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| The PRESSTIME blog presents news and perspective on events going on in the newspaper industry. |
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NAA is gearing up for the 2010 mediaXchange, April 11-14, at the Hilton Orlando, a new hotel that is opening Aug. 1.
The 2010 mediaXchange will be the industry’s largest gathering and will combine what was formerly the NAA Marketing Conference, NEXPO® and the NAA Annual Publishers’ Convention.
You can become a sponsor or an exhibitor, or to take a sneak peak at the exhibit hall here. Exhibitor and sponsor sales start in July.
You can also follow the latest mediaXchange updates on Twitter or post your own. Here is the mediaXchange hashtag, #NAAmxc10
Friend NAA mediaXchange on Facebook and Connect with NAA on LinkedIn.
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At naa.org today, Mike Dorning, national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, offers his perspective on the value Washington news bureaus bring to readers.
Dorning talks about having dinner and drinks with President Barack Obama after his Berlin speech last July. "One of the things I've liked about covering politics is the chance to follow political figures, well-known and not so well-known, over many years," Dorning writes. "Character and personality count. Issues do, too, of course.
"But people, in particular, can take time to get to know well," Dorning writes. "It helps to know the people you're covering, to see them tested in moments of crisis and in countless conversations, to develop a well-calibrated sense of their worldview and of their willingness to be candid at difficult moments." That knowledge helps newspapers deliver informed articles on highly nuanced and complex topics.
The piece is introduced by John F. Sturm, NAA's president and CEO, who remind us that research shows "the most active, engaged and motivated citizens are those most likely to identify newspapers as their most trusted information resource."
Read the full account of John Sturm's Above the Fold here.
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The newest iPhone will hit the streets Friday and that's good news for newspapers like the Star Tribune in Minneapolis that have robust mobile advertising programs.
The Star Tribune has 17 active mobile accounts that are expected to bring in $60,000 in revenue by June, and an additional $95,000 to $125,000 before the end of the year, Daniel Krolczyk, director of sales for Star Tribune digital media, said during a webinar on mobile advertising on Wednesday. The webinar is the third in a series of four free webinars focusing on mobile revenue opportunities and it was sponsored by Spreed Inc. The final webinar on mobile revenue will be offered in August and details will be available on the NAA Web site sometime in July.
In the past year, the Star Tribune has seen a surge in the number of page views and visits to its mobile Web site with an 801 percent increase in unique visitors, Krolczyk said.
The department has a mobile-only specialist who spends his day doing product research and demos. All of the 17 cross-trained digital sales reps are equipped with BlackBerry devices to show advertisers how mobile advertising allows for one-click purchasing, he said.
Krolczyk outlined two successful mobile campaigns. Ivy Spa, a local retailer, ran a Valentine Day's special. The digital-only campaign included a banner ad, e-mail and mobile advertising targeted to men looking for a last-minute gift. The ad had a 12 percent click-through rate with 311 total clicks, Krolczyk said. The spa ran a similar campaign for mother's day.
Another successful campaign was with a local bank. The news department was developing a state fair food finder for the paper's mobile site and the ad department was able to get TCF Bank to sponsor the food finder by including the locations of bank's ATMs at the fair in the food finder application.
As these examples illustrate, the key to a successful mobile campaign-particularly with a banner ad-is having a specific activity tied to the campaign, such as a sale. It's not just the placement of the banner ad, but the value that is offered when the user clicks through, said Michael Becker, vice president of mobile strategy for iLoop mobile. Other NAA resources on mobile and digital media advertising are available here and here.
--Lisa Rabasca
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Newspapers looking to increase their advertising revenue may want to try selling local advertisers packages that include text messaging.
