Tag Archives: BusinessModel

Newspaper Association of America Abandons Its Members

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NAA sent me a letter with this month’s Presstime magazine letting me know that this is the last print edition I will be receiving.  They are moving online only.  Truth be told, it was probably the last print edition I would be getting anyway you see I graduated from NYU in January and NAA wants proof that I still qualify for their student rate. I do, but you know what NAA, I’m not wasting my time to send you the appropriate paperwork. 

Why is NAA, the NEWSPAPER Association of America, eliminating their print publication and moving online only?  The reason they cite in the letter is “to adapt our organization to the realities of today’s newspaper business”.  I’m calling bullshit on their reasoning.  The real reason I suspect is because NAA is too big a coward to try something innovative and instead is hoping to just hang in there a little longer like everyone else and hope for the best.

According to NAA’s website, here is the association’s purpose:

Today, NAA serves the newspaper industry in strategic efforts to:

. Serve as a catalyst for industry growth
. Identify and disseminate examples of industry innovation
. Provide tools to exchange information and ideas
. Advocate and communicate industry views and interests to the Federal Government and to third-party standards and measurement bodies
. Communicate the vitality of newspaper media to external constituencies including the advertising community, Wall Street and the news media.

    Did you read the first and last bullet points?  What an awful message eliminating print sends to NAA’s advertisers, NAA’s members, and to the advertisers who spent roughly 34 Billion dollars in PRINT advertising last year. Continue reading →

    How UPS Saves Millions on Delivery Costs

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    I remember writing about this a while ago, but can’t find it and now the issue has come up again.  United Parcel Service UPS saves millions of dollars a year on fuel costs by avoiding left hand turns and idling.  Here are the details.  

    In 2007, UPS route planning technology, which minimizes left hand turns:

    - shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes;
    - saved 3 million gallons of gas; and
    - reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.

      Perhaps newspapers can follow suit?  It won’t save the industry, but if physical distribution is part of their business model, they must implement these policies.

      Big Screen Kindle – What’s It For?

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      It’s for Textbooks

      Amazon plans big screen Kindle: Textbook margins are the real aim not saving newspapers -from ZDnet

      Editor in Chief of ZDNet, Larry Dignan convincingly writes that the new Big Screen Kindle’s are designed and marketed to serve the $8.6 Billion college textbook market.

      It’s for Newspapers

      Looking to Big-Screen E-Readers to Help Save the Daily Press -from NYTimes

      “…it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies.”

      We don’t know who it’s for

      Will Anybody Buy The New Large-Format Kindle? -from wired

      Wired is owned by Conde Nast who is owned by Advance who owns many newspapers like the Staten Island Advance and Newark Star-Ledger so this is an interesting take on the situation.  Where’s the market demand?

      Steve Buttry’s Blueprint For News Media Companies

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      A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection is exactly what it sounds like.  Steve Buttry is editor of The Gazette and GazetteOnline a news source for eastern Iowa, Cedar Rapids, and Iowa City. On his blog he graciously shares his detailed 38page blueprint for the path ahead for Gazette Communications.

      This is a must read for all news media professionals.  The document is insightful and creates great potential for reflection on business practices. I’m not saying his blueprint is THE best, but even if you hate his ideas, there are lots of salient points to build on. One obvious forehead-smacking point he raises is that the details of his blueprint, “will be determined not by my decree but by the needs of the marketplace and by the creativity and abilities of the staff”.  Did you catch that?  THE NEEDS OF THE MARKETPLACE.  In the internet paradigm, what needs are you now filling?  I love it.

      Something I wish Steve would have addressed more clearly is the distinction between geographic communities and communities of interest.  Does he agree there is a distinction?  Why or why not?  Can print and online serve both communities equally well? How does his blueprint address these distinct communities?

      I emailed Steve and asked about the above points.  Here is his response:

      Robert, absolutely there is a difference between geographic communities and communities of interest. However, the local media organization has its strongest opportunities to appeal to communities with at least a geographic tie. For instance, we attract attention of Iowa Hawkeye fans around the world. They are a community of interest, but they have a geographic tie. The blueprint details plans to help countless communities of interest within and overlapping a geographic community – the family/friends of each high school graduate or engaged couple, congregations, etc. Print can serve some communities of interest (we have a business magazine and a magazine geared for young adults), but because of the cost of transportation, print is quite geographically based. Thanks for asking.

