Content Bridges

10 New Marketing Ideas for NAA!

The Newspaper Association of America -- NAA -- is about to hold its annual conference in DC next month. Some of us (Content Bridges, Newsosaur) have carped about the NAA's rose-colored view of newspapers' future, their reach seeming to extend into the horizon as their revenues sink into the basement.

So I think it's only fair to offer ideas for marketing the newspaper of today. That's the print newspaper, not the bundled reachy offers newspaper companies are putting together. Here are my 10. What are yours?

1. The Newspaper: Thinner Than a Mac Air!

2. We're Greener! Fewer Forests Felled!!

3. Now! More Time on Sunday to Do Other Things!

4. Newspapers: We're "Younger" Than Network News!

5. Just in Time for the Recession! Fewer Stock Listings to Scare You!!

6. We Reach 156% of U.S. Households*

7. The Sunday Paper: Now Easier on Your Aching Back!

8. You Deserve a Break....From Computer Reading!

9. We'll Still Got All Your Inserts -- For Now!

10. New and Improved -- With More Yahoo!

*Base reporting period: 1950-1985

The Newspaper Consortium's MicroHoo Hedge

Everything's timing, and QuadrantOne's formal launch may be bolstered by the fortune of events, in this case the Microsoft bear shadowing Sunnyvale. Today, it announced the addition of Newspaper Consortium publishers -- adding 138 web sites (both newspaper and broadcast). ClickZ's Kate Kaye lays it out well, here.

The new ad network, announced last month, had been in the works for more than a year. Tribune and Gannett had long tried to rally fellow news companies to consort together and not just with Yahoo. They'd pulled in just two others as equity members, Hearst and the New York Times for its regional newspaper group. The idea: a long-treasured one that trusted newspaper brand online advertising, networked across the country, could boost digital ad revenues, and allow the companies to keep a greater percentage of their sales.

A number of us (Content Bridges: Four Things About QuadrantOne) expressed the opinion that QuadrantOne might be too little (reach, ad technology, scale), too late (as the big four of online ad world -- Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL -- devour the lion's share of revenues, buying out companies to add to their own positions). And among several hundred online ad networks, how would QuadrantOne stand out?

My own skepticism has been further fueled by talking with several major advertisers who said a couple of things: 1) They didn't really have a need for such a network, finding the current buying choices adequate; and 2) They were surprised that QuadrantOne management, largely experienced Tribuneites, hadn't sought their opinions or given them a heads-up before the announcement. After all, they are the customers, here.

Those doubts are still there. Clearly, though QuadrantOne has more going for it today than it did yesterday.

As I've been asked about the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, my reply has been: good idea, especially if you take the name "Yahoo" off the front end of it. The idea, which I saw expressed most cleanly today in the release is that the Newspaper Consortium is its own entity, having grown to accept the notion that the struggling US press is best off dealing collectively with the web world. I think that's a maturation, a sense that uniting to do the Yahoo deal was a good idea and should be extended. It's not that the Yahoo partnership hasn't been a good move. On the contrary, publishers report good upsell revenue both from the HotJobs recruitment products and lately from the ability to sell Yahoo inventory to their own local advertisers. But Yahoo is still just a part of the web, and for newspaper companies finally acknowledging that their own destination plays are not enough, Yahoo is only part of a much bigger move into the distributed Web.

Clearly, the timing is as much market-driven as internally driven. The signs that Yahoo will end up as part of MicroHoo are increasing. The questions seems to be when and at what price. Given the likelihood of the deal, newspaper publishers need a hedge. Sure, they can say that the Yahoo ad deal is about local and the QuadrantOne deal is about national. But targeting audience is targeting audience, and the lines between national and local are blurring. And, sure, in the long-term, a MicroHoo relationship could be a strong one for publishers.

In the next year, though, it may give them a big headache, and that's unacceptable if you've already got the flu. If Microsoft emerges from Sunnyvale soon, with Yahoo in its teeth, we'll see a year-long drama of 1) Yahoo staff exodus; 2) Sale "closing" delays with anti-trust reviews; 3) The dreaded "integration" of technologies and staff, which is never a pretty thing, and in this case will something like the sixth sequel in the "Alien" series. You don't want to see this mating on a big screen.

