‘It’s the end of advertising as we’ve known it’
I was surprised to hear those words come out of my mouth recently, during a strategic discussion about where our company, Morris Communications, needs to be in three to five years.
I heard myself say, “We need to realize that we’re witnessing the end of advertising as we’ve known it. Not this year, not next year, but over a period of not very many years.” Read the rest of this entry
Time to disrupt the old media sales model
The local media industry is in desperate need of new business models. By now, after seven or eight years of brutal shrinkage in ad revenues — in the U.S., anyway — it’s painfully obvious.
And heaven knows we’ve been looking. We’ve tried a lot of things — new digital advertising and marketing products, sales department reorgs, newsroom reorgs, different content models, new niche products and websites, pay walls and meters, just to name a few. Some are even working, at least to some extent.
But here’s a model we haven’t tried: Calling on every possible local advertising/marketing customer at least once a year. Read the rest of this entry
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
Seeing a bigger picture: Two examples of how to spot opportunities amid disruption
When you spend years working in a disrupted business, you often wind up with a vision problem. You tend to become so focused on trying to evolve your existing business models that you don’t see the much bigger opportunities that surround them.
We’ve seen two examples of that recently in my work at Morris Publishing Group. In both cases, we’ve widened our view, and we’re now seeing and targeting some bigger possibilities. Read the rest of this entry
Newsroom jobs: We know about the big fall, but why the big rise in the ’80s?
The plunge in newsroom jobs has been a big story in the industry over the last six or seven years, for obvious reasons. But a look at the bigger picture — newsroom employment over a span 30 years or so — add some interesting perspectives. 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
MediaReset 