Consider this: The number of people who sought local information on a mobile device grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009, according to comScore. Examples of how local advertisers are benefitting from (and buying) text messaging as part of their ad campaigns was discussed at a free NAA webinar on text messaging Wednesday afternoon. The webinar is the second in a series of four free webinars focusing on mobile revenue opportunities. In Norfolk, Va., The Virginian-Pilot is selling advertisers text-messaging subscriptions. Advertisers can buy three months or four months of unlimited text messaging to a short code (74568—Pilot) using a keyword that describes their business. The most successful advertisers engage actively with their users and promote their short code in other media and every piece of marketing material they produce, said Shaun Fogarty, online sales director for the Pilot's HamptonRoads.com and PilotOnline.com.
Fogarty outlined four successful categories: quick service restaurants, casual dining, real estate and the paper's "Best of" annual event. Couponing is powerful for quick service restaurants, Fogarty said, adding that the most popular ads offer something for free or half off. One casual dining establishment uses text messaging as part of its frequent diner club, Fogarty said. In the real estate category, agents can use keywords in their "for sale" or "for rent" signs, allowing users to get a complete description of the property without leaving their car, he said.
The paper also sponsors an annual "Best of" event that allows users to vote for the best of everything in Norfolk. Last year, the paper received votes via text message from more than 18,000 unique phone numbers, Fogarty said.
Gannett's local text messaging strategy is based on USA Today's national strategy, said Jason Fulmines, mobile product manager for Gannett Digital. Every day, each section of USA Today publishes a text message call to action. Users can text to a short code to find out stock prices, the weather, sport scores and celebrity birthdays. These appear above the fold on the front page of each section and an advertiser can sponsor them, he said.
In local markets, local retailers are sponsoring breaking news alerts for text message subscribers. For instance, Kroger grocery store is sponsoring break news alerts in The Indianapolis Star. The blurb about signing up for breaking news alerts appears above the fold on the front page with Kroger's logo, Fulmines said. Kroger's logo also appears wherever there is an entry point for signing up for text messaging in the paper or online.
In the last three months, Fulmines says, local Gannett properties have sold 30 of these sponsorships to advertisers.
Both Fulmines and Fogarty agreed that selling only text messaging to an advertiser is difficult. It needs to be part of an overall, comprehensive advertising package, they said.
The archived webinar will be available here by Friday. Other NAA resources on mobile and digital media advertising are available here and here. --Lisa Rabasca
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The U.S. Postal Service announced last week it would reduce the postal rates for High Density flats mail that newspapers typically use to deliver their Total-Market-Coverage products. I had a chance to talk with Paul Boyle, NAA senior vice president of public policy, about the role NAA played in getting the USPS to change the rate. He also explained what impact the new rates will have on newspapers.
You can listen to Paul Boyle in the latest podcast from NAA.
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PRESSTIME asked Melinda Gipson to track down a handful of industry leaders, who had once been honored by the NAA Digital Media Federation as online innovators, and ask them about the future of the industry.
Melinda, who was named an online innovator in 1999 for her work as NAA electronic media director, spoke with Rusty Coats, vice president of the Interactive Division at The E.W. Scripps Co. in Cincinnati; Christian A. Hendricks, vice president of Interactive Media for The McClatchy Co. in Sacramento; Michael A. Silver, executive director of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium; Lisa Desisto, vice president of advertising at The Boston Globe; and Michael Romaner, president of Morris Digital Works in Augusta, Ga. Read what they had to say here.
You can also listen to a 13-minute podcast with Christian Hendricks and Michael Romaner.
--Lisa Rabasca
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Recent statistics about cell phones and their use point to two growth areas newspapers can tap into—mobile-based classified advertising and location-based mobile content.
Consider this: Cell phones have an 87 percent market penetration across the U.S. population, according to CTIA. And, according to Nielsen Mobile, 70 percent use those phones for data services including text messaging and the mobile Web.
The Orange County Register already has tapped into this new revenue stream by selling text messaging and mobile Web sites as part of its classified ad sales.
Since the paper started selling text messaging to advertisers last August, it has generated an additional $250,000, Dan Hellbusch, manager of real estate advertising, said during a free NAA webinar on mobile classifieds Wednesday afternoon. The webinar is the first in a series of four free webinars focusing on mobile revenue opportunities. Hellbusch said he expects mobile Web sites to become an even bigger revenue stream, bringing in $25,000 to $30,000 a month. "We sold 50 of those sites last week," he said. The paper began by offering mobile Web sites to auto dealers and plans to expand the program to real estate advertisers and then retailers.