So newspaper publishers quite properly don't want to be left holding the bag, as the air filters out of it. QuadrantOne can be part of that hedge, with lots more needed including other paid search solutions, video/video ad solutions and monetization of emerging user-gen. We still know little about QuadrantOne's own technology ramp-up -- which is absolutely crucial as the audience-targeting business gets more finely tuned each day.

No one wants to talk publicly about how much of inventory the new affiliate sites are "guaranteeing" QuadrantOne. Initially, it had asked affiliates for about 5% of its inventory, as compared to the approximate 10% that equity participants were committing.

Similarly, we don't how much of this guaranteed inventory will end bringing in high CPMs and how much will simply buck up bottom-of-the-barrel remnant inventory pricing. In the ClickZ story, QuadrantOne's Dana Hayes' comment that, "It is not just below-the-fold, remnant-like inventory," is a curious one. Did he really mean the "just"? Yes, 30 to 40% of some sites' inventory is considered "remnant", but even doubling one-buck-chuck CPMs won't save the day.

Today, McClatchy online head Chris Hendricks, a new QuadrantOne affiliate, made the point that, "This is the first step for the industry to come together and work on the national advertiser area as a unified front." Left unsaid in that comment is McClatchy's own unacknowledged Real Cities ad network (which it got out of the Knight Ridder acquisition) and the very real revenue that Centro -- a major partner to most of the industry -- is bringing in every day. But Chris' point on "first step" with QuadrantOne is right.

Whether steps two through ten will match market needs and ad network competition will be the measure of any significant success QuadrantOne accomplishes.

Charlie and Phil's Excellent Global Adventure

Call it physics. Call it Zen. Call it journalism.

As I cover the waning fortunes of legacy media and rising fortunes of start-up journalism sites, I can't help but think of equilibrium. Maybe it's being back on the Left Coast too long, but somehow the scales seem to be balancing. Recall that Americans still read news 62 minutes a day, just as they did 10 years ago. But of course they spend less time with newspapers, TV and radio, stealing some of those minutes for the web.

It's certainly not a gainly equilibrium, but the announcement that Charlie Sennott is joining Global News Enterprises as executive editor is just one more sign that it's happening.

Sennott, award-winning and industry-esteemed, swings out the Boston Globe door, taking the increasingly familiar buyout route after 15 years there, and busts open the portals of Global News.  The site is the first embrace the (lower-case) globe as its reporting assignment. The plan: launch in early 2009, with a complement of 70 corresponents, reporting in from all corners of the world. The correspondents won't be full-time staff, but rather stringers drawing stipends for a weekly report. The site will be staffed initially by 10 full-timers, with the editorial operation headed by Sennott. Over his time at the Globe, he served as Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem,  as European bureau chief in London and then worked on the Globe's special-projects team, doing year-long work in both  Iraq and Afghanistan. His recent work has tracked the Iraqi war, including this piece -- "New England's Own" -- on veterans returning home from Iraq. It's an impressive multimedia package, one which Sennott says is a "raw prototype of what the in-depth reports might look like on GlobalNews".

Of course, Global News is just one of many new news sites emerging, from its national cousins Politico and ProPublica to its regional kin, MinnPost, PegasusNews, CrossCut, Voice of  San Diego, the New Haven Independent, VillageSoup and more. Their business models vary, from profit-seeking to non-profit, with differing views on advertising, sponsorship, membership and angel funding. But I'm beginning to believe their most important business model is one that's been sucked out of the newspaper industry: enthusiasm.

It is one of the common denominators of all these site founders, and the 45-year-old Sennott's got a good case of it:

"I leave the Globe April 4. I start [on Global News] on April 7....I want to be in the revolution. I want to jump the barricades... Global News will be a dream team of reporters who are at places they don't have to be, ready to commit themselves..."

Sennott was just back from Baghdad, from an embed assignment in a patrolling Humvee, when we talked. He can talk traditional Ernie Pyle war correspondent lingo and the language of 2008. "It used to be you took a brick of notepads," he remembers. Now it's Kevlar, Marantz (as in digital recorders) and a host of audio/video gear to get the whole story. "And I've learned Final Cut Pro."

The site has got more than enthusiasm going for it. It's got almost $8 million to start (intending to raise $2 million more pre-launch), and Phil Balboni as a co-founder. Balboni founded New England Cable News, and he's pulled in as investors former Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor,  Akamai president Paul Sagan and Continental Cablevision co-founder Amos Hostetter, Jr. Balboni, whose business and journalistic acumen is well-regarded, will be CEO.

