Blog Archives

Desperately needed: More innovation on the audience side

Oct 14

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Just how disrupted is the old newspaper business model — the model that’s centered on providing news to a geographic market?

A lot more disrupted than many people in the news media think.

The local media industry is scrambling to innovate around sales. This is seen, for example, in the race to create new digital sales teams and agencies selling digital marketing solutions to small and medium businesses. And the industry is innovating around costs by consolidating, outsourcing and otherwise whacking at the high costs of producing and distributing its products.

But I don’t see a lot of innovation happening around the content model that’s been the basis of the newspaper business for the last 100 — even 200 — years. Read the rest of this entry →

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Posted in Audience, circulation, Consumer revenue, Content, Disruption, innovation, Media business model, Newsrooms, Paid content, Revenue

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Price hikes on content — and then what?

Aug 20

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As more and more newspaper companies charge more and more for their content, it’s important to ask — how are they using the money?

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Posted in Audience, circulation, Consumer revenue, Disruption, innovation, investment, Media business model, Paid content, Revenue

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Everyday requirement for local media companies: Be the greatest show on earth

Jul 15

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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 →

Posted in Audience, Content, Disruption, Media business model, Newsrooms

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Newspapers need to juice up the ad content, not just the news

Apr 22

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The quality of newspaper content is getting some much-needed attention these days, as companies work to justify their print price increases and digital meters/paywalls. They realize they need to reverse the slide in amount and quality of content and talk plainly about it, so readers can see they ‘re serious about meeting their needs despite our shrinking ad revenues.

This strategy works, as several companies, including Morris Publishing Group, have shown. But from what I’m seeing, even the smartest companies are missing a huge part of the consumer value proposition: the advertising itself. Read the rest of this entry →

Posted in Advertising, Audience, Disruption, Media business model, Revenue

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