The key to selling texting and mobile sites, he said, is to create "passionate sales reps." The paper offered a series of training seminars to it sales reps, he said. The sales reps were encouraged to use their mobile devices to look at mobile Web sites. ESPN, Disney and the Orange County Register all have robust mobile Web sites, he said. Then the sales reps were instructed to look at the dot.com versions of those sites on their mobile devices. "They can see the difference," Hellbusch said, "and why the mobile site is better."
The archived webinar will be available here later today. Other NAA resources on mobile and digital media advertising are available here and here.
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NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm was interviewed on News Channel 8 NewsTalk on Friday about the "open letter" he wrote to the advertising community debunking many of the myths about newspapers. The ad recently ran in The Washington Post.
You can see the video of the interview here. The link is on the left-hand side of the page under the date 5/29/2009.
And, in case you missed the "open letter," you can download it here. --Lisa Rabasca
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It's no surprise that market forces are driving newspapers to develop new pricing for home-delivery and single-copy circulation. Bloomberg.com takes a look at how price increases at large metropolitan newspapers are generating higher circulation revenue. I asked John Murray, NAA vice president of audience metrics, to weigh in on this topic. "There is no question the newspaper business model is evolving and it is apparent that publishers will become increasingly reliant on the reader to contribute a larger slice of the overall revenue pie," he said. "The potential to increase circulation revenue is an important element in the changing newspaper business model and that goes beyond raising the basic home-delivery rate or the cover price of the daily newspaper. It also includes distribution revenue for other publications, breaking out specialty products such as TV books and charging for niche products and a premium for special editions. No single one of these initiatives makes a big difference, but the sum of them adds up to a local business model less reliant on traditional advertising."
One of the interesting byproducts of generating higher circulation revenue is readers who stick with newspapers through price increases tend to be the ones more attractive to advertisers. Despite more aggressive pricing, subscriber churn is at the lowest level since NAA established the industry metric 15 years ago, Murray said. "Newspapers are more focused on selling subscriptions to readers most relevant to their advertisers," he said. "This includes defining the market geographically and targeting a reader profile most likely to remain a subscriber. The decisions are no longer clouded by a fixation of the bottom line paid circulation. Instead the focus is on the relative value of the reader to the advertiser."
--Lisa Rabasca
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PRESSTIME asked freelancer Mark Toner to take a comprehensive look at how news organizations are experimenting with paid-content models. In recent weeks, News Corporation, MediaNews Group Inc., and The New York Times have all announced they are considering ways to make readers pay for online content.
As Stephen Brill says in the article, "All the conversations are now about when and how much—not if." Brill recently unveiled Journalism Online, a venture that aims to provide technology and strategies for publishers exploring paid-content models.
The article explores how traditional news organizations like The Arkansas Democrat Gazette in Little Rock and The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., are charging for content as well as the voluntary payment approach of new online ventures like MinnPost.com and InDenverTimes.com.
Download the article here. NAA members also can download a series of articles from NAA that takes a look at the debate and analyzes the results of newspaper's paid and free online models.
--Lisa Rabasca
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At naa.org today, two food critics provide their perspectives on why newspapers are their chosen medium.
Heidi Knapp Rinella, staff writer and restaurant critic, for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, focuses on the objectivity of newspapers. "For example," she writes, "when a forum is open to any and all to critique a restaurant, it's impossible to tell if a negative review is coming from a competitor, or a positive one is coming from the mother of the chef!"
Michael Bauer, executive food and wine editor/restaurant critic, for the San Francisco Chronicle, says newspapers are the best medium for telling a story. "I get queries every day from people coming to town and wanting advice after looking at the Chronicle reviews online," he writes.
Both pieces are introduced by John F. Sturm, NAA's president and CEO.
