What is Black and White and Dead All Over?: Reengineering Newspapers for Survival

What is Black and White and Dead All Over?

Reengineering Newspapers for Survival

by David A. Rozansky, Publisher, Flying Pen Press

Readers, Writers & Royalties columnist

May 8, 2009

Copyright 2009 David A. Rozansky

It’s said that the newspapers in America are dying. So many towns have been left without a newspaper in their town. Here in Denver, I watched the demise of the Rocky Mountain News with much concern.

The state of the newspaper industry is not doing well. Even the mighty New York Times is having a tough time. And everyone is looking for someone or something to blame, and nobody knows who or what.

More often than not, the alleged culprit is the Internet. Craigs List, they say, has taken all the classified advertising revenue away, and most every Internet portal has a free news feed. People simply have no reason to pick up a newspaper, it seems.

Recently there has been a very thoughtful article written on this topic, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” by Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) Essentially, Shirky indicates that there is no culprit, that rather, there is a paradigm shift and newspapers have become, well, obsolete and nothing an be done about it. (The article can be found at http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable.)

Of course I disagree. I do concede that the concept of a printed newspaper as we know it is done. It has run its course. Why would I say this? Simple. Ever since journalism has hitched its wagon to advertising for survival, it was doomed—although it certainly squeezed a good century or two out of the concept. But advertisers always seek the most efficient manner of advertising, getting the most bang for their buck, and once a more efficient means of advertising came along, advertisers felt no loyalty to the city papers. It was inevitable.

But I believe there is a way for newspapers to survive, if they act fast. They have to change their ways. They have to learn to be what newspapers used to be, not what they have turned out to be.

My proposed strategy for newspaper survival has three facets:

• Newspapers must go back to their core business.
• Newspapers must offer something that the Internet cannot.
• Newspapers must trade in on their good names.

The Core Business of Newspapers

Every business, from hot dog stands to Disney, has a core business. It is that product or service that should the company fail to sell will cause the entire company to fail. But it is not always obvious.

Riddle me this: What is Disney’s core business?

If you said “Media,” you would be wrong. Movies? Nope. Theme parks? Ha, not even close.

Disney is a Mickey Mouse factory, it makes Mickey Mouse. The core business of Disney is its trademarked characters. They don’t have to be maintained, there is no payroll, no overhead. Disney’s profit margin on Mickey Mouse, Pooh, Cinderella, and all the rest is pure and untainted. Each movie, TV network, and amusement park drives—and is derived from—the value of the cartoon characters.

Take a look at another company, Hasbro. Games? You probably have caught on that this is not the case. It is trademarks, once again. Hasbro has a monopoly on Monopoly (a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc.).

And so it goes. What is the core business of a major metropolitan newspaper?

News? Close, but not close enough. A vehicle for advertising? Never.

The core business of a newspaper has always been a sense of community. It is the ears, the eyes, the voice, the consciousness and the conscience of the city. Like the town crier and the posted notice, the purpose of the newspaper is to bring the community together.

When newspapers began buying most of their news from syndicates, and used advertising to pay for the printing, they lost their way. The Internet replaced newspapers because the Internet is that much better at serving the news junkies without having to toe the line with advertisers or siphoning the news through big media.

And while the Internet is full of all sorts of “communities,” the one community that the internet has trouble serving is the local community. Sure, there are a few websites like CitySearch and CityGuide, but because these are open to all and yet viewed individually on a cold hard monitor, they just don’t do the job of bringing neighbors together.

Newspapers, on the other hand, have always held this responsibility in high regard and with much success. While it will be necessary to move this “core business” from print to the web, the newspapers will still find that they can succeed at serving the community.

Right now, most newspapers (the ones that are left) have websites that allow readers to comment on articles. This is not what newspapers should be doing with their websites, at least, it should only be a very, very small part.

The local newspaper should create a website that is the core of the community. A place where people can instantly contact their Senators and legislators and animal control, a place where fairs and events and gatherings can be arranged, a place where community activism and protests can be organized, a place where local entertainers can draw an audience, and where local news can be examined and discussed.

Offer Something the Internet Cannot

Society has become so comfortable wit ht eh Internet getting involved in every aspect of our lives that sometimes we think the internet can do anything, but it can’t. It fails on many levels when it comes to personal relations, community building, and education.

Don’t get me wrong. The internet also excels in other levels of these same goals. There is no doubt that the Internet is King of Breaking News. That is the very reason newspapers are seeing the paradigm shift so harshly.

But the Internet is the Fool when it comes to In-Depth news. The internet serves up news in 400-word articles, 140-character headlines, 30-seconds of video. Even old enemies—TV, cable, gossip—serve up sound bites in place of news. Only newspapers have the staff, the integrity and the attention of its audience to serve up news as deep as it needs to go.

Newspapers should be turning away from the quick news. The old idea of newspapers serving up short articles (which are usually pasted verbatim to the Internet) is not useful any more. Instead, newspapers should begin to focus on longer articles, perhaps about 3,000 words. It can still stitch in the short articles, for the same reason Yahoo does—to keep the readers’ attention between its offerings. But in the long run, people will turn to newspapers for the same reason they always have: to learn all they can about what is going on around them.

