How to Save Newspapers

The decline of the newspaper industry has been well publicized. Essentially the ‘problems’ are two-fold:

1. The internet provides free, real-time forums for information.
2. We’ve lost interest (for the most part) in exposés.

In this sound bite world we want headlines, now. Because they have lost so much advertising and subscription revenue, papers can no longer afford to maintain expensive staffs of journalists. Consequently, as their revenue declines their product becomes anemic and even less able to compete with online rivals. It’s a viscous circle.

So the core question becomes, is there still demand for newspapers?

I say yes. Some people still want in-depth analysis of particular issues. These could be of local concern (one reason why the weekly publications aren’t suffering so badly as the dailies) and might also be based on interest in specific industries or fields. And guess what? Lots of people still enjoy the visceral feeling of handling an actual newspaper (the same can be said for magazines).

So the next question is how can newspapers build a successful revenue model given the current market for their product?

The answer is contextual advertising. This is the practice of presenting advertising that is relevant to the reader’s interest. Here’s how I think it should work for the newspaper industry:

• Instead of charging for subscriptions, publishers should give away the papers (removing this barrier to entry would help them increase circulation).
• There would be no more newsstand versions. You would have to subscribe if you want to receive the issues.
• When subscribing, you would complete a demographic profile (I’m 37 years old, hold a B.A., married, 4 kids, $ income, etc.).
• You would choose print and/or digital delivery.

Though the newspaper loses revenue on the subscription side, their advertising now increases in value because they know more about you. The tricky part is delivering only contextualized ads to the readers who ‘requested’ such content. This is the cornerstone of the strategy: if I am being blasted with (what I perceive to be) irrelevant ads I am going to tune them all out. If on the other hand, there were fewer but more meaningful ads I would be much more likely to engage with them. From this perspective it is important to see ads as sources of information.

People still want ads. If there were no advertising how would we find out about things like new products, special promotions, etc? Word of mouth would only go so far. So we don’t actually want to eliminate advertising, we just want it to be more targeted to our personal interests.

Once the newspaper captures our interests they would be positioned to share the information with their advertisers, who would be well served by creating content specific to their primary demographics. This is where ‘track-back’ campaigns would help the advertisers actually measure their return on investment into this segment. For example, they could issue a coupon through the publication and see how many coupons are redeemed, then compare those results to other forms of media. I’d bet you anything the results would be much more favorable than the ’shotgun’ approach newspapers have traditionally utilized.