Cross-platform advertising model

A major metro newsroom these days produces far more than a newspaper. My employer, for example, publishes three magazines, more than 100 blogs and a Web site that offers a large number of pages devoted to relatively narrow reader interests. (From neighborhood happenings to sports teams to specific forms of entertainment.)

The trick is to leverage that diversity of outlets on the advertising side, maximizing revenue potential. Now, I don't believe that advertising will continue to carry the lion's share of the weight when it comes to media revenue in the future. (See my previous post about instituting a pay model, and subsequent ones are in the works on other revenue sources.) But advertising will be -- and needs to be -- part of the business-model solution.

What we need to do is become much more sophisticated about our outlets, and the demographic/ethnographic profile of our customers who frequent each. Offer advertisers what they want -- an opportunity to make their sales pitches to specific slices of the reading/viewing/listening audience. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we increasingly have to offer a la carte solutions to advertisers.

So, for example, an advertiser might have specific income, gender, geographic or other criteria in mind for its target market. "I run a fly fishing shop and I'd like to reach men over the age of 35 who make more than $75,000 a year and like to spend time in the outdoors." We could work with that shop owner to identify the eight platforms we provide that cater to that audience, and price the shop's advertising accordingly. Those eight places might include a weekly outdoors column that runs in the sports page, of course. But it would also include the outdoors blog, hiking blog and fishing blog we write and the news Web site we maintain for that shop's neighborhood. And probably a section in one of our monthly magazines that caters to that demographic.

Slice the newspaper and magazines into narrow pieces, and do the marketing research required to know who reads each section/column/feature. Use that information, along with the dozens of blogs and news pages online, to offer advertisers exactly what they want in terms of audience. To do that of course, we first have to understand our audience very well.

This isn't rocket science, of course. It's just one more thing we need to consider as we remake this old-school industry.

The future ain't free

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/business/media/12carr.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

David is right, for better or worse. (It's better, I think.) Even at the regional news outlets like mine, we'll eventually have to move toward a partial-pay model of some sort. It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually have at least four levels of news access:

1. Some base-level content remains free and available to anyone online, at least partially as a marketing tool designed to drive readers to the pay products
2. Full or "premium" subscribers receive access to everything in print and online
3. An online-only subscription available for people who do not want the dead-tree product on their porch
4. An a la carte option for one-time users or people for whom the free news is generally enough

This kind of a structure, combined with some advertising, could start to resemble a business model. Someday.

Ads on the front page?!? The horror... The horror...

Okay, the sky has officially fallen. Or the old gray lady has hit the deck, anyway. The New York Times published its first across-the-bottom front page ad this morning.

Everything in my journalism DNA wants to scream out against this incursion of consumerism on sacred news space. For years, I quietly cheered editors at my paper and elsewhere who bragged about fending off money-grubbing advertising managers who came begging each year for the chance to sell ads on section fronts. But now, with everybody hemoraging cash, the money grubbers are increasingly winning those fights.

And you know what? It's not the end of the world.

Print is increasingly our secondary product, anyway. Another ad, no matter where it appears, is not the enemy. A general lack of advertising will be our undoing, if anything.

The thing to be careful about is that we get additional revenue by taking the plunge. It seems like a no-brainer, but the situation might be more complicated than it appears.

In a recession, there's a chance that if we open new space on the front, some existing advertisers will merely move from the inside to a better position. Incremental revenue gains might be small -- or nonexistent -- as we struggle to keep the big advertisers we have now in the fold.

In that case, we've given away a valuable piece of property and gained little in return. So it's the business-side guys, rather than the editors, who will need to know when to say "no" in the months ahead. Because we all know, in the wake of the Times' decision, pressure will be on everybody else to start offering the same perks before long.

Moderately interesting report of the day

This today out of The Bivings Group.

It's a survey of what the big newspaper sites are doing, which by definition means it isn't the bleeding edge. But I am curious about the 10% of newspapers sites that have social networking tools. I need to find some examples of news sites that do this kind of thing well. Or, I suppose, badly.

I spend too much time on Facebook at the moment, and I'm interested in the social networking phenomenon overall. But I'm suspicious the MSM will get the culture of the whole thing wrong, and end up hurting itself more than it helps.

J schools

Last week, I sat in on a class with a group of juniors and seniors studying journalism at a college that shall remain nameless. (To protect the guilty, as it turns out.) I expected them to grill me on why organizations like mine have been so slow to get with the times. I expected them to surprise me with the breadth and depth of the digital media they consume.

Instead, this group of 21- and 22-year-olds turned out to be remarkably traditional. They look occasionally at the print versions of my paper and others provided by the communications department, if only because professors force them. But it was the Web sites they regularly visit that floored me. Their answers: nytimes.com, oregonlive.com, Web sites for the Seattle papers, a smattering of TV station sites.

Huh? That's it? I pressed them for more, but came away with nothing. The idea of an increasing convergence between print, TV, radio and the Web -- and that they could no longer expect to work in one medium exclusively -- seemed to catch them off guard.

Granted, this was only one college and I spent only one evening with a handful of students. They may not be representative of the next generation of American journalists. But I fear, in fact, that they are. I fear that many of the nation's communications professors may be farther behind the curve than we are. And that scares me.

The AP

This afternoon, I was reminded why big newsrooms like ours might want to consider ending -- or drastically altering -- our relationship with AP. Our Washington correspondent wrote a story that AP immediately picked up, which began running on the sites of the local TV stations with no attribution or credit.

So we're paying a fair amount of money to gather, write and edit the news. In this case, from a bureau we fund 3,000 miles away. We're also paying quite a bit of money to AP, and then allowing it to take our story and distribute to other sites that use it against us. Within hours of the time it appears in our paper, if not sooner, we're matched by a number of local competitors.

It's the free-rider problem. Many places that pay little or nothing for newsgathering (beyond their AP fees) are nonetheless in the business of news dissemination. Newspaper newsrooms are having their throats cut by sites that don't have to pay for journalists of their own.

There are a variety of solutions to this problem, of course. The MSM needs to get creative and aggressive in implementing a few.

Knight Foundation grants

More cash announced today for MinnPost, voiceofsandiego.org, Chi-town Daily News and St. Louis Beacon. That's a good thing, even for those of us deep inside the MSM.

Experimenting with local-news models is a necessary step, and these guys are at the front end of it. So watch and learn. I assume Portland will have one or more outfits like these guys before long.

We ignore them at our peril.