@Tim,
While waiting for tmw’s installment just one more cent:

Every small medium business – either retail or service thinks they need marketing. An idea I’ve been floating around the blogger blablaba is for newspaper ad salespeople to team up with printing salespeople. The team can offer the SMB a “marketing solution.” Includes a web ad buy, some print ads, and a bunch of brochures or posters and maybe some analytics from the web site. The comp deal might be an affiliate type relationship.

So far, except for the challenges of separate cultures, I can’t see why this wouldn’t work for local papers and local commercial printers, who are also in pretty deep trouble.

Any thoughts?

Steve,

Thanks for jumping in.

The comScore rankings for Baltimore aren’t wildly out of sync with what I’d seen in the past from many other markets, but I’d be very interested in seeing any local news operations that are doing more than about a 20% penetration as measured by comScore. (I believe The Washington Post and AJC were outliers, if I’m remembering correctly.)

But you’re correctly anticipating where this is going – it’s NOT about selling in a CPM world. It’s about creating a media experience that does exactly what you suggest and creates opportunities for local businesses to see real results.

Based on your comments and MichaelJ’s above, I’m rethinking the wisdom of my decision to split this post into two parts. Unfortunately, the draft isn’t done, and I’m out of commission until later tonight.

One is that local newspapers can not / will not move toward the left of the graph. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary among local news sites. While no local site is likely to achieve the level of ubiquitous utility that places Google in the #1 slot, there is little excuse for not being in the top ranks. The Baltimore Sun represents embarrassingly poor performance, not potential.

The second is the assumption that ad avails is all we have to sell. Local businesses are not interested in ad avails, CPM rates, clickthough rates, and all the other details. They’re looking for results (actual business transacted in the brick-and-mortar world) and — importantly — service. Local media sites have an opportunity to focus on understanding the client’s business needs and tailoring packages of creative solutions that meet those needs. This requires a different skill set than past practices (mostly taking orders and picking up slicks), but a local news site is infinitely better positioned to provide such services than some randomly chosen global giant. Already many newspapers are selling local advertising that is actually delivered to geotargeted users through national sites via ad networks.

We need much more attention paid to the poorly developed local content-and-services model. While “newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies” might be true, it’s also true that newspaper regular readers become online occasional visitors.

Frequency of use is the responsibility of the newsroom — or whatever we choose to call it today. The aging content model is simply not appropriate to the current information marketplace. News is not enough. Yet there are many poorly met, uniquely local information needs. And if journalists choose not to meet those needs because they don’t fit a 20th century model of journalism, they will nominate themselves for unemployment.

You’re definitely on the same scent that part two of this post will follow tomorrow!

Advertising is a good business for Google. They have lots of long tail in their infrastructure and the numbers are huge.

For the newspapers, they should use the web to identify their fans, assemble tribes and communities. Then they should harvest that information to sell them stuff. The web is awesome for selling stuff and gathering information on who is viewing what when.

The faster newspapers get out of the selling eyeball business and into the selling stuff business, the faster they can relax and start making money.