A few years ago I penned a blog post about the future of newspapers and suggested that ‘prestige’ was one of the keys to unlocking a prosperous future for newsprint. So I thought it was pretty interesting to read an article today by Philip Meyer who suggested making the newspaper more ‘elitist’ would be a wise move.

Philip Meyer is one of the industry’s most lauded researchers and wrote an intriguing book called ‘The Vanishing Newspaper – Saving Journalism in the Information Age‘. Philip Meyer suggests a move away from printing newspapers on a daily basis combined with a stronger focus on visual presentation and what he describes as ‘evidence-based’ journalism.

One can infer several things from this viewpoint, the first of which is that daily newspapers need to be free. Secondly, by moving to a less frequent publishing schedule, you can focus more on providing content that digs deeper and thus has more value than what is currently being offered in the daily newspaper or blogs for that matter.

“Recently, I took another look at the readership data from the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and tried a different metric. Reasoning that you could still make a pretty good business from an audience reading less than daily, I tracked the percentage of adults who reported reading a newspaper at least once a week. That chart, from 1972 to 2002, shows a much clearer leveling off in the 1980s. Then, at the end of the decade, as though somebody blew a whistle and ordered a column-right march, the line snakes downward again. Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available.

Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it. The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating. Not all readers demand such quality, but the educated, opinion-leading, news-junkie core of the audience always will. They will insist on it as a defense against “persuasive communication,” the euphemism for advertising, public relations and spin that exploits the confusion of information overload.

Readers need and want to be equipped with truth-based defenses. Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence. To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet.”

Mario Garcia, another industry heavyweight, sums it all up…

I think the future lies somewhere at this intersection, the one where a combination The New York Times/The Economist/Die Zeit meet a colorful free version of USAToday. Of course, a strong online edition is a vital requirement. The newspaper of the future – elite or free – is simply a companion to a robust and newsy online edition.

I would love to get involved in the newspaper business right now. I realize that may sound crazy given the doom and gloom that is hovering over the entire industry like a black cloud. However, I see the current state of the newspaper business as a tremendous opportunity. Through my work in print for clients big and small and thus exposure to the industry, my mind is full of ideas and concepts on how the newspaper can evolve / change both from presentation and design, to new methods of creating additional revenue. It has become a closet fascination for me. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in the newsprint business is a corporate culture that is not currently embracing innovation fast enough.

Meanwhile, the default attitude of newspaper management is still caution and probity. And if you point a gun to the head of caution and probity and say “innovate or die,” don’t expect wonderful things to happen. Instead, expect buzzwords. In short: we need more paint thrown at more walls. But there aren’t many true innovators out there yet in positions of authority, and those who are are struggling against an archaic institutional architecture that remains despite all the layoffs: everything from the strictures of AP style to the cluelessness of corporate overlords.

I don’t particularly like the use of the term ‘corporate overlords’ as it does not accurately convey the real challenges that every newspaper executive currently faces on a daily basis. From managing shareholder expectations to restructuring debts and corporate structure, using a term like ‘corporate overlord’ seems like a cop-out. Nonetheless the overall motif of that quote rings true. There is an inherent slow pace of evolution and change in the newspaper industry and that in and of itself may be cannibalizing its future more than anything else. This culture of ‘slow’ needs to change. The corporate newspaper culture needs an injection of fresh thinking, new ideas and this overall fear of experimentation must be cast aside before this perfect media storm quashes the relevance of the medium for good. What is this perfect media storm that is threatening newspapers?

Let’s take a look at some of the key factors that are eating away at the newspaper’s future.

a) Consumer attention crisis – Pre-internet newspaper readers may have spent 2 hours reading their daily paper, now that number is probably under 30 minutes. Consumers are pre-conditioned to want everything ‘now’. Combine shorter attention spans with a myriad of other options to consume media, and it’s no wonder newspapers are facing an attention crisis.