      There you have it metaprinter readers, ask and you shall recieve.

      RELATED:

      How are you going to make money? By changing your relationship with your community -from OJR.org

      IBD Editorial Slams Major Media

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      Dying For An A -from Investors.com

      Investors Business Daily has a short article in their editorial section today entitled “Dying for An A”.  The article starts out with this line, “From once-revered print institutions to formerly dominant TV giants, the major media are crumbling. And the White House press secretary just told them why, “grading” them a “strong A” — A for acquiescence.”

      The article then goes on to explain that “White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who recently took it upon himself to give the White House press corps a collective report card affixed with a gold star, telling reporters he was awarding them “a strong A” for their coverage of the administration’s first 100 days”.

      Zing!

      IBD has an agenda and people usually either love IBD or hate it, but you have to respect their ridiculous number of revenue streams, and print circulation… growth!  IBD generates approximately $10 million in annual revenue from its seminar business.” as reported recently in TheBigMoney.

      Sustainable Revenue Idea For Newspaper Publishers

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      “What does your audience want from you – and do you know what they will pay for?”.  -from PWC

      Many newspapers have not honestly asked themselves this question because if they did they would be the largest creators of business websites in their DMA.  As a consultant I work with local business owners to do things like build / rebuild their websites, add their sites and business to listing sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp and others.

      Newspapers should be doing this, not me.  It should be a big, growing part of their revenue stream.  I know of only one newspaper doing something close to this and that is Cox Ohio publishing.  Here’s an excerpt from a quick interview with Internet General Manager Ray Marcano from Cox Ohio Publishing explaining more.

      End America East Session Follow up with Ray Marcano:

      RI- Looking forward, what will your main revenue streams be?
      RM-  Direct sales not tied to print / classified upsells.  Our direct sales are up 30% year over year.

      RI- Tell me about your Ad Studio business.  When did it launch?  Who is using it?  Is it a major revenue stream?
      RM- We started that business in 2008.  Our biggest customers are media companies outsourcing to COX for ad design.  It is a significant new revenue stream.

      RI- Is an online only presence like the what the Seattle P-I did anything your company has considered?
      RM – No because our product is thriving, that’s not to say we don’t have stand alone online sites because we do have 937moms.com and activedayton.com

      RELATED:

      Free Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers

      Part 2 More Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers where I talk about setting up an advertising fair for for courting local businesses.

      Second Street Media Solutions Owners Matt Coen and Doug Villhard Discuss Upickem online contesting platform.

      PricewaterhouseCoopers Releases Newspaper Outlook 2009 Report

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      Outlook for newspaper publishing in the digital age | 2009 report -from PWC.com (pdf)

      56 page report on the outlook of the industry ask lots of great questions the industry should be asking itself like “What does your audience want from you – and do you
      know what they will pay for?”, many newspapers have not honestly asked themselves this question because if they did they would be the largest creators of business websites in their DMA.

      Newspaper Outlook 2009 Related Video (sorry PWC doesn’t allow embeds at this point).

      Topix Creators Brag about Creating a Large, Useless News Site

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      Topix is a news aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography.   Topix LLC is a privately held company.   Gannett, The McClatchy Company and Tribune Company own a 75% stake in the company.

      Today Topix announced that Topix becomes #1 news site of Gannett, Tribune & McClatchy Internet Portfolio -from Topix blog.  I have a few problems with this:

      1. This sounds like a made up category,  ie. Metaprinter is the #1 news site of the Metaprinter Inc. portfolio!
      2. Topix is ranked #32 in the news category on Alexa.
      3. Compete doesn’t show Topix beating USAToday as stated in the above article.

      4. I don’t know anyone who uses or likes Topix.  In fact, reading through the comments at the above post, it seems most people suspect the site is full of flame wars, trolls and hate speak.
      5. For their size, Topix does not have a vibrant hyperlocal online community.
      6. Where are the local advertisers?

      I’ve contacted them for an interview.  We’ll see if they can clear some things up.

