By Staff
No matter where I go these days, I get a variation of the same comment when people find out what industry I'm in: "Wow, that must be tough."
Many people are under the mostly mistaken impression that all newspapers are on life support. Yes, many newspapers across the country are in dire times, but they are challenges we've seen before and the pressures are ones we face every day, recession or not.
The newspapers that are hurting the most are the major metro dailies, like the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Tribune and others like them. And while we share many of their same pains – a recession-slowed advertising market, rising input costs and a smaller readership base for our paid subscription products – Leader Publications is positioned well to serve our communities for decades to come.
I tell you this not to brag or to put any "spin" on the current economic times; rather I want to reassure our readers and advertisers that all of our products will be around to serve both well into the future.
Businesses that have fared well in the Internet age and which are weathering our current recession well are the ones which realize that we must no longer think of ourselves as "stuff" companies. Steve Jobs put it gracefully in the mid-'80s when he said that his company, Apple, doesn't make personal computers, they make "bicycles for the mind." A computer is just a box with wires; what the computer enables and represents is what makes the company unique and successful.
Leader Publications is also not a "stuff" company. Sure, we print "stuff" – The Niles Daily Star, Dowagiac Daily News, Cassopolis Vigilant, Edwardsburg Argus, The Leader, Off the Water and a whole slew of niche products – but our reason for being is as a dealer in information and connections. We provide information in the form of local news and advertising to our readers, and we provide consumer traffic (connections) to our advertising customers.
We can do that in print, via the web or, in the future, even to mobile devices – the medium, or the "stuff," isn't as important as the information and connections we provide.
For now, fortunately, print remains a strong and viable medium on which to accomplish both of our reasons for being, and I don't see it going away any time soon.
The papers that are now failing are doing so in part because they came to think of themselves too much as "stuff" companies.
The fact that I still read and hear from some publishers that we should be charging for online access to our news (in part) because we charge for a printed edition illustrates this problem.
Subscription prices have only ever paid for the "stuff" involved: the cost of delivering a printed copy to your door.
Newspapers have never charged directly for the information we provide, only the convenience of reading it at home.
Advertising supports the cost (reporting, editing, printing, etc.) of the "stuff," just as advertising supports the cost of hosting the news on a Web site.
In other words, the cost of our information service is provided by our connections service.
Failing newspapers didn't realize that the needs of their customers – both readers and advertisers – were changing soon enough.
In the early stages of putting newspapers online, publishers decided they wouldn't put all of the paper's content on their site, because that might denigrate the printed edition.
On the flipside, because readers couldn't find all of the news they wanted on a newspaper's Web site, they turned to blogs and alternative Web sites for local news and CNN.com and Google News for national news.
Publishers of failing papers mistakenly thought that "stuff," their printed newspapers, were their commodity, when in fact information was their product.
Similarly, bad publishers didn't change their advertising offerings to reflect the changes their customers were seeing. We are in the business of selling connections to our advertising customers, and even though major metro dailies were seeing circulation declines of 10 percent or more, they continued to increase the price of advertising. Businesses were then paying more for fewer connections, and they began finding other media for their messages.
And although publishing companies with the resources to do so could have been offering innovative online advertising solutions to their customers like video, breaking news sponsorships, hosted business Web sites and more, they hesitated because that might draw dollars away from their printed edition (their "stuff").
They could have been offering free online classifieds a decade ago and then up-selling customers into the print edition, but they didn't, because as an industry we've always charged for classifieds.
Their hesitation to truly embrace a new medium, the Internet, allowed opportunities for Google Adwords, Craigslist and millions of small local Websites to come in and decimate a large section of our industry.
Thankfully, many of us are learning from the mistakes of old and embracing new opportunities in traditional and new media alike.
Leader Publications, for example, launched a free monthly newspaper to 10,000 households along the Lake Michigan shore, we've embraced Twitter and Facebook as opportunities to strengthen our information service and later this year we plan to relaunch our five Web sites with new features for readers and new opportunities for local businesses.
We've experimented with downloadable coupons from our Web site and continually search for new opportunities to get our customers' marketing messages to new consumers.
We've done so without diminishing our core brands and continue to move forward with our customers' interests foremost in our minds – both readers and advertisers.
Note: In this column I've mentioned a few of our new products and experiments.
For your information, Off the Water is available in print at our Niles office and at 60 rack locations between Grand Beach and St. Joe, and online at http://www.offthewater.com.
You can follow the Niles Daily Star on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MichianaRE – in the coming weeks we will be getting Twitter feeds up and running for our other news products as well.
E-mail him at bryan.clapper@leaderpub.com.