DigitalEdge

Welcome to the Digital Edge Blog! The Digital Edge Blog focuses on developments, trends, best practices and more in newspaper digital media. The blog launched in 2006 (archives before August 2008 are here). We look forward to reading your comments and contributions to the Digital Edge Blog. Questions? E-mail Beth Lawton at beth.lawton@naa.org.

Last week's presidential election showed the power and importance of newspapers, as reports streamed in about stores running out of Nov. 5 newspapers. Dozens of newspapers restarted their printing presses Wednesday afternoon to meet demand. But the elections also showed the power of newspaper-based digital media (see this earlier Digital Edge blog entry for examples).

NAA strongly maintains that print is not going away. The print edition of newspapers may change in its purpose, frequency and content, but it will continue to be an important part of any newspaper company's media mix for years to come.

With API's C-level "Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis" coming next week, a number of bloggers have revisited the issue of the newspaper industry's transition (print circulation declines, digital media growth, etc.) and how to "save" newspapers. Very few of them call for a complete end to print, but all of them call for a real increase in digital media.

Tim Windsor today proposed keeping the print edition, but turning it into a free tab and limiting it to 60 pages. The more in-depth print work can go into a paid weekly magazine, and the newsroom should combine its resources that normally work on separate projects (entertainment weekly, daily newspaper, TV, Web) to create a "multi-disciplined content team." That team can help drive digital growth.

Lauren Rich Fine takes a different approach, calling for newspaper companies to stop printing entirely. "If the goal is to preserve quality journalism, diversity of views, investigative reporting and the like, something radical has to happen," she wrote in a PaidContent.org column. "If major brands push consumers online more heavily-i.e. it's this or nothing-there might really be a business there. Increased time spent on a site should result in more ad impressions. If enough publications really push, maybe others will be brave enough to follow. Maybe more advertisers will take notice and join them. This could be good. It could add years to papers' respective lives."

Six Pixels of Separation blogger Mitch Joel earlier this week listed 10 things every newspaper and magazine needs to do. His list included link journalism (which many newspapers are still reluctant to do), effective cross-promotion, commenting and collaborative filtering. The National Journal earlier this month ran an article about the financial spot newspapers find themselves in and reiterates publisher Walter Hussman's call for paid online subscriptions. BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis, who recently hosted a conference on future news business models, wrote an entry this week wondering why API limited the crisis summit to newspaper CEOs and didn't invite Google, Yahoo and people from other industries.

While these and other ideas focus on variations of product mix, newsroom organization and an increased focus on digital, (with the exception, partly, of Rich Fine) they don't really address the sales side. As long as sales reps' compensation is (at least partly) tied to revenue, and as long as selling a print ad yields much more revenue than online ads, the newspapers' sales team may be reluctant to really dive in online. Scripps is moving toward changing this by "reshuffling ad commission plans" so more commission is based on online sales, The New York Times reported last week. And, the newspaper is adding more online-only sales reps.

Making moves like that - going beyond telling the business side that digital sales are important and actually making them important - is going to be just as key to newspapers' future as the product mix and organizational structure.

Last year, NAA published a best practices report called "How Leading Newspaper Sites Manage Sales" by Borrell Associates. Here's the teaser:

The digital media area is full of ideas for optimizing business online - but they often hold more hype than substance. In this report, Borrell Associates sorts out the merely interesting from the truly effective in online sales and revenue building initiatives. The report also details best practices from top performers, and reveals why a hunger for data and smart staff structuring really matter.

Even beyond that, however, the actual business model has to fundamentally change. That might mean separating the "newspaper company" into three separate, self-sustaining businesses (content, printing, distribution). It certainly means growing non-advertising-based revenue streams. I hope the CEOs at API next week talk about that.

Learn more about API's crisis summit here.

Bonus 1: Over the summer, NAA asked more than 20 top journalism, business and digital media thinkers to write short essays for a blog project called "Imagining the Future of Newspapers."

Bonus 2: Recovering Journalist blogger Mark Potts took the bait and answered his friend's question, "How many newspaper CEOs does it take to change the business?"

About Beth Lawton