      UPDATE:

      An anonymous tipster has revealed to me that some news sites use Topix for their article comments section.   See for example this Gannett owned news site: citizen-times.com

      Note the ‘comment on Topix forums’ option directly below the social bookmarking tools in addition to the Pluck Sitelife comments option at the end of the article.
      “If you choose the Topix comment option, and enough discussion is generated on topix, it presumably bubbles up the story on Topix and the inbound links to the news site generate page views and more discussion”.

      A little more digging on my part revealed that Tribune is using Topix.net to link to “Related News From the Web” as here below the Google Ads box in the body on their Baltimore Sun site.  The purpose here again is to increase pageviews and links.  It seems that Topix is nothing more than a solution for member newspapers to game the system and/or get more Google Juice.

      TweenTribune Signs Up Another Newspaper

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      TweenTribune is on a tear signing up their third newspaper, in almost as many weeks, since launching the platform.  The North Carolina based Wilson Times is now using TweenTribune for their NIE program and founder Alan Jacobson reports that “ads are running at wilsontimes.com on its homepage and interior pages to promote tweentribune”.   If Alan Keeps this pace of new announcements up I’ll have to start charging him for bandwidth consumption on metaprinter.

      Read my interview with Alan Jacobson to learn more about “community of interest” news sites and how TweenTribune can monetize a newspaper’s NIE campaign while bringing it into the internet paradigm.

      Interview with Journalism Online LLC Strategy Consultant Merrill Brown

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      BIO:  Merrill Brown is the founder and principal of MMB Media LLC, which provides clients with management and strategy consulting, corporate, editorial and program development, business analysis and marketing services. Since the founding of MMB Media, clients have ranged from companies in the news, information and wireless businesses to a large foundation. Brown serves as Chairman of the Board of NowPublic.com, the leading citizen journalism company in the world.  (bio provided by Journalism Online LLC)

      RI- what is your affiliation with journalism online LLC?
      MB- I am the strategy consultant at the moment, this is a start-up so we all have varied roles.

      RI- I see in your Bio that you are an advisor to evri.com, a site that looks and feels to me like a news aggregator, does this complicate your involvement with Journalism Online LLC?
      MB- No, it’s not an aggregator at all it is a natural language search site that builds related topics pages for new sites and others.  Our largest distribution deal is with WashingtonPost.com and if you look at the bottom of every new story page you’ll see our widget there. Continue reading →

      The Bakersfield Californian to Deploy TweenTribune

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      The Bakersfield Californian joins The Virginia-Pilot as early adopters of the Alan Jocobson inspired news platform, TweenTribune. Both newspapers are using the site to revitalize their moribund NIE programs.  The platform is web based, safe for kids, NIE compliant, and monetizable.  If that is not incentive enough to consider it, the Audit Bureau of Circulations will cease to count NIE newspaper copies as a form of paid circulation in the beginning of 2010.   The TweenTribune sites will fill that need.

      Though TweenTribune is a niche site for kids, Alan’s concept focuses on newspapers publishing many “community of interest” news sites rather than a single geographic community newspaper website.  Currently, this is a more common strategy for magazine publishers and blog networks, but the idea is to publish many independent niche news sites to focus readership, drive engagement and command higher CPM’s from advertisers.

      In an email with Alan he emphasized that newspaper publishers are interested in the TweenTribune platform as a model for lots of niche sites – “…the number we’re throwing around is 1,000 sites. They want to use TweenTribune to test the efficacy of that strategy”. Continue reading →

      Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery today announced the formation of Journalism Online

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      Media Leaders Form Journalism Online, LLC
      Company Will Be Global Platform for Easy Payment Option Enabling New Revenue Models For News In Time of Crisis

      ‘Strong interest’ already expressed by major newspaper, magazine companies

      NEW YORK, April 14, 2009 – Citing “the urgent need” for a comprehensive, immediate plan to address the downward spiral in the business of publishing original, quality journalism, experienced journalism and media industry executives Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery today announced the formation of Journalism Online, a company that will quickly facilitate the ability of newspaper, magazine and online publishers to realize revenue from the digital distribution of the original journalism they produce …continue reading Media Leaders Form Journalism Online, LLC

      Here is what the above press release boils down to:

      “…there is an urgent need for a business model that allows quality journalism to be the beneficiary of the Internet’s efficient delivery mechanism rather than its victim,” said co-founder Steven Brill Continue reading →

      More Free Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers

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      The original post from October 2008 Free Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers touches on increasing sponsorships vs cpm, building experiences around your top draws, and improving navigation for better user engagement.