Charlie and Phil's Excellent Global Adventure is one to watch. They put it together as both had separately noodled on the idea. Sennott has been working on the notion for a couple of years, thinking "non-profit", and seeking funds from the Knight Foundation, among others. When they came together, they decided that a profit-seeking model was better, better at raising capital and in providing some skin in the game to the fledgling correspondent corps, who will get options.

Regional Dailies Give Business Away

We can add still another franchise – business news – to those being abandoned by the daily press. I’ve seen slimming of business pages, some announced grandly, some never acknowledged but painfully obvious to newspaper readers. Once-robust sections of eight pages have trickled to six or four, clear candidates for newspaper hospice.

So the Orange County Register’s recent moves – in addition to a segmentation (old people: print; young people: online) approach caught my eye. The Register seems to be giving up on the local print business business: 

• Its Business Monday section was eliminated.
• It stopped publishing its stock tables.
• It folded daily business news into its main news section 

That’s indicative of what we’re seeing, usually in a more piecemeal decline, across the country, with papers as diverse as the Denver Post, Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Reno Gazette-Journal, Winston-Salem Journal, Monterey Herald and Akron Beacon-Journal announcing major cutbacks.   

It’s not surprising. The Web is so much better suited for business news in so many ways. Business is immediacy, moving faster than government – seconds, minutes, hours, days – as often compared to months and years. Business is about numbers, and instant access to interactive, automatically databases are a wonder. Take Marketwatch’s new Portfolio product, for instance, which combines current stock price, historical pricing and current news into one dynamically updated screen. 

Such innovation reminds me of the days of newspaper business innovation. I believe (Knight Ridder alums, please remind me) it was the Miami Herald that innovated the Business Monday section in the early ‘80s. The idea was a simple one: both for the readers and for the newsroom journalists – business literacy. 

Where daily newspaper had long concentrated on governmental coverage, it started dawning on people that this little phenomenon called American capitalism might be worth a look. The emergence of local and regional private sector coverage was a good thing, and over time, we even saw some journalists hired for some degree of business acumen. The comfort with numbers has never approached, though, the comfort with words in any daily newsroom I’ve ever seen, save the Wall Street Journal.

It is worth pointing to SABEW, the organization for business news editors and reporters, which has managed to keep nurturing the beleaguered trade.

(Last year I did a presentation of news business change to a group of editors at a midsize daily. One came up to me at the conclusion and offered, “That was really interesting, though I’m not sure I got it all, “I’ve never been good with statistics.'”) 

That discomfort has never been a good thing. Increasingly sophisticated readers have become increasingly frustrated with innumerate journalists and gone elsewhere, as dailies largely failed to climb the business news hill fast enough. 

So here we are in 2008 and face these realities: 

• As print papers slim, they’ll cut business news and business news reporters. It’s fine to eliminate expensive-to-print listings tables, something they should have done earlier before today’s big crunch.

•  Papers will have less call on local/regional print business advertising, further reducing those revenues. Failure to deeply cover regional business only exacerbates such ad loss, as business advertisers find the B2B and B2C ad targeting and lead generation of the web far superior to expensive, mass market print.

• On the web, the business news game is largely global and national – not local. While dailies used to be the portal of business news – local and national – for their readers, they’re not online. We’ve learned that national media – WSJ, New York Times, AP, Reuters, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Business 2.0 and lots of specialized blogs or blog aggregators like TechCrunch, AllThingsD and SeekingAlpha are the places to go.

•  The Web business news business is lucrative. Business news – an area through which lots of money is moved – pulls in the highest CPMs out there. Take the niche of business news video – exploding on the above sites – and you see CPMs of $100 and more.  

So where does that leave local business news coverage? Most companies I think will just cutback in print and limp along online. 

We may see innovation and new business models in a couple of areas. Expect to see more partnerships between the national/global business news suppliers and local media sites. Look at what Reuters did with the International Herald Tribune a couple of months ago. IHT, owned by the New York Times, contracted with Reuters to provide both its print and online business sections. Co-branded. Revenue share. 

That’s also the approach of Dow Jones, which over the years has signed up about three dozen papers for its Sunday personal finance print product. The Register is one of those papers carrying the product, along with the Denver Post, Star Tribune and Sacramento Bee. Steve Townsley, an alum of both Newspaper Direct and New Century Network, is directing sales for the product.