The internet is allergic to long copy. Write more than 400 words, as I often do, and there is a hue and outcry about how evil long copy is. Long copy, however, continues to be the best form of education about any topic (with the exception of celebrity marriages, I reckon). Newspapers have always seen increases in circulation whenever they tell a big story in depth.

The newspapers are also very good about filtering and organizing pertinent information. Despite decades of mingling with advertisers and politicians, most city newspapers have maintained a tight control on their integrity, and that integrity is what will save them now. A wise newspaper publisher once told me that integrity is all that his newspaper really has to sell. The core business, if you will.

The internet, however, abounds with rumor and innuendo. The in-depth story is so badly buried in endless blogs, Google searches, retweets and YouTube mashups that it is impossible for the reader to piece together. The professional newspaper journalist, more so than in any other medium, is adept at sifting through the hay to find the needle of truth.

Go for long copy. The internet can’t compete. In fact, the internet should be the major source of customers for the paper. The short story, the one that ends up being linked from every Yahoo, Google and tweet, should have a link itself that says something like: “For the full story, buy The Denver Post.” This then leads to a pay site, or perhaps one of those few print copies people sometimes find laying around the barbershop.

Practice long copy beyond the news, as well. The internet makes it easy to serve up fiction in novel length, easily serialized, exclusively published. The world is awash right now in trying to figure out how to make a model of ebooks. Newspapers, once the first line of book publishing, can once again serve up novels.

Newspapers most go multimedia. They might need to be called something other than papers, but essentially, if they can serve up the news in the form of longer documentaries, fully-researched e-books, and downloadable browser apps, they will meet their goal of selling something that the Internet cannot: In-Depth News.

Stand on Their Own Good Name

When you discuss the demise of newspapers, people get very emotional. The reason, I suspect, is that newspapers are synonymous with “our town.” There seems little difference between the city of Denver and the Denver Post, between Los Angeles and the L.A. Times. One can’t imagine New York without the New York Post, Chicago without the Tribune, Miami without the Herald, Kalamazoo without the Gazette.

This is exactly what trademarks are supposed to do. Many corporations spend millions, even billions of dollars forging their trademark in the minds of the public. For newspapers, it comes free of charge (well, only after a few decades of journalism with integrity, but it comes with the territory).

If the trademark stands for eyes, ears, voice, consciousness and conscience of the community, it therefore stands for the community itself. Except for towns like Hershey, Las Vegas, and Anaheim, this trademark connection is usually reserved exclusively for municipal governments and newspapers.

This means that anything with the newspaper’s brand on it stands for that community. All too often, newspapers have bought rights to be associated with public events, when in fact they should be charging the event, because the trademark of the newspaper endorses the event as a community event.

Newspapers should be hosting concerts and public fairs. It could open its own bookstore, set up a restaurant, establish its own cable channel, and even organize a private school. There is nothing the trademark cannot be used for, as long as it stands for “our town.”

Homogenization of America has caused all of our cities to look alike. Chain restaurants and discount stores have overrun local independent businesses. But nothing should be more independent and more local than the city newspaper, and this is what a newspaper has to sell: its representation of “our town” as a city that is clearly unique in the world.

The newspaper trademark also stands for integrity (or rather it should, because if it doesn’t, then I can’t see any way to save that paper, no how). Integrity is a rare commodity, one that cannot be bought or linked to. This trait of newspapers is extremely valuable, enough so that anyone will lament the departure of their local paper.

Combine this with a newspaper’s expertise in publishing, and you have one answer that is dear to my heart. Newspapers can publish books and magazines.

Had the Rocky Mountain News here in Denver simply decided to start up a book imprint, perhaps titled “Rocky Mountain News Books,” it would have established an entirely new market for its services of in-depth news, quality writing, and “our town” community involvement. It could have also created films, television, even art shows and musical recordings.

Unfortunately, the Rocky Mountain News—like so many newspapers across the country—had trouble thinking outside the newspaper box, and was locked into competing headline for headline, ad for ad, word for word with the internet, and of course, it lost. It was an inevitable defeat.

To summarize, newspapers need to change their way of thinking. The model of “printing short news stories in order to bombard readers with advertising” has been commandeered by the Internet, and is no longer valid. Instead, newspapers must focus on binding together their communities, selling what the Internet cannot, and trading in on the “our town” representation of their trademarked names.

I would think that newspapers abiding by this advice will see bright, sunshiny days ahead, and their journalists will find profitable avenues to explore with their unique and valuable talents.

But for the newspapers that are still trying to figure out how to hang ads on content in print form, it’s over. Simply pasting your newspaper onto computer screens won’t change that.

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This is just one article in David A. Rozansky’s column, Readers, Writers & Royalties, a blog column about the book trade, from writing and publishing, to selling and reading.

Readers may find archived articles or subscribe to Readers, Writers & Royalties at www.ReadWriteRoyalty.Gather.com. Subscribe to all of Mr. Rozansky’s articles at www.FlyingPenPress.Gather.com.

David A. Rozansky is the publisher of Flying Pen Press. He has been in publishing since 1987, and has more than one million published words under his byline. Flying Pen Press is at http://www.FlyingPenPress.com. He is available for speaking on the subject of writing magazine articles, public relations, marketing and book-length material.

The book mentioned in this article is Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky (ISBN 9780143114949, Hardcover, $25.95)