My 'Crisis' Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Jul 09
  

  Randy Bennett
• 03 Feb 09
  

  Nathan Yeo

  Advice to CEOs

  media newspapers

  • If your newspaper is hell-bent on retooling the print edition to appeal to younger readers, give it up. Have you stepped into a coffee shop lately and noticed how most of the younger people are sitting with their laptops, or tapping on their smartphones? Chances are there are people reading the printed newspaper, but they're mostly older. And why would younger people -- digital natives -- bother picking up a newspaper? Most everything in it they've seen already in other digital forms of media; what's in the print edition is, to them, old news.
  • An example of this approach was cited recently from Neiman Watchdog, "Local Papers Find Their Inner Watchdog," about hard-hitting local investigations by the Orange County (Calif.) Register and positive reader reaction to them. If you want to make your print loyalists happy, content and interested in your journalism, then get back to the basics of watchdog community journalism. That's possible if you stop spending resources on chasing the unreachable younger crowd.
• 08 Dec 08
  

  Andy Brudtkuhl

  To survive, publishers have to let this one go. Digital (online and mobile) is the future; younger people have already adopted digital media as a lifestyle, and they're not going to miraculously start reading print newspapers in any significant numbers as they grow older. Print will continue to decline as its core audience ages. So put the future at the center of the company, not the past. Now, and not before it's too late.

  media journalism getanewbrowser web strategy

• 02 Dec 08
  

  Cynthia McCune

  future of newspapers

  • my game plan for bringing the newspaper industry out of its steepening nose dive
  • my game plan for bringing the newspaper industry out of its steepening nose dive
  • 15 more annotations...
  • • If you can't fathom a radical reinvention of your newspaper company, consider handing the reins over to someone who can.
    • Turn "beat reporters" into topic specialists. I advised reporters years ago that they should all blog, and I still stand by that. (I think they should dive in and use a bunch of social networks, too, because that's the only way they'll truly understand new forms like social media.) So for a reporter who is writing about, say, the state government beat, she should not only have her work published in the print edition and the political section of the newspaper's Web site, but also produce and maintain a state government blog.
    • Get outside your news organization's little box and aggregate relevant content from other sources.
    • Copy Google and give employees some paid time each week to focus on reinventing-the-newspaper ideas and projects.
    • Hire an executive who understands social media and put him to work to utilize his skills to significantly increase the visibility of and traffic to your site. Leverage that person's knowledge in building communities, and a mobile content and services strategy, too.
    • This is an as-yet untapped opportunity. News organizations are positioned to grab it; but then, so are other Internet companies.
    • What no entity currently offers is a single point of entry for an individual to get all the news that he or she wants or needs -- from global, to national, to state, to city, to neighborhood, to personal social circle.
    • Digital (online and mobile) is the future
    • If you want to make your print loyalists happy, content and interested in your journalism, then get back to the basics of watchdog community journalism. That's possible if you stop spending resources on chasing the unreachable younger crowd.
    • go back to your roots as the community's watchdog, made possible by trimming the stuff that you've fruitlessly being doing to attract young people to a medium they no longer want.
    • redesign your print edition to appeal to your print-edition loyalists -- those (primarily older) readers who still like the experience of sitting down with the newspaper at breakfast and on leisurely Sunday mornings. I think you'll find that these readers are less interested in fluff and features, and are most wanting of their newspaper to do a credible and assertive job of covering the important news of their communities, and they want thoughtful analysis.
    • If a print edition is to be of any value and interest to the younger digerati, then it must be integrated with their preferred media form.
    • If your newspaper is hell-bent on retooling the print edition to appeal to younger readers, give it up.
    • So put the future at the center of the company, not the past. Now, and not before it's too late.
    • A thinned-down printed newspaper must, out of necessity, consistently, regularly and frequently point out digital supplements to what the reader is seeing in print.

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