b) Advertisers are taking money off the newspaper table – And they’re spreading it out across more mediums and utilizing different marketing strategies. Not only are people spending less time reading newspapers, which has trimmed the value of newsprint ads, but advertisers also have so many other places to put their money these days. Yes, lots of print ad money is migrating to the web, but advertisers are also experimenting more, using strategies like direct-to-consumer and word of mouth marketing campaign

c) Consumers are producers – We’re moving from a few-to-many media spectrum to a many-to-many spectrum where anyone can grab a signal and be heard. Blogs and any form of user-generated content for that matter are fragmenting the media market. You don’t need to be a newspaper columnist to have influence and / or a large audienc

d) Investor fragmentation – The same way that consumers have so much more choice when consuming media, investors too have many more places to invest their money. Money also moves so much quicker today which only compounds and expedites the exodus of investment out of your company / industry if you can’t project a solid vision for the futur

e) Technology game – Media consumption has become very technology driven. How media is both created and transmitted has changed forever and technology is now driving this bus. Newsprint has not evolved, and many newspapers have been incredibly slow to embrace new technology as a whole. In some ways it starts from the inside-out. A change in DNA has to happen for newspapers. I’m not suggesting newspapers need to stock themselves full of technology geeks, but to some degree an internal shift has to happen. If you want to capture the attention of a younger, tech-savvy demographic, you are going to have to start looking and thinking like they do.

f) Market communism, the wall has come down for good – Pre-internet, newspapers had a protected market. Today, there is no such thing as a protected market. It’s now a fluid marketplace with no borders and barriers. You’re audience may be here today, and gone tomorrow. That’s realit

Those are the challenges facing the newspaper business today. Will the newspaper survive this new world of hyper-connectedness and hyper-short attention spans? I think they will, but the sooner newspapers start throwing paint at their walls, the better.

via The big die-off via pff.org

I’ll preface this by saying that the U.S. newspaper market is quite different than the Canadian market. Canadian newspapers have managed to hold on to what they had far better than their American compadres. However, the news on the newspaper biz continues to reflect an industry under tremendous duress. A recent article from Reuters indicates that the number of financial analysts who cover the newspaper industry are dropping like flies, and the ones that are still doing it sound like this…

“If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself,” Appert said.

Full article: Number of newspaper analysts dwindles

Retired ex-newspaper exec Leonard Tow is donating $8 million dollars to two schools in a dual-effort to train journalism students in digital media and experiment with new business models for the newspaper business. Columbia University will receive $5 million for training, while City University of New York gets $3 million for research and development. While I think this is both generous and positive, I do wonder if $3 million will really have any impact or utility on testing new newspaper business models or technological concepts. Nonetheless, a really nice gift, but might MIT had been a better place for this kind of R&D investment?The newspaper biz does need all the help it can get and Dr. Tow is clearly focused on the notion that authentic, trained news reporting may be eroding.

Leonard Tow, a co-founder of the foundation, said the grants were a response to his “serious concerns about what is happening in the world of journalism.”“I thought it was time for us to think about addressing these new-media opportunities so what we as citizens receive from them is more an accurate reflection of what is going on in the world than some opinion”

via Chronicle.com

I stumbled across an interesting article recently from the Miami Herald about the ongoing struggle to re-invent and re-invigorate the newspaper business. Some great commentary by Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. after news broke that upwards of 190 Herald employees may be let go.

Virtually every newspaper is going through the same thing: shrinking profit margins, declining circulation, staff cutbacks and morale at subterranean levels as journalists struggle to figure out how we can save the American newspaper. But I have come — reluctantly — to believe we can’t. We must blow it up instead. Doing otherwise is like trying to save record albums in an era where music is downloaded to iPods, trying to save film in an era where every camera is digital. People did not stop listening to music or taking pictures, but new methods of doing so evolved, and those who were in the business of selling music or pictures had to adapt or die.

We in the business of selling news have yet to adapt. Yes, every newspaper has a website now. Some, like The Herald, have TV and radio facilities as well. I’m talking about something more: a radical change of focus. We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary. So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.

Full article: Launch a fiery campaign to reinvent newspapers

The sign of things to come? Is news on paper really dying? That depends on who you ask. I truly believe newspapers will be around for a long time yet. But they must evolve and embrace change. I added some flotsam and jetsam on this topic a few years ago. While debating the newspaper’s future is much traveled territory, one association is grabbing the bull by the horns. The International Newspaper Marketing Association has just announced that they are changing their name.

INMA is changing its name to reflect the evolution of its member newspapers and lead the newspaper industry toward its multi-media future.

Their new official name is: International Newspapermedia Marketing Association

“We are an association evolving to meet the evolving requirements of our members in a changing information landscape,” said Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director of the 1,300-member global association. “Our roots and our origins remain intact. Most of our members continue to make the preponderance of their revenues from print newspapers, and we believe this will resume growing in the future. Yet the online, mobile, digital, and niche publishing canvasses are vital, growing and important to news consumers and advertisers who want to reach them. We want to be an association inclusive of professionals in our larger industry not be tied specifically to those of one medium.”“We simply replaced five letters in our name to reflect the new realities of our business.”