Newspapers Need To Understand the Evolution In News.
Posted: Thursday, August 13, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
The local county fair is over and it was a heck of an active week for the Lincoln Daily News. Besides some cute little stories we published 252 color pictures during the week.
We can do that being an online paper. There is no way we could do more than a tenth of those pictures if we were a print medium. But we are not and we understand what we are and use the fact we are online to our advantage.
The bigger, outlying papers didn't do much coverage and if you are a buff of the local fair you wouldn't have seen anything that would make you call up and subscribe to their papers.
The key to any paper nowadays is local coverage. With so many other sources of news dissemination, only information that is local and not published by other sources will garner readership. But somehow the papers don't understand this. Oh some say they are local but then they cover a few things and never really engage the community and so they fail on both counts. Now they are covering local poorly and with lost space they are now covering state and national poorly as well.
I asked one of the local print reporters who took a ton of pictures, why I didn't see them posted in their web edition. I was told they didn't publish more because that would be in competition with their print edition. I asked since the print edition couldn't do all those pictures, how could it be competition. I also wonder how their sales people can go around town asking for businesses to buy ads in their online edition when it is obvious they keep the online edition inferior to what it could be. That thinking doesn't make much sense to me. But it is the thinking of many newspapers and newspaper chains: that all are losing tons of money.
I understand trying to save the print medium. I am rooting for it to stabilize and go on for at least as long as I will. I live in an electronic world but I enjoy immensely visiting the world of tactile print.
But if the print papers don't understand that they have a chance for large revenues online then they won't get decent revenues anywhere as droves of businesses are pulling back on their printed advertising. It is almost like they won't admit they have to change and that's a shame because every month another paper that wouldn't change closes its doors.
I see a medium-size newspaper in Indiana now thinks they have the answer. They have a print edition and an online one as well. They are also touting how their online will be as good as or better than the print but then they shoot themselves in the foot. They are going to charge $9.50 a month to get the online version. I guess they haven't noticed the rest of the online world is free.
I will watch this experiment and will let you know when it blows up, probably right on the launching pad.
The papers online all seem to be going for hits to increase their readership in their papers but hits aren't what an online paper should be going after. Hits in their area are what counts. They don't seem to realize a local grocery store doesn't care if someone in Bangor Maine sees their ad. They care if the people in their town see the ad.
I am also fascinated by all the goop these papers put in their online versions, YouTube, and Digg It and chat rooms with no means of moderating what is said all to get more traffic that doesn't count with their local advertisers. Yes the national advertisers like traffic but most of the national advertisers' still use inserts in the print medium so why not concentrate on creating a large local online readership and then you can actually begin selling local ads.
The newspaper industry needs to get back to their roots. They need to see that those roots should now also include the number one source available for the dissemination of their local news, the web.
The mission of a paper, in print or online hasn't changed: deliver the news your readership wants to read. Everything else will come on its own.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)"The mission of a paper, in print or online hasn't changed: deliver the news your readership wants to read. Everything else will come on its own. "It's good to be reminded of that, Mike. You know I find this topic fascinating... I would be very disappointed if lost my 'tactile print' Houston Chronicle. I even pay an extra $4.50 a month to receive the exact-replica online version, even though I've only even looked at it once... and that was to determine if I was missing a page in the print version.A simple economics rule of thumb I've witnessed over the years is that a web site earns an average of 1 penny for every unique visitor. Can an online newspaper survive on that level of revenue? Not without drastic changes.Thanks Bruce. Yep, a newspaper doesn't have enough pages on the web to garner any real income except from local and they haven't done that very well so far.Miked
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