Whap! Whap!

Editors moan about the lack of resources. Publishers moan about the lack of profit and order editors to trim costs. Editors moan even louder about lack of resources and slash jobs. Readers and advertisers suffer, resulting in even lower profits ….

Meanwhile, there are simple, inexpensive ways to give readers and advertisers MORE of what they want. Some are free. Some could actually save money by eliminating the need for syndicated material to fill the space around ads. Let’s be honest. We spend a lot of time and money on those filler pages.

Here are a few ideas. Please add your own.

Use reverse shovelware

Instead of wrapping the ads with day-old news from the wires, wrap the ads with day-old blogs and comments from the paper’s website.

Some of the best writing from many staffs is in blogs, which most readers never see. In fact, even most web readers never see them because they’re buried on the website behind all the shovel ware from the newspaper, but that’s a rant for another entry.

Some papers print promos of what’s in the blog. Run the whole thing, with comments. It’s fresh local content no one else has, at no additional cost to the paper. No editor is shy about filling the website with shovelware. Why be shy about the reverse?

This employs the advantages of both media: The interactivity of the web, and the serendipitous nature of print. (more…)

Steve Outing has caused quite a stir with his recent column “Life Without the Print Edition.” What’s sad about the controversy is that he didn’t say anything at all controversial.

He points out the obvious: news is old, especially stuff like stocks and weather, and that publishers keep jacking up the price of the paper. Nothing new or controversial.

The controversy should be about the idiotic response to the column by journalists, which consists almost entirely of variations on a theme: “You’re a traitor to the industry because if you don’t buy the print product we’ll go out of business!!!!!”

My answer to them is: “If you don’t start listening to people like Steve Outing (you know, your customers) you’re going to go out of business!!!!!!”

It’s more of the raw arrogance that newspaper execs show every day. Slash your product and charge more for it. Reach fewer and fewer customers at a time when your advertisers have countless new opportunities and respond by raising ad rates. And when your customers complain, bully and threaten them. Call them stupid and ungrateful.

For years I heard fellow editors complain that their own journalists didn’t read or subscribe to the paper. Some wanted to mandate that employees buy the paper. Not once did I hear one say “If our own employees, people who love journalism, aren’t clamoring for our product, how can we expect customers to?”

Ultimately, newspapers rank right up there with the oil and auto industries in their utter contempt for their customers. “This is the product we want to produce, and you better damned well buy it!” is the customer service creed of the industry.

For those of us who love newspapers, it’s time to stop being angry at the Steve Outings of the world. We need to turn our anger at the people attacking him: the brutally stupid editors and publishers who are creating and exacerbating the crisis that threatens the industry.

There’s a page of letters at EditorandPublisher.com today decrying this reality. “Online revenues will never equal the print model and cannot support the editorial and business staffs necessary to do a good job of reporting and disseminating the information,” Ken Anderberg, a Florida publisher, moans.

It’s a cry we hear from publishers all the time, but it begs the question: Why does that matter?

(more…)

In an incredibly bold leap into the late 20th Century, the Albany Times Union is giving up on letterpress. Letterpress.

Of course, to install a new press, the paper has to build a new building. So its customers get to pay tens of millions of dollars to get everything they ever dreamed of … except for things like more news, more interaction, competitive ad rates, lower circulation costs … little things like that. (more…)

Is there a sadder sight in the newspaper industry than publishers’ continuing quest to put the newspaper online? Not just the contents, but the actual newspaper pages.

The movement has been going on for years, with companies such as Olive, and incredibly it continues today (the San Diego Union-Tribune being the latest using a company called SmartPress Media).

Publishers still don’t understand that their business is a service - information - not a manufactured product. They remain convinced that all they have to do is put the physical product in its current format on a computer monitor. They see Olive and SmartPress and other jokes and think “Hey! The internet finally has come of age!”

Newspapers are losing to the electronic media precisely because of the constraints of the manufacturing process. Converting the paper product to the web adds yet another manufacturing step, making the problem worse, not better.

That’s not the most distressing part of this insanity. At the same time publishers are wasting money on this foolishness, they are cutting newsroom staffs. So customers end up getting less information, later than before.

Editors rail against control exerted by government officials and big advertisers. Government officials and advertisers rail against the control newspapers hold over them.Yet the internet revolution has shown us that the very control editors railed against was, in reality, the lifeblood of newspapers. In fact, everyone in this unholy alliance has lost by clinging to control.The only reason the damage to papers hasn’t been even worse is that many of the aging decision makers in government and business are as clueless about technology as aging editors are.It wasn’t too many years ago that car dealers, for example, laughed at the idea of the internet when I pitched it to them. Even when they did launch sites they didn’t want too much information available because their goal was to get customers in the door, grab their keys and confuse them with options and financing plans. The newspaper was the perfect static medium in which they could tightly control their own ads (and in many cases intimidate publishers into keeping a lid on negative news coverage). (more…)