A ‘Marshall Plan’ for the newspapers
Steve Safran September 4th, 2006
“Newspaper industry leaders are frogs in a pot. The water’s starting to boil, and it’s time to jump,” writes Tom Mohr in Editor and Publisher. Mohr, who was the president of Knight-Ridder Digital, puts forward a manifesto for saving newspaper companies by making sweeping changes to their industry. “Only 19 percent of 18-34 year olds read a daily newspaper; 44 percent of them go to a web news portal,” he points out. Mohr outlines a “Marshall Plan” for the papers - and it’s a good one. The question is: will the industry listen, or is it too late?
5 Comments Add your own
1. Tim | September 4th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
He has many good points, but if you look at it from a different angle, why not just create a WordPress/Typepad/Blogger account for each local paper, and hook in Adsense? That could be the common platform he’s talking about for news and content management, at least, and I’m sure the costs would be less than “rolling their own”.
Here’s another idea- cede the national and international news to online, and quit paying AP and other sources for it. Make the local paper only local, thereby reducing the size of most papers (and the paper costs) by about a third; further reduce paper costs by going to magazine size. Quit handling flyers for national firms such as Penney’s and Best Buy, in fact don’t bother with the expense of inserts at all.
Now that the costs are down, devote the staff to doing the best damn stories they can do on the local level. Surveys (at least in our area) showed people wanted more local coverage, but what did we get? Additional little city-section newspapers, at additional cost, delivered by mail about once a week. I’m assuming the additional ad sales in those cover the printing and paper costs, but it’s got to be a razor-thin margin. Why not put that affort and that content into the newly-localized paper and eliminate the extra ones?
Third idea: where are the statistics about how many NON-internet-connected people read the paper? I know online is “hot” among some 18-34 year olds, etcetera but is the market penetration of computers enough to start ignoring the non-connected?
2. Emery Jeffreys | September 4th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Newspapers must do something to preserve the industry, but a lot of Tom Mohr’s statements are hogwash.
Specifically, there has plenty of innovation by online newspapers.
On one hand he dismisses the vlaue of “local” and in another statement says that outside forces can’t reckon with the vlaue of local branding.
The common platoform is just a marketing idea to squeeze a bunch of cash out of newspapers in some scheme like the Knight-Ridder tablet. And it probalby would border on a real anti-trust problem.
Newspapers have plenty of problems and I doubt if Mohr’s plan will solve many of them.
3. Joe | September 5th, 2006 at 10:11 am
It is beyond past being “too late” for newspapers. Time for the frogs to jump ship, because television and radio are in the boats right behind you ready to go over the falls. The wreckage of the recording industry ships are waiting on the other side.
4. Devin | September 6th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
This guy is so caught up in his business-speak that he can hardly string together a clear sentence. Regardless, he’s right about most of it except for the very first point.
It is true that innovation has not come from the newspapers, but he’s wrong about the reason why. You don’t need a Ph.D. in Computer Science to create something innovative and new; you just need to be willing to do it. Craigslist is a great example of this: it is simple, ugly, cheap, but amazingly effective and profitable. The newspapers would never do anything like it, though, because they weren’t willing to jeopardize their existing classifieds revenue by offering free online ads. They were like the monkey that would rather starve to death than let go of the fruit in a bottle.
In the end, it doesn’t take much technical skill to create a cool site, it just takes the guts to do it.
5. tx | January 18th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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