Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged newspapers →  View Popular

Nobody's reading newspapers anymore.

And yet they are. And in record numbers. Look at this report in Editor & Publisher. The online audience is soaring, and here's the growth rate and numbers of unique readers for newspaper Web sites in January 2008:

Not only are these huge audiences, but the growth rates continue to be spectacular. By far, more people are reading newspapers than ever before. As just one example, scroll down the list to No. 16, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has a Web audience of 2.2 million people per month. The P-I's print circulation, when it was considered healthy in the previous century, was in the low 200,000s.

Conventional wisdom says that newspapers are caught in a business model which doesn't support the changes to digital media, and despite huge efforts, the newspaper industry is in decline. Maybe there's no longer a place for traditional newspapers.

The conventional wisdom is crap.

It's hard to take claims that newspapers are taking the Digital Age seriously when they have so under-invested to compete in it. Consider:

• Most digital operations are seriously under-staffed and under-resourced. They don't employ even the basic traffic-building strategies that independents are using with great success.
• Newspapers have declined to innovate as eBay, Craigslist, Monster.com, Google, and myriad ad networks have sprouted, thrived, and stolen customers.
• Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and others are experimenting with community selection of news, while newspapers pay little more than lip service to reader involvement.
• Hundreds of small Web operations have sprung up to compete with traditional newspapers, while news organizations remain mired in old conventions.
• Social networking has changed the way young people interact, yet newspapers have failed to meaningfully take the plunge.

Pretty much every online initiative in the traditional news industry has been me-too-ism rather than bold invention. The back-end digital news production structure at most newspapers is a mess. Many papers still bizarrely consider their online and paper versions separate operations.

Let me focus on one area in some detail: ads. Say I want to advertise on the Web site of my local paper. How about those 2.2 million P-I readers? I go to the Web site. Look for how to do it. Not easy. I have to call someone, negotiate a deal. Can I advertise on the newspaper's blog that I know all my customers are reading? No. No one's advertising there. So how much will it cost? Not worth it to me.

Now go to any large blog. Next to every ad there's a link that says "advertise here." Click the link, you get rates, you can specify where it runs, and for how long. You can upload your ad online. If there's space, your ad can be up an hour from now. And the price drops if the space is under-utilized. Easy peasy.

At a time when Internet advertising can get ads to readers with incredible accuracy, why aren't newspapers on board? Last week, several newspaper companies announced a new ad network. This is only eight years late in happening, and it's not at all clear how this new network is going to make things better.

A local example: Here in Seattle, art galleries don't advertise in the local papers. Why? It's way too expensive, and it's probably not hitting the art-buying audience. Yet the popular online visual art blog of the P-I's art critic, Regina Hackett, is a place where the city's visual arts community increasingly logs in every day. Make the ads cheap enough, and galleries would be clamoring to buy space. The paper's Microsoft blog and venture capital blog have substantial, highly-sought-after audiences, yet the paper doesn't look to be even interested in attracting new advertisers for it. You don't think startups looking for funding wouldn't flock to the place where the VC's check in every day?

There are plenty of small businesses that would be micro-advertisers if the rates were right. And who has a bigger local audience online than the local newspaper? Traditional advertisers are falling away? Then start exploiting non-traditional advertisers. Hard to take newspaper execs seriously when they say they're trying everything they can to keep up their revenue. Meanwhile, they're not doing even what any savvy blogger can.