Read the full account of John Sturm's Above the Fold here.
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Teens visit news sites to get informed, not to follow specific new events, according to recent study conducted by the Media Management Center at Northwestern University for the NAA Foundation. But, according to the study, when teens visit most newspaper sites, they get overwhelmed and don't return.
For teens, getting informed means learning enough about a topic to form their own opinions and talk about the subject, said Vivian Vahlberg, managing director of the Media Management Center and co-author of "Teens Know What They Want in Online News Sites: Do You?"
Vahlberg and co-author Stacy Lynch, a consultant with the Media Management Center, presented their finding today during the one-day 2009 Young Reader symposium.
Teens are interested in the news, Vahlberg said, but what they see at news sites doesn't match what they want. They want fewer stories, more focus, a clear hierarchy of what is important, summaries and photos, background information and no links to click on, she said. They want to learn about the news from just looking at the homepage, she said.
Many news sites are a list of headlines from the newspaper. To be engaged by most headlines, readers need to know who and what things are, Lynch said. "The less you know about the world," she added, "the more difficult it is to make sense of what's going on in the news." These lessons, said Vahlberg, can be applied to not just to teens but also to many adults. "Most news sites," she said, "are made for news junkies. They don't fit other people."
An executive summary and full report can be downloaded. --Lisa Rabasca
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In the current market, e-reader devices are about books and textbooks, not newspapers. But newspaper publishers have an opportunity to change that dynamic and create a new e-revenue stream, according to four experts who participated in today's NAA webinar on e-readers and e-revenue. "If newspaper publishers allow the e-reader market to evolve organically, e-readers will mean modest revenue at best for newspapers," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester Research. "To create a substantial revenue stream from e-readers," she said, "newspapers will have to do something more radical to catalyze adoption of the devices."
The Detroit Media Partnership will become such a catalyst when it offers a test group of readers the opportunity to receive the newspaper on an e-reader device. The test is part of the Detroit Media Partnership's decision to limit home delivery of the Free Press and The Detroit News to Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Since March 30, home-deliver subscribers have been receiving a digital edition of the newspaper Monday through Wednesday.
It is important for newspaper publishers to get involved with e-readers now, said Patricia Kelly, vice president of digital development and client solutions at the Detroit Media Partnership. Manufacturers are looking for guidance on the advertiser model and there is still an opportunity to influence that discussion, she said.
One of the larger questions is how to measure audience on an e-reader device, said Janet Hasson, senior vice president of audience development and strategy at the Detroit Media Partnership. NAA and the Audit Bureau of Circulations will be exploring this issue at the summer ABC board meeting, she said.
In the meantime, newspapers might want to do some research on e-readers in their market. Interview your largest advertising accounts, suggests Epps, and find out what the advertisers would pay for an ad on an e-reader. Survey readers to find out how many and who would be interested in a subscription offer that included an e-reader, she said, and figure out what the offer should be.
Newspapers might want to look at the e-reader opportunity in conjunction with rethinking the entire multichannel product and pricing strategy, Epps suggested. It might justify making other changes, she said, including charging for online content.
Another issue newspapers need to consider is content rights and copyright, Kelly said. What content can be distributed in a non-replica format? And, she added, is the newspaper's current workflow able to support creating content once and delivering it on multiple devices.
The hypothesis is distributing via an e-reader will lead to enhanced profitability for the newspaper, said Derek Robinson, manager of business development for the Cox Media Group. Robinson presented a worksheet that can be downloaded (look under the heading Financial Models: Impact of E-Readers on Subscriptions, Advertising and Revenue). The worksheet considers what impact testing an e-reader would have on the newspaper's revenues and operating costs.
There is an opportunity for a significant cost reduction on the operational side, Robinson said. But, he added, the two critical unknowns are how much advertisers are willing to pay and what share of the revenue would need to be relinquished to vendors.
