos) to expand our territory.
And yet our sales force is still grasping to fully comprehend how to intertwine both print and online as a multimedia package. We also are struggling with online advertising design that moves away from print design principles.
Contrary to some belief, news organizations are not trying to catch up with innovation. In the late '80s and early '90s, news organizations were exploring new opportunities with such groups as New Directions for News with Jean Gaddy Wilson. The problem is we didn't come up with any silver bullet then either.
So what's the urgency now? It's not readership which has been slowly migrating to other media over time; it's advertising. And everyone in all media is suffering from the lack of it.
Yet, discussion about our future is focused chiefly on how to deliver content. That is misplaced (Later, I will argue it's not HOW the content is delivered but WHAT kind of content is delivered.) Yes, content needs have changed but we are finding newspapers are raising rates and increasing revenue. So content is not the major issue.
Secondly, no discussion should be seriously considered without a viable plan on how to monetize it.
One of the suggestions I offered was for reporters and editors to take an advertising rep out for lunch to learn what challenges they face and advertisers are telling them about why they aren't advertising.
That prompted a "tweet" from SPJ_DMC that said "Uh, got ethics?"
Is it really the preference of journalists to keep an arms distance away from those people who bring in the money to help pay the salaries of our news organizations? Why? Is it because they fear trust in our reporting will be tainted. Well, sorry, but that bus has already left the station and it had nothing to do with perceived coziness with the ad staff.
Then there's the demeaning stereotype that salespeople have no ethics. If journos would talk with the ad staff, I'm certain they would learn that ethical behavior is just as important for them. Their clients have to trust them or they won't get the business.
And while I wasn't suggesting reporters should talk to advertisers, I'm warming up to that idea. As one tweet following the OFON conference said "Have journos closed themselves to valuable resources by refusing to talk to advertisers?"
Journalists should treat all sources regardless of who or where they are with some skepticism but not avoidance. I think reporters have enough backbone to say no when presented with a proposal that doesn't smell right.
I'm asking that journalists listen not negotiate for stories.
In an earlier life, I was with a group of very talented journalists with our own regional magazine. We wrote the stories, shot the photos, sold the advertising and handled distribution. The entrepreneurs of today and survivors of the decline will need to be a jack of all trades. T.D. Mischke found that out when he lost his job at KSTP and moved to City Pages.
As one participant at OFON said, "Now it sounds like journos have to be tweeters, videographers, bloggers AND marketers." Yep. Probably.
One of the major initiatives we started this year was something very simple and yet will mean the very survival of our business. Listening.
For our advertisers, we started a feedback loop on the effectiveness of their ads. We are asking them "Did if work for you?" Knowing that an expectation like that is paramount, our designers and ad reps pay closer attention to what the ad will say, how it is designed, when it will appear. They have a vested interest in the success of that ad, just as much as the advertiser does.
We then will collect what common principles appear to make an advertisement effective and use them on further designs.
For the newsroom, that means listening to our readers. We have commissioned the Organizational Effectiveness Research Group at Minnesota State University-Mankato to do a consumer study that asks specifically what information they need to plan their day, choose their entertainment preferences, make decisions about work, get engaged with their child's school, become more involved in local politics. We wanted research from the consumer perspective, not the newspaper which typically asks do you want more state news, national news, movie reviews, etc.
We then will look at how we can provide those pieces so we can be relevant.
We hope to have the results of that study by the first quarter of 2010.
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