As reported everywhere The Detroit Free Press (GCI) and The Detroit News are going paperless (somewhat) in their quest to remain a going enterprise. There is a thorough story about the specifics on MarketWatch.
Here is Dave Hunke, CEO of Detroit Media Partnership and Publisher of the Detroit Free Press:
“The dynamics of delivering information to audiences has changed forever due to technology. Today, consumers are more empowered than ever before. In order to serve them well, we must find ways to be more nimble. That means we have to change the way we deliver that news – not just in subtle ways, but in fundamental ways.”
I applaud the effort to innovate their business model. I have some serious reservations about their strategy however. Simply going online will not save the news business. Bragging that you’ve had “50 million pageviews” and “won Pulitzer Prizes”, while not being able to become economically sustainable should raise red flags about how inefficient newspaper websites are.
What I don’t like:
- I would be disinclined to pump any additional money into a general information news site. That model is a failure. The ad rates just do not support the costs, and people are unwilling to pay for subscriptions.
- Limiting newspaper deliver – do it or don’t do it. Limiting deliver to “Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays” tells me that your content is valueless and your only interest in the paper at this point is bleeding dry the last remaining advertising revenues.
- “Providing subscribers daily access to electronic editions, exact copies of each day’s printed newspapers delivered to your email” -who cares? How many Kindle owners read these papers? And if I’m accessing my email, I can probably access the internet. How many successful new media organizations use “e” editions? I can’t think of ONE.
What I do like:
- Parsing out your content into discrete niche websites. This is great for building better user experiences, better branding, and generating higher CPM’s from niche content. – they don’t go far enough though. They need to break apart the newspaper websites. Bundled products don’t make sense online.
What I would have done (at this paper or any general interest paper):
- Completely eliminate the printed newspaper as a daily product.
- Offer as a paid premium service a weekly newspaper LOADED with advertisements and inserts. In my latest study, print newspaper readers prefer papers with ads over ones without ads 9 to 1.
- Take every single section in the newspaper and newspaper website and create their own distinct new site with their own URL and everything. For example the freep.com business section will now be freepbusiness.com. This will lead to better branding, better user experiences, and higher CPM’s as a result of targetted content.
- Parsing out all the sections of the business also quickly reveals where the winners and losers are. This is important because newspapers need to quickly build their new industry.
- Work with your advertisers to create new solutions which fulfill their needs, otherwise they will go elsewhere. One example: I don’t know who owns this Detroit Wiki but it needs to be developed by the local newspapers. This would be THE BEST WAY to serve their community and create new revenue streams. The Wikipedia page for Detroit has 124 references, only 20 are from the two newspapers mentioned in this article.
- Newspapers are caught in a paradigm shift and if they don’t reinvent their purpose, their value addition, then they will be the next “tower records”. I’m still not convinced that these Detroit papers know how fundamentally flawed their businesses have become in the presence of the internet.
Here is the official press conference video of what went down.
And Here is Bob Giles from the Nieman Foundation (and former editor&publisher of the Detroit News)
Related posts:
- Detriot Newspapers Going Paperless – you’ll probably read about this in the newspaper tomorrow
- Part 1-The Best News Reporting Story About The Housing Crisis is Not In a Newspaper
- Part 2-The Best News Reporting Story About The Housing Crisis is Not In a Newspaper
- ABC News Cancels Its Newspaper Subscription – FOREVER!