A copy of Sarah Rotman Epps's presentation, Derek Robinson's spreadsheet and other background material can be downloaded. --Lisa Rabasca
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PRESSTIME asked Chris Cook, deputy editor of Pulp & Paper Week in San Francisco, to write an article about the implications of AbitibiBowater Inc. filing for bankruptcy in April. Here is his article:
The North American newsprint industry entered uncharted waters last month when newsprint giant AbitibiBowater, sinking under a mountain of debt, sought court protection from its U.S. and Canadian creditors. Whatever the eventual fallout from the failure of the eighth largest pulp and papermaker in the world, there are near-term benefits for U.S. newspaper publishers. AbitibiBowater's Chapter 11 filing removed the threat of sudden shutdown for the company that controls 40 percent of North American newsprint production capacity. But the action did nothing to address industry oversupply, which has sent prices tumbling in recent months. James M. Follo, senior vice president and chief financial officer for The New York Times Co., said on an April 21 first quarter 2009 earnings conference call that he expects a $12 million saving on newsprint spending by year's end and executives at McClatchy Co. in Sacramento and Gannett Co. in McLean, Va., also have said they believe prices will continue trading down. Newsprint producers have shuttered more than 2 million metric tons of production capacity in the past two years and are idling another 600,000 tons in the first two quarters of 2009. But their closures have not kept up with disappearing demand. Total U.S. consumption was down by 25.5 percent in the first three months of the year, and about 2.5 million metric tons of capacity needs to close permanently just to balance supply with demand. Prices that hit record highs last November may soon go so low that the selling price of newsprint would no longer cover its production costs, says David Allan, president of Allan Consulting in Houston and publisher of Newsprint Tracker. Allan says he expects that prices will continue falling for another three or four months before they level off.
--Lisa Rabasca
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It’s harder to break a big story in the print edition these days. But at least two papers are bringing back the ink-on-paper exclusive. They’re doing so by limiting the content that appears on their respective Web sites compared with what’s available in the Sunday print product. The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, announced its strategy last week: “From now on, each Sunday edition of The Monitor will prominently feature one or more ‘Print Edition Exclusive’ stories that are of major impact, importance and interest to Valley readers,” the paper reported in an April 17 story. And The Monitor won’t make these stories available online until the following Wednesday. Since late March, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis began running some of its exclusive, in-depth Sunday stories only in print and posting them on www.startribune.com later in the week. In early April, for example, a major story about the fall of a well-known local auto dealer’s empire appeared exclusively in the Sunday print edition. The story appeared online the following Wednesday. Star Tribune Editor Nancy Barnes described her paper’s experiment in a March 28 column, calling the change a way to reward the paper’s paying print customers. She provided an update in a guest column on Alan D. Mutter’s “Reflections of a Newsosaur” blog last week. It’s too early to evaluate any effects on circulation sales, Barnes wrote, and the paper is watching its Web traffic closely. But since the site’s breaking news drives much of this activity, Barnes and her colleagues aren’t expecting to see a significant drop in traffic. As in the past, the Star Tribune staff continues to post breaking news items online immediately. “This is an experiment,” she wrote in her guest column. “It might fail. But I think all of us have to try to do things differently, to challenge the status quo and the groupthink, to find some new ways of doing business.” I asked John Murray, NAA vice president of audience metrics, for some thoughts on the larger issues at play here. “Newspapers should use each platform for what it does best,” Murray said. “If it is breaking news, consumers of the local newspaper brand should expect to find it online.” But when it comes to other content, “if it is a feature, or in-depth local story that is effectively served in print, there is no advantage to post it online before it is available in print, and there is an opportunity to promote the print product. These are the same issues that are at the forefront in the current debate regarding paid content.” You’ll find more information about emerging business models for newspapers’ content in upcoming issues of PRESSTIME, including the June cover story about several newspapers that have been charging for content on their Web sites. In the meantime, check out this month’s issue for ideas from 10 experts, including Mutter, on how to reinvent the print newspaper. “Don’t Stop the Presses!” and a related podcast are available online. The story starts on p. 25 in the print and digital editions. —John Heys
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