Category Archives: Disruption
Everyday requirement for local media companies: Be the greatest show on earth
What’s a local media company’s No. 1 job, whether it’s a newspaper company, a TV station or a radio station? Simple: Win the biggest audience, every day. You have to win audience to win advertising dollars.
Winning the biggest audience is a clear, simple, results-based goal. In the TV and radio industries, they’re all about it, based on standardized measures of audience share.
But in the newspaper industry, for far too long now, we’ve rarely held ourselves accountable for our audience results. Read the rest of this entry
Explore ‘adjacencies’ to discover new business models
Breaking out of the mindsets of traditional business models is one of the toughest challenges for any disrupted industry. And it’s one of the most important, because the old mindsets keep us from seeing new opportunities that are staring us in the face.
In the newspaper and magazine industries, we definitely need new ways to see opportunities. At last May’s World Congress of the International News Media Association, James T. McQuivey of Forrester Research presented a good one: Adjacencies.
We’re putting it to use in a practical process at Morris Read the rest of this entry
Seven kinds of “new news” for the 21st century
I’d like to pose a challenge to the thousands of intelligent, dedicated people still working hard to serve their communities with the news and information they need.
I challenge you to rethink what your readers/users want.
Most news organizations are still using notions of news developed in the Dark Ages of the 19th Read the rest of this entry
50x current information = lots more disruption
If you’re involved in traditional media and your mind wasn’t boggled by last month’s IDC report, “The Digital Universe in 2020,” it must be that you didn’t see it.
So let’s take a look, and then let’s consider the implications.
Each year, IDC — a division of EMC — attempts to estimate the amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed that year, and to project the growth likely in the “digital universe” by the end of the decade. Read the rest of this entry
Five game-changers for the local media business model
It was an interesting assignment: Forecast the next three years’ revenues and cash flows based on current activities, then come up “game-changers” that could produce significantly better results.
At Morris Publishing Group — 12 daily newspapers and dozens of digital and non-daily properties — we came up with five that I’ll share here. Read the rest of this entry
Doubling down on digital at Morris — Part II
In Part I, I described how Morris Publishing Group came to be committed to creating a separate digital sales division in our markets. But at that point, we still had big questions. Exactly what would we sell, and how would we sell it?
To figure out the answers, Read the rest of this entry
Doubling down on digital at Morris — Part I
You’ve probably heard this before: If you want to have a shot at holding and gaining digital market share in your local market, you need a separate digital sales force.
But “separate” can have a wide range of meanings. Read the rest of this entry
Creating audience leadership at Morris
It used to be so simple. Now it’s so complicated.
The days are gone when hiring a few reporters and editors and reporting the news of your town virtually guaranteed you healthy advertising revenues and a handsomely profitable business.
Back then, we didn’t talk about “content” or “audience.” We just reported the news, and people showed up in droves to get it. Businesses paid us to put their ads alongside the news, and people paid us to print their “car for sale” ads somewhere in the back section. And we enjoyed profit margins that other businesses could barely imagine.
It was nice.
These days, it’s not so nice. We’re still doing the news, Read the rest of this entry
Here comes the next wave of disruption: hyper-targeting
This may be the most important thing I have to say this year:
The next wave of disruption for newspaper companies is bearing down on us right now, and it will be a doozy. Read the rest of this entry
MediaReset 