      The economy has really shit the bed since my first post on advertising. With that in mind, this article will concern itself with bringing value to the businesses operating in your distribution area. This focus should bring in new business and reinforce the idea that your newspaper has its community’s best interest in mind. The only way this will work is if the publisher and sales manager green light this project. Change and leadership in this case must come from the top down and yes, they should be at the event, shaking hands, answering questions.  Newspapers can no longer sit around waiting for money to come to them.

      The purpose of business is to create a customer. -Peter Drucker

      When? ASAP

      What? I propose a marketing fair.  Think of a job fair, except your entire sales staff will fill their niche booths to listen to their business owners’ (customers’) concerns.

      Who? for any business in the community your newspaper serves.

      Where? Rent out a big cheap place like a high school gymnasium or holiday inn. Set the event up in such a way that that people can ask your newspaper sales staff questions (all hands on deck) about your media kit, your readership, your services offered, costs, and then get real face to face answers (and hopefully ad buys on the spot).

      Why? The purpose is to reconnect or stay connected with your community. Show them you care about their financial well being. Do Not Pitch your products to them. Have your sales force meet these business owners one on one. Listen to their problems, their concerns, their successes and failures.  Let them do all the talking.  Have your sales force take copious notes to find out what your businesses want from you.

      As I have come to discover through the services I provide to my local chamber of commerce members, I think newspapers too will find out that most of your potential advertisers suffer from the same problems. Common concerns that I hear?

      NEEDS:

      1. Newspaper advertising is too expensive and complicated.

      2. The cost structure / sizing in their media kits looks like the table of elements.

      3. I only want to advertise next to relevant content.

      4. I want to market my self, my own website.

      5. I did it once and it was horrible, I lost money.

      6. I wanted an ad on their website, but they could not tell me where exactly it would appear.

      7. How can I use the internet to drive business to my company?

      Now here comes your moment to shine Mr. Newspaper Publisher.  Right these wrongs.  Add value to your operation by filling the unmet needs of your business community.

      FILLING THE NEEDS:

      1-3. Innovate your advertising platform to make it easier for readers and small business owners to place ads online and offline.  Models to ape?  Craigslist & Google ( you know, the ones everyone uses).

      4. They want websites?  Build them websites!  Offer the service using your in-house team.  Don’t have an in-house team of developers?  You can partner with a local shop or an Indian firm to crank out quality sites for $300 a pop, add 100% margin and you’re making big money!  95% of the small business clients I deal with need a new website.  Their existing sites are usually real crap.  Build them a site that gets customers in their door and everyone wins.

      I can’t stress enough how important this is.  This is a newspaper’s biggest potential new revenue stream.

      5-6.  SEE #1-3 above.

      7. Some of the greatest kudos I’ve gotten while consulting have come from just sitting with a business owner and helping them list their business on all the free listing sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, YellowPages, etc…

      REALIZING VALUE:

      Your newspaper is now generating new value by filling an unmet need for your business community.

      1. You will realize greater print and online sales.

      2. You will get a better feel for the needs of your business community.

      3. You will create new revenue streams outside of simple display advertising.

      MORE REVENUE IDEAS:

      1. That unused space on your website’s login form?  It could now be generating $100 per month from sponsorship via your local Locksmith.  Are you The Washington Post or The New York Times?  That space should be going for $1000 per day to Sargent Locks or  ADT.

      2. Publish a twice annual town guide distributed to the local community college.  In it you can find coupons and ads for every single eatery and club in your area.

      3. Your newspaper now has 3 people on staff to work with business owners to design and develop business websites for them, list their businesses, and learn how online marketing works.   You’re thinking of adding the service to readers to start their own blogs and sites.

      4. The success of the #3 above has led to you launching a “SeekingAlpha” type platform for publishing original content.  (seeking alpha pays nothing for the 175 posts they put up every day by the way).

      I hope you’ve enjoyed this and it has helped.  Here is the link to the original post from October 2008 Free Advertising Ideas For Newspaper Publishers.

      RELATED:

      Advertising in the